Make the trade-offs visible.
The important decisions, compared at the same level: which problem, which product approach, and what changed after the first results.
How Splice went from helping creators find sounds to helping them start songs—and why it stopped short of replacing the DAW.
The interesting move was not simply choosing Stacks. It was changing what counted as value: from finding a sound to finding a musical idea worth developing.
Search and browsing treat the individual sound as the unit of value. That framing makes improving discovery the obvious answer.
A retrospective interpretation of the strategy, not a recorded sequence of thoughts.
Choose a step, or explore the complete diagram below.
The important decisions, compared at the same level: which problem, which product approach, and what changed after the first results.
This is a retrospective reconstruction of a product decision, not a transcription of the original discovery process. The green nodes are deliberately written as customer needs; where interviews are not available, they are interpretations and hypotheses—not attributed customer quotes.
Splice explored different boundaries for creation: improving discovery, curated starting material, a guided creator, or a fuller composing environment. The product case documents the choice and the later importance of making results steerable.
The timeline matters: CoSo launched first, with Create and subsequent capabilities evolving later. A later feature does not prove the original need was discovered in the same way.
Opportunity underwriting framed the economic questions; lead-user research informed how to search for advanced needs; decision-episode analysis informed need language; and behavioral simulation supplied guardrails on counterfactual claims. Missing studies are not shown as completed findings.