⚙ Hi {{first_name_tally|Operator}},

There's a type of email that makes everyone nervous.

Subject line: "Important Update: New [Policy Name]"

You open it. Read three paragraphs. Have seven questions. None of them are answered in the FAQ.

So you Slack your manager. Who Slacks their manager. Who Slacks HR. Who says they'll "look into it" and get back to you.

This is just... how policies work at most companies?

Spotify looked at this process and said "what if we just tested it first."

Radical idea.

Today's piece breaks down Spotify's full framework (the 20-person beta, the 50-page playbook, the metrics they tracked).

Turns out beta-testing policies is way less complicated than cleaning up the mess when you don't.

- Rameel

Deals moving too slow? Forecasts always off? The best sales teams don’t rely on luck. They master alignment, automation, and intelligent execution. This free guide shows you how.

Inside, you’ll get:

High-performing teams don’t guess. They execute with precision.

Everyone’s got access to ChatGPT. Few know how to get results that don’t sound like a middle-manager wrote them.

That’s where Momentum’s Prompt Library comes in — a private vault of prompts actually used in the field. Not “10 ways to boost productivity.”

We’re talking revenue ops reports, outbound campaigns, investor updates, even product specs.

All written, tested, and refined by operators who already made AI pull its weight. Stop guessing at magic words. Start stealing the ones that work.

Most companies would never ship a feature to 5,000 users without testing it first.

They ship policies that way every day.

Draft in a conference room. Get Legal to sign off. Announce at all-hands.

Hope nobody rage-quits when they realize the PTO policy they just learned about doesn't actually answer whether their Uber to the airport counts as travel or needs a different expense code.

Basecamp shipped six policy changes at once in 2021. Via blog post. No testing, no input, no warning. Thirty percent of staff walked.

Spotify spent a year beta-testing one policy. They built a 50-page playbook. Pressure-tested it with 20 employees from every corner of the business.

Anticipated 990 out of 1,000 questions before launch. Time-to-fill dropped six days. Attrition fell. Nobody quit because they couldn't figure out the rules.

Same problem. Opposite approach. The difference: Spotify treated their remote work policy the way you'd treat a product launch—iterate with users before you scale the thing.

This isn't soft HR stuff. It's survival. Bad rollouts cost you months of cleanup and your best people.

Good ones buy you leverage: faster hiring, lower attrition, teams that actually know what to do Monday morning without a 47-message Slack thread.

Try treating your policies like products. Beta test them with real users before you ship to everyone.

Anna Lundström had a problem in fall 2019. Spotify wanted to go distributed-first by 2025. Everyone had opinions. Nobody had answers.

She could've done what most VPs of HR do: convene a task force, draft a policy, announce it at all-hands, deal with the fallout later.

She did something else. She treated the policy like a product launch.

Not HR's mindset. Not leadership's mindset. The employee trying to figure out if they can move to Denver without getting fired.

The playbook hit 40 pages. Then 50. Every question they could anticipate. Every edge case that would break.

They got executive buy-in on both strategy AND tactics—the mistake companies make is getting leadership to sign off on principles while leaving implementation details vague.

Then they did something companies skip entirely: assembled 20 employees from every corner of the business.

Engineers, support reps, PMs, someone from Legal who actually uses Slack. Not to rubber-stamp the policy. To pressure-test it.

These employees surfaced questions the working group—smart, well-intentioned people in a room—hadn't considered. Questions you only discover when someone actually tries to use the thing.

This took a year.

While the pandemic was making every other company panic-ship remote policies, Spotify held back.

Kept researching. Studied 2,000+ companies. Refined the playbook. Resisted the urge to ship fast just because everyone else was shipping.

When Spotify finally launched Work From Anywhere, employees submitted 1,000 unique questions. They answered 99% from the playbook.

A thousand questions from a workforce trying to understand how their lives just changed. The policy documentation anticipated 990 of them. That doesn't happen by accident. It happens because you tested the policy with users before scaling it to everyone.

Eighteen months post-launch, Spotify measured outcomes the way you'd measure a product release:

Most companies don't measure this. They announce a policy, track compliance rates, call it done.

Spotify tracked whether the policy accomplished what it was supposed to accomplish—make hiring better, make retention better, make work actually work for people.

The pattern isn't unique to Spotify. It's how you ship any policy that doesn't immediately break.

Before you ship your next major policy, find 20 employees across different teams and levels. Hand them the draft policy.

Don't ask what they think—make them try using it for two weeks. S

ubmit an expense under the new rules. Request PTO through the new system. Schedule a meeting with the new guidelines.

Watch where they get confused. Time how long each step takes. Count how many questions you get. That data shows you where the policy breaks before you scale the breakage to 500 people.

Then fix it. Rewrite the confusing sections. Add the FAQ addressing the top five questions. Test with a fresh group of 20 for another two weeks. Iterate until the policy works for users, not just for Legal's risk tolerance.

The instinct is to move fast. Ship the policy, iterate in production, fix complaints as they come.

That's not fast. That's expensive.

Fast is spending a year so you don't spend two years cleaning up. Fast is answering 990 questions before you ship so you're not answering them in 1,000 Slack DMs.

Spotify didn't delay their policy. They beta-tested it. There's a difference.