Our Interim Technical Product Manager Helped the Platform Team for Utopia Music

The Client: Utopia Platform creating a better World for Music

Utopia Music is a Venture Capital-Backed company based in Europe, with headquarters in Switzerland and offices in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The company's ecosystem uses artificial intelligence and data transparency to improve entertainment productions while tracking music metadata and attributing royalties. It was founded in 2016 solely for the music industry with the vision ‘Fair Pay for every Play.’

Utopia allows Music Creators, Publishers, Labels, and Collection Societies to enable growth for the entire industry by allowing them to focus on their strengths. By reducing operative overhead, X-raying growth opportunities, and helping Music become an asset class, the company finally allows the Industry to become its best self. It is creating an ecosystem where music & tech foster creativity & joy.

According to PitchBook, Utopia has raised $7.56M in funding in 5 rounds. Utopia Music has been on an acquisition spree since September 2021, snapping companies. It has acquired 8 organizations; its most recent acquisition was Absolute Label Services on Feb 24, 2022.

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Mission(s): Interim Product Manager for SWAT and Hidden Dragon Mission

Utopia’s B2B customer wanted to partner with the company and get a GAP analysis for one of their Music Catalogs. There was no team for the mission, so Utopia created a temporary SWAT team with members from different Business Units to tackle this challenge.

Our Interim Technical Product Manager joined Utopia to represent the Platform team in the SWAT team. We’ve empowered and motivated the team to complete this on time (within a month) by realigning priorities and unblocking business units from the Platform so that Utopia can provide their B2B client with a top-notch and transparent GAP analysis report. As a result, this initiative received further sponsorship to continue.

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How We Helped

Onboarded Very Fast

The Platform has 5 product development teams, but there was no Product Manager to lead all those teams and represent the platform in other business units. We jumped in quickly and provided a helping hand to all the platform teams by identifying roles and responsibilities based on the mission needs.

Knowing that there was no one to onboard us, we unwrapped the platform right away by speaking to the team leads of all the platform teams and by documenting our findings. We used a collaborative strategy based on understanding the customer’s needs and the stakeholders’ knowledge. This approach helped us onboard fast and align ourselves with the teams.

First Deliverables

1. Internal Plan - a detailed breakdown of the team’s goals and assigning tasks to the respective stakeholders
2. Radio Stations List with Metadata Overview - a visible document for all the mission members listing the stations and the metadata available in Utopia’s Database
3. Mapping of all Radio Stations with the correct Feeds - a clean setup of all stations and their metadata, including all the required feeds in the Utopia’s Station mapping tool
4. Consumption Report - a deeper look into the catalog’s consumption using the station's metadata from Utopia’s Database
5. Estimated Income - a thorough breakdown of the expected royalty for the B2B Client’s Catalog
6. GAP Analysis Report - a concise and focused presentation visualizing the difference between expected and actual royalty

A snippet of how GAP analysis, the numbers have been adjusted/distorted to preserve the confidentiality

Conducted Extensive Sessions to fix Station Mapping in Utopia’s Database

There were a lot of UK stations that were not mapped with their feeds in the Utopia Database and a few were not present in the database at all. We ensured that all stations were properly mapped to their correct feeds and showed the result in a .csv file.

Improved Cross-Functional Communication

We sensed a lack of communication among different teams hence we created channels for every task with all the stakeholders who were required to work on that task. We orchestrated the channels' priorities to ensure everyone was aware of their work and could unblock each other.

Reframed Problem Statements for Stakeholder’s understanding

The initiative's scope was not defined in a way anyone could read and comprehend. So, to ensure that all the stakeholders were well aware of the goals, we developed an internal plan mentioning the goals and the tasks in a way easily understood by anyone new to the topic.

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Other Mission: Hidden Dragon

• We created a brand new team for another mission for the Utopia Platform. It is a subset of the platform, Royalty Management, commercial, and Customer Operations responsible for discovering, proposing, and managing the foundational steps to launch a successful pilot.
• It’s also a Cross-Functional Team (XFN), hurdling many business-critical touch points with access to the people, data, process, and tech that will enable rapid discovery and results.
• After gathering the requirements, we started to define the goals and responsibilities of all the stakeholders involved in the pilot mission.
• So far, we have improved the data quality by cleaning it and collecting the missing metadata from different authentic resources (radio station data, song metadata, etc.).
• We automatically gather data for the B2B Client to help them become more data-driven in their strategies. They visualize these in a user-friendly dashboard.

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Delivered Outcomes

Notable outcomes we've delivered in our three months:

💡 Improved the team’s morale through regular communication, which helped them own their tasks

💡 Defined clear goals, roles and responsibilities

💡 Removed dependency by unblocking teams on time