Mady Torres de Souza
Staff Product Designer
She/Her
About
I'm a Brazilian designer who has spent the last decade building products at scale and the last few years questioning how we create them. At Spotify since 2016, my work spans product design, service design, and design ethics. I've led strategic initiatives across hardware and software platforms, and I've developed frameworks that help technical teams recognise and address societal impacts in their work: algorithmic bias, cultural assumptions, and power structures embedded in systems.
Through the years, I've worked with service Design, Illustration, Supporting Global User Research Studies, Multimodal User Interfaces, Hardware and Digital Prototyping in high and low fidelity.
In my spare time, I enjoy learning new languages, Music production and creation, Gaming, cooking and restoring old record players.
Contact
Linkedin
Portfolio
Phone
+46 72 360 2466
Work experience
2016 — Now
Staff Product Designer
Spotify in Stockholm, Sweden
I work with the Partner and Platforms Team on listening experiences across hardware products. Beyond feature design, I focus on the ethical implications of algorithmic decision-making: how automation affects user agency, how our systems encode cultural assumptions, and how design choices create unintended consequences at scale. I previously co-led the Audiobooks launch and am currently exploring cross-device listening behaviours.
2014 — 2016
Visual and Interaction Designer
Wobo in Oakland, USA
Designing web-based products and systems for campus services.
2011 — 2013
Interaction Designer
Samsung / SIDIA in Recife, Brazil
Designing products intended for mobile and web platforms and supporting the creation of the design team at the Recife office in a project embedded at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE).
2010 — 2010
Visual and Interaction Designer
I2 Tecnologia in Recife, Brazil
Proposing and building digital advertising products for mobile devices.
2008 — 2009
Interaction Design Intern
Nokia Institute in Recife, Brazil
Design intern in an embedded project from the Nokia Institute of Technology in partnership with the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE).
Ethics & Education Work
2020 — 2022
Design Ethics educator
Spotify, Stockholm
Created and facilitated courses for engineering teams on identifying bias, anglocentrism, and power structures in technical systems. Developed frameworks that translate critical theory into actionable practices for teams building recommendation algorithms, data infrastructure, and user-facing products.
2020 — 2021
Design & Decolonisation Series host
Spotify, Stockholm
Led a multi-day seminar examining unintended harms in design, historical colonial patterns in technology, and methods for centring affected communities. Featured First Nations designers and facilitated workshops on implementing decolonial principles in product development.
October 2021
Speaker
PRISMA in Natal, Brazil
I've represented the hardware interactions career path and its implications for society in a job market seminar for design students at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) in Brazil.
Education
2013 — 2016
2007 — 2013
Features
2021
Lessons from One Designer’s Journey in Uncentering Her Design Practice on Spotify Design
In this article, Janey Lee and Shreya Gulati describe their goals of learning more about designing products for the entire world, not just the US and Europe. In this journey, one of the internal learning initiatives I organised is referenced. Design & Decolonization featured a series of talks from around the industry to help other designers form a perspective on the culture we come from and the culture we reach through our work.
2020
2019
The Story of Spotify Personas on Spotify Design
Spotify personas are the topic of much discussion by those in the product, design, and user research communities. I joined our researchers, Olga Hörding and Sohit Karol, to explain how we developed our personas tool, how we use it today, and why it’s so helpful for an autonomous, cross-functional organisation like Spotify.
2019
Using Service Design to Create Better, Faster, Stronger Designers on Spotify Design
Service design is an essential tool when tackling the challenges of a swiftly growing company like Spotify. Here, senior design manager Katie Koch explains how it’s an integral part of her team’s process - featuring some of my work around creating Family and Duo plans.