Netflix

“As you move vertically down the tree, your opportunities are getting smaller and smaller. This is like a really key to helping us unlock a continuous cadence. So if I start with that example of I can't decide what to watch, it's a really big, hard evergreen pr…”

“If someone is meeting expectation, we let them go. We've already let all those folks go. So on our team, it's Only outperformers.”

“It depends, but usually I'll say six to nine months. But it's a function of how much authority you have and how much existing SEO traction you have. The more authority you have and the more traction, the faster it is. So if a company like Netflix makes a chang…”

“Companies like Netflix and Microsoft, there's over and over again. 80 plus percent. Some companies say 90% of things fail.”

“We've been able to deliver, you know, speak to my own team around innovations in our content delivery network or innovations in encoding or innovations in discovery and personalization. We're not driven by some leader saying, I think this is a priority. They w…”

“We can't really have any of the other aspects of the culture including candor, learning, seeking excellence and improvement, freedom and responsibility if you don't start with high talent density.”

“The dedication piece really isn't about long working hours. It's more about how much I care about Excellence, I guess. So giving it my best in those situations. And, that might not mean that I work really wild hours or I work weekends, or I'm the one who's wil…”

“So at the scale of company that Netflix now is very often data oriented teams are embedded in other parts of the business. So it could either be they're embedded in a business line like ads or games, or they are Organized more functionally separating data engi…”

“I do get about 300 pieces of feedback.”

“I often ask people, what would their priorities be? What would they do differently if they had my job?”

“Not unbridled Chaos Monkeys, no. But, you know, we carry too much responsibility, speaking of freedom and responsibility for the member experience to inject pain. Though we do do a lot of experiments to test resilience, and that does probably mean injecting th…”

“And it also allows us to be really objective. That is probably the most important thing that our job is not to tell the story that someone wants to hear with the data or to solve the problem that someone thinks is most important. It's for us to have our own pe…”

“In practice, that means I take notes in leadership meetings. And I share those notes with the whole organization.”

“On the compensation point, we pay what we call personal top of market. Meaning we want to be highly competitive in the pay, but we don't want pay to be like the golden handcuffs.”

“So thankfully not a lot of meetings at Netflix feel. Like now you're really in this scary room, but it does feel like the role has more consequence, which is actually an exciting thing.”

“If we're clear on the objectives of something, it might be that the last 20% of polish on the document is a really bad use of time. So if we're gonna come together to talk through, like, quarterly business review was the example. What were the highlights? What…”

“Until two years ago, individual contributors didn't have levels at Netflix. So all engineers were just senior engineers. All data scientists were senior data scientists. And we did not have a leveling system. We introduced IC levels two years ago, almost exact…”

“We don't have performance reviews.”

“In the case of Netflix Reid actually had me come in and train the top hundred people in Netflix and strategy. We actually, I actually ran classes in the company.”

“UI development there that it's been an enormous amount of resources on trying to get just the very best UI. I mean, a zillion AB tests, all kinds of things, their recommendation engine, everybody's kind of knows the story about how that, that went you know, th…”

“The cost of their content is a very large fixed cost, about 50% of their cost structure every year.”

“And these videos are quite expensive. They end up, one series takes more than the entire cost of monthly cost of Netflix to view.”

“For Waze, it was four years. For Microsoft, it was five years. For Netflix, it was 10 years.”

“It's like people download apps to make or save money. Examples of that might be like, you know, WhatsApp where, you know, free texting. And then the other reason is to find a mate. So maybe like Tinder or Snapchat, find love. And the third is to unplug from re…”

“A lot of people forget that Blockbuster had streaming first. Streaming wasn't a good play at the start of the online video industry, because The penetration of broadband in the U S was very limited.”

“Google has no product owners as far as they know. Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, like no company you, you've heard of that's a tech company has a product owner. They have, or they're all product managers. They're all product managers.”

“Well, the talent density is the non-negotiable. You have to start with that. If you don't have that, you can't get to a place where you have confidence in decision-making at all levels of the organization.”

“That means that engineering profiles are more distributed systems, more infrastructure, more of that system thinking mindset than a local business expertise.”

“So I don't think it makes the functional expertise obsolete. I think it means that teams have to be more comfortable with maybe this helps us move faster in a certain direction.”

“And even for things like coding interviews, allowing candidates, of course, to use AI tools, because that's gonna be part of what the work requires now.”

“In a world of AI with agents operating across multiple systems, wanting source of truth data, the importance of having preferred paved paths that get the most of the benefits and produce some guardrails so we can make sure we're doing good work, common infrast…”

“The way we've approached this so far is instead of trying to articulate at each level, Exactly how AI changes those expectations to instead put an overlay across all of the talent at Netflix, people on the team and those who are hiring to talk about an aspirat…”

“It's often cited in a way where you think of keepers test as that moment where you decide to let someone go, that they're not the right fit for the role and the conversation about that. But it's equally commonly used to have a conversation about how extraordin…”

“We are still hiring junior people, and they're really important to our talent strategy. So we still have an intern program. We still have a new grad program, which is, was new for us as of a few years ago. So prior to a few years ago, we were only hiring more …”

“I don't feel like we've suffered or like other companies are vacuuming up all the good people because so many of them I do think sit at Netflix.”

“I still find great engineering to be scarce, great data science to be scarce, great creativity to be scarce. So I, yes, some things are easier, but that hasn't dissolved in my mind.”

“Every time we saw that and we added more process, we spent more time without getting better outcomes. And so it's another unnatural thing that I think everyone's inclination when things are hard and complicated is you think you're simplifying the problem by pu…”

“So we recently acquired a company, Inner Positive, that was started by Ben Affleck, that built a set of models and capabilities that allow you, after you've shot something, to relight, reframe, reshoot, change dialogue in ways that are very impactful to get hi…”

“You don't have to boil the whole ocean. You don't have to solve for Netflix's overall strategy and who are we relative to competition, but you take the thing you're responsible for and you just do one zoom out. Of the problem you're solving and question that. …”

“All of these things are not things that human beings or organizations at scale. Tend to do. So it's constant diligence to try to maintain the thing that's made Netflix a special place. Cause in the end, it's the work and the culture that attracts people and re…”

“One of the visions we have at Netflix is we will have so many agents that are contributing to doing work. That you need to be able to reason and rationalize throughout that. You know, the humans are the ones guiding what's the problem we need to solve. Do I fe…”

“The days of very narrow, deep specialization feel more limited to me. I can come up with examples where we still need it because there's an industry or technology expertise where there's only a few people in the world who really know how things work. We have e…”

“So instead of that needing to be only the experts who were here for 20 years and saw every experiment or know where to find it, we're now able to do that faster within product and tech across all functions. And a big unlock for us is our business stakeholders …”

“Netflix's role in this is to enable creators with whatever tools they want to use to bring their vision to life. There are going to be some creators or filmmakers who are on the end of the spectrum that says, absolutely not. No AI. That is not how I do product…”

“I have found that PMs, designers, data scientists are able to get farther in the product development life cycle before engineering really needs to be front of the line in unlocking things than was true a couple years ago.”

“Do the thing that is right for the broader organization instead of just what's right for you locally. That's systems thinking as well. So it's not just seniority, but it's breadth of the way I solve this problem and I build this. Is it going to be useful to my…”

“But I think it would be a mistake to say design and deep design expertise in thinking gets squeezed out just because we can write Code faster. We can do data analysis faster. That feels like at least for a large scale consumer product like Netflix, I feel like…”