Roel van der Ven

I’m Roel van der Ven. I build products, tinker with systems, and try to understand how things connect.

Professional Background

For the past 20+ years I’ve worked across media, music, and platform technology. Currently I’m a Senior Product Manager at Spotify, where I work on consumer authorization and platform AI. Before that, I spent formative years at SoundCloud and tape.tv in Berlin’s music-tech scene. The thread through all of it seems to be helping creators and audiences find each other through well-designed infrastructure.

At Spotify, I’ve spent seven years leading zero-to-one initiatives in areas where the problem space is ambiguous and the systems are complex. I launched Spotify for Authors, Spotify’s first dedicated portal for the audiobook publishing community, taking it from business case to production. Before that, I built Spotify Open Access, the content authorization technology that lets membership platforms grant their subscribers access to premium content on Spotify (the system behind partnerships like Calm). That work resulted in integrations with 17+ external platforms and a patent filing for the underlying technology. I also bootstrapped Spotify for Music Providers, a self-service portal now used by 5,000+ music industry professionals, and led the metadata platform consolidation that unified three legacy systems into a single foundation powering 20,000+ downstream data endpoints.

Before that, I co-organized Music & Bits, a conference and hackathon that bridged the web and music industries, which eventually merged with Amsterdam Dance Event. I also taught product management at General Assembly and was an intern at Last.fm (acquired by CBS during my time there). I started my career building one of the first cross-media strategies for Bright Magazine, bringing print content to web and TV.

I approach problems from first principles. My background is in full-stack engineering, which means I think in systems, feedback loops, and tradeoffs before I think in roadmaps. Our current thinking on what “good product work” looks like keeps evolving, and I try to evolve with it.

Personal

My family and I are Dutch, living in the Berlin area with two kids and two cats. I’m vegetarian and I love running. If you haven’t guessed, I’m pretty crazy about discovering new and old music, it’s a constant thread throughout the week. Ask me what I’m listening to!

I self-host most of the digital infrastructure I depend on. A homelab running Proxmox, Docker, Home Assistant, and too many side projects teaches you a lot about the systems you usually take for granted. This website is part of that same impulse: own your content, own your tools, observe what happens when you do.

When I’m not working or tinkering with my infrastructure, I’m likely baking sourdough, exploring some new cooking technique, or on a run in the woods. If any of this resonates, say hi. The best conversations tend to start with a shared curiosity.

Get in Touch

hello [at] roelvanderven.com