What My Playlist Taught Me About Building

Ask me what I’m listening to and you’ll get a longer answer than you asked for. Music is what I come back to between projects, on the road, and in the middle of a hard problem.

Over time I’ve noticed that the artists I keep on repeat are quietly teaching me things about my own work. Here are five of them.

Harry Styles: every era gets a world

Harry Styles went from one of the biggest boy bands in the world to a solo career with a very different sound, and each album since has arrived with its own look: the colours, the clothes, the artwork, the stage. You know which era you’re in before you hear a note.

That’s what a brand system is supposed to do. When I built Bloom, Vera and Luminary, the test was the same: could you tell which one you were looking at from a single screen, with the logo covered? A good identity is an era you can recognise from any angle.

Lola Young: say the uncomfortable thing

“Messy” works because it doesn’t pretend. Lola Young sings about being too much and not enough at the same time, and a lot of people heard themselves in it. The honesty is the hook.

I try to write case studies the same way. PayVault is a concept, so its page says so, and it lists the risks I haven’t solved yet.

Specific and honest beats polished and vague, in a song or on a landing page.

sombr: make it personal, then let it travel

sombr’s songs are raw and personal, and a lot of their reach came from listeners passing them on to each other. Nobody had to be convinced; people just wanted their friends to hear it.

That’s the MeshLearn idea in a different medium. A good thing, handed from person to person, travels further than you’d expect. The job is to make something worth handing on.

Gorillaz: the world is part of the product

Gorillaz is a band made of cartoon characters, drawn by Jamie Hewlett with Damon Albarn leading the music. The characters have histories, the videos build a universe, and the albums pull in collaborators from everywhere. On paper it shouldn’t work, and it has worked for more than two decades.

It taught me that the world around a product matters as much as the product. Onboarding, empty states, the error message someone sees at 2am: that’s the universe. If it’s consistent and a little surprising, people want to stay in it.

Drake: consistency is a feature

Whatever you think of him, Drake has kept releasing music, year after year, for well over a decade. Some releases land harder than others, but the habit of shipping never stops, and the catalogue compounds.

Products work the same way. A hackathon win is one night. What matters is showing up the next week: fixing the bug, shipping the small improvement, doing it again. Consistency looks boring from the outside, and from the inside it’s most of the game.

The playlist is the brief

None of this is a system. It’s just what happens when you listen closely to people who are very good at their craft.

Eras, honesty, word of mouth, world-building and showing up. That’s most of what I believe about building products, and I learned a lot of it with headphones on.