Headline

Growth Lead, Premium Subscriptions @ Spotify | Building business engines for markets where imported playbooks don’t work | Consumer growth, monetisation & partnerships | Ex-Meta, Intel

About

Kavya Hegde is a growth leader specializing in building consumer businesses and subscription engines within complex, high-stakes markets. With an engineering background and experience at Spotify, Meta, and MX Player, she excels at developing localized, end-to-end strategies where traditional models fail. Kavya has a proven track record of scaling creator ecosystems, managing P&Ls, and driving product-led growth through data-driven experimentation and strategic partnerships.

Location

Bengaluru, Karnataka

AI stack

anthropic apis

claude code

claude

codex

cursor

gemini

Work experience

Growth Lead, Premium Subscriptions - India at Spotify, Oct 2024 - Present · 1 yr 11 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, I lead strategic growth projects and the business side of Premium demand generation for Spotify India, one of the world's most complex subscription markets. -> Leading the Spotify Premium Rewards program, a fandom and lifestyle benefits platform with live brand- partner integrations: co owned the thinking, took it through product, legal, partnerships and GTM to its August 2026 launch, and now scaling it. -> Building the live experiences layer of Premium: fandom-led activations at major concerts, artist launches, owned and operated events and cultural moments, at a scale. -> Driving product marketing and feature adoption for Premium: onboarding journeys, feature-led education and plan-level communications that help subscribers see and use what they pay for. -> Led localised offers for regional audiences, moving Premium from one-size-fits-all to market-tuned offers. -> Working with India and global teams on funnel economics, experimentation and willingness to pay; learnings from the India projects feed into Premium thinking globally.

Lead - Creator and content partnership at Spotify, May 2022 - Sep 2024 · 2 yrs 5 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, I led Spotify India's podcast creator function through the category's formative years: creator acquisition, growth, monetisation and community. -> Set the India creator strategy: mapped and tiered the country's podcast catalog, which drove the acquisition and growth playbook for the creators. -> Conceptualised and launched Spotify India's first creator monetisation program -> Grew the podcast creator base several times over through structured discovery, onboarding and creator success programs. -> Represented Indian creator needs to global product and content teams, shaping how Spotify builds for creator economies beyond the West.

Business Head - South India at MX Player, Nov 2021 - May 2022 · 7 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Expanded remit seven months into the company: end-to-end ownership of MX Takatak's South India business alongside the national creator partnerships role. -> Owned the region's P&L and led a cross-functional org spanning creator programs, marketing, monetisation and growth. -> Drove step-change user growth in South India, scaling the region's creator ecosystem many times over.

Director - Creator Partnerships & MX Live at MX Player, Apr 2021 - May 2022 · 1 yr 2 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Led creator partnerships for MX Takatak, and built MX Live, the company's live-streaming business, from concept to launch. -> Built the creator partnerships engine behind Takatak: how creators were discovered, onboarded, grown and rewarded, scaling the creator base many times over. -> Designed creator incentive and success programs that made the platform a viable career for regional creators. -> Stood up MX Live from zero in seven months: proposition, creator supply, operations and engagement model, including the platform's first live-creator ecosystem.

Strategic Program Lead - 'Born on Instagram' at Instagram, May 2019 - Apr 2021 · 2 yrs, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, I built and ran Born on Instagram, Instagram's first scaled creator development program, from launch through its first two years. -> Designed and launched Born on Instagram as an India-first initiative: a structured path for emerging creators to learn the craft, grow an audience and unlock monetisation opportunities. -> Built the creator discovery engine behind it, reaching thousands of creators across hundreds of Indian towns, with the majority coming from beyond the metros. -> Built the creator curriculum from scratch, spanning dozens of hours of learning content, later opened up as free certifiable modules for anyone in India. -> Recruited established creators as mentors, creating a peer-led model where successful creators developed the next cohort. -> Partnered with Lakmé to train emerging beauty creators, showing how brand partnerships could fund and scale creator education. -> Launched bornoninstagram.com, the programme's digital learning platform: free creator courses with certification, built in seven Indian languages, turning a hand-picked cohort programme into something any creator in India could access.

Lead Business Development and strategy at Start-up experience, Sep 2018 - Apr 2019 · 8 mos, Mumbai Area, India

Product strategy and business development at Infosys, Jun 2017 - Aug 2018 · 1 yr 3 mos, London Area, United Kingdom

Education

Post Graduation in Management, Information Technology Administration and Management and Marketing, Indian School of Business

Bachelor’s Degree, Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering, Visvesvaraya Technological University