Where product decisions in audio become promises

When a content business pays rights holders for each hour consumed, the shape of a plan is a margin decision as much as a marketing one. I design plan structures with finance and the content team: what we count, how much each band includes, what happens at the edge of a limit and how existing subscribers move between plans. At Lisandre that meant retiring a single unlimited plan in favour of hour-based plans with roll-over, a rule that nobody is cut off in the middle of a chapter and an unlimited option priced at what unlimited listening costs. I read churn by cohort and by stated reason rather than as one monthly figure, because heavy listeners, gift recipients and bundle customers leave for different reasons and respond to different remedies. I also treat the cancellation route as part of the product. French and German consumer rules now expect a subscription taken out online to be cancellable online by a simple route, and an honest exit brings more people back later than an obstructive one keeps.

A home screen in a cultural business answers to more than relevance. Ours must honour paid visibility agreements with publishers, a public charter commitment to independent French-language publishers and the listener's own tastes. I own the structure that reconciles them. My practice is to keep obligations out of the ranking model and give each one a labelled place on the screen with a cap on its share: sponsored rows marked as such, an editors' row chosen by people, and personalised rows that explain their main reason for each title. I agree each quarter's measures with our content and commercial directors, and our CSR committee sees what the editorial row featured by publisher size and language. I work closely with our head of recommendation science on model quality, and I leave model design to his team; my part is deciding what the model should and should not be asked to do.

About a fifth of our subscribers are over sixty-five, and many of our earliest customers were blind or partially sighted. I treat both groups as cohorts with their own research panels, support-contact measures and churn, not as slices of an average. Our accessibility team of nine reports to me and has a veto over releases of the main player. Before June 2025 we took the app from 412 audit findings against the standard we had adopted to 37, working on screen-reader labels, focus order, contrast and captions on video trailers. Separately, we built Mode lecture, an opt-in reduced mode with five controls and a direct line to support, after a redesign drove calls from older subscribers up by 60%. I recruit panel members over seventy for every major release, and I have learnt that a family member's help is part of the design: a relative can prepare a listening list from their own account.

Adding a free tier to a paid service is a decision about what the free tier must never become. When we launched our podcast tier in March 2025, I set three rules with our content director and finance director: audiobooks stay behind the subscription except for samples a publisher has approved, advertising stays below a fixed number of minutes per hour of listening, and targeting is contextual unless the listener consents to personalised advertising. I own the conversion design, which offers a paid plan at moments of real interest, such as the end of a narrative series, rather than through interruptions. I also watch for movement in the opposite direction. In the first fifteen months about 6,000 paid subscribers who listened only to podcasts moved down to the free tier, a cost we accepted and report to the board alongside the 61,000 who moved up. The free tier's advertising earned €9 million in its first ten months.

Much of the European law that now shapes digital services arrives at the product team as concrete design choices: how a recommendation is explained, how illegal content is reported and removed, how consent is asked for, how a subscription is cancelled and whether an app can be used with a screen reader. I keep a register of these obligations with our general counsel, recording for each one the screens and processes it touches, the product owner and the date of the last review. Because creators can upload podcasts to Lisandre, our lawyers concluded that part of the service is an online platform under the Digital Services Act, and we built reporting and explanation features accordingly. I report twice a year to the board's audit and risk committee on this register. I am not a lawyer and do not give legal opinions; my contribution is making sure the legal reading is turned into a product decision with an owner.