Spotify is a Swedish audio streaming and media services provider founded in 2006. It is the world’s largest music streaming service provider, with over 365 million monthly active users, including 165 million paying subscribers, as of June 2021. Let’s learn about Spotify’s RPA journey and why citizen developers became a vital part of it.
Spotify first started to experiment with RPA in late 2017. It was during the first year of RPA development that Spotify formed its RPA Center of Excellence (CoE), with a mission to focus on RPA coding, IT governance, development, security, and creating a service center.
However, after initial success with another RPA platform, Spotify decided they wanted to move away from a code-based solution to a platform that would allow accounting and other departments to develop their own automations. In Spring 2019, the company conducted a second vendor selection where UiPath in partnership with PwC won and was on-boarded in August 2019. Once the CoE team had deployed UiPath, the team successfully established the foundational layers for its successful RPA program, including the operating model and citizen developer program, and migrated 11 existing processes to UiPath.
The Accounting team became the pilot group of citizen developers and after developing automations for more than two years, the global business unit is looking at ways to scale RPA with unattended bots.
“We really focus on providing automation in two different ways: through enterprise-led automation, which is all of our unattended bots, and citizen-led development, through all of our attended bots. We’re basically taking our accountants and upskilling them to build their own automations alongside the more robust, end-to-end automation that our Center of Excellence developers are simultaneously producing. Coming out of our RPA upskilling program, our citizen developers have an automation-first mindset.”
Sidney Madison Prescott, Spotify’s Global Intelligent Automation Leader
“Spotify’s decision to expand their program to scale citizen-led automation was an important strategic choice. It allowed them to engage business users in a more hands-on manner and put more implementation wins on the board, which then furthered organizational buy-in behind their enterprise efforts. We see too many clients struggle to gain the right momentum when their output is constrained by their own centralized resources.”
Kevin Kroen, Intelligent Automation Leader, PwC U.S.
UiPath played a big role in the success of the burgeoning citizen developer program. UiPath started citizen developer instruction onsite, and when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the Spotify citizen developers were able to pivot to UiPath Academy and use virtual training sessions.
“Training is absolutely essential, and you need to adopt a robust training framework. We began that journey by leveraging the UiPath format and that’s been very successful for us in avoiding the hiccups we anticipated with upskilling and the rollout of the citizen developer model.”
Sidney Madison Prescott, Spotify’s Global Intelligent Automation Leader
Today, the program has scaled to include more than 100 citizen developers ensconced within a variety of mission-critical functions at Spotify itself, according to Prescott, who spoke with Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s live streaming studio, during UiPath’s Forward IV conference. You can watch their conversation and find more details about Spotify’s Citizen Developer Program in the video below.
