Everyone can be everything now. PMs can ship code, designers can write PRDs, engineers can product, and there's this confusion and frustration of what is my job anymore? Anytime a new technology comes along, you go through a storming phase before you go through the forming phase of things. We are in the middle of that right now. I don't think that means we should put AI back into the box and say let's not use it.
If we all become builders, will we still need separate functions? I still see a craft excellence that's really important that I don't think is going away anytime soon. I still find great engineering to be scarce, great data science to be scarce, great creativity to be scarce. If you look at the early culture deck of Netflix, high agency, autonomy, paying top of market, this is what I hear constantly now from how the top AI labs operate. Netflix's culture has always been excellence as an operating system. It's a resistance to do the thing that a lot of bigger companies would do and to feel comfortable in that discomfort very often.
What are the ingredients to make this happen? Talent density is the non-negotiable, being very comfortable with risk-taking. In cases where things are not going well, not assume that process is going to fix it. What have you added to the career ladders within this AI world? We need more systems thinkers, people who can look across all the business domains and abstract that to here's the building blocks we're going to need. How do people learn this? Small trick. Each problem you're trying to solve, step out one click to the what am I assuming is true about the broader space.
Today, my guest is Elizabeth Stone, product and technology officer at Netflix. This is Elizabeth's second visit to the podcast. Her first visit, when she was just the CTO, was, for the longest time, one of the most popular episodes of this podcast. You'll soon see why. This is such a killer conversation because when we chatted two and a half years ago, AI was only starting to emerge. And as a longtime head of engineering and product and data science, Elizabeth has such a unique perspective on where things are heading and what's worth paying attention to.
Prior to Netflix, Elizabeth was VP of science at Lyft, chief operating officer at NUNA, an economist at the Analysis Group, and a trader at Merrill Lynch. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out Lenny'sproductpass.com for an entire year free of the hottest and best-crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Elizabeth Stone. Elizabeth, thank you so much for being here. Welcome back to the podcast. Thank you. I'm honored to be here once and now twice.
That's right. That's a rare treat for me. I don't know if you know this, but your first visit to the podcast, your episode ended up being my second most popular episode. You were right behind Brian Chesky for the longest time. Wow. I'm pleasantly surprised and also mildly competitive of how do I get to the first spot? But I'll set that aside for now. This is her shot. Brian's amazing, so I'll let that one go. Yeah, he is. And then there's all these fancy AI people that are coming in high.
So it's been two and a half years at this point. A lot's changed. Obviously, AI. Something AI is allowing people to do is everyone can be everything now. This idea of PMs can ship code, designers can write PRDs, engineers can product, and everyone's everything. There's a bunch of elements of this conversation. One is that I've heard from people that there's also this confusion and frustration of what is my job anymore? What am I responsible for as a PM, as a designer? Is that something you've experienced?
I hear it within Netflix for sure. I think anytime a new technology comes along, especially one that's as transformative as Gen AI, you go through a storming phase before you go through the forming phase of things. And I think we are in the middle of that right now. I don't think that means we should put AI back into the box and say, let's not use it, because this is complicating all of our preconceived notions about our roles. But I do think it means we have to be much more thoughtful about how do we get the benefits while reducing the costs.
I think it's a great thing that people are experimenting with. How can I develop an idea faster, prototype an idea, put together an initial set of code that would allow us to test it? Do I believe that means anyone should be shipping code to production, that everyone should actually be doing everything? Probably not. But I think that it's good for people to be exploring what's possible.
And then, like I mentioned earlier, the benefit of having product and tech teams together is that if the business problem is clear, I think it's okay and it's healthy for there to be some fluidity in the roles that people play. Because instead of having to wait for the engineering team to be ready to be able to prototype something, product and design can move faster on it, but they should still work with their engineering partner to think through, how should we productize this? How do we scale it? What are the guardrails for it?
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.
From an organizational perspective, things I think about to make this more coherent or less frustrating are some of the things that have to be in place for us to get the benefits rather than the cost. So that includes clarity on source-of-truth data, guardrails on shipping code to production or testing before we make large changes, thinking about opportunities where we can trust the output of AI versus we should have a process or review that helps us check that we're getting high-quality outcomes, and the importance of reiterating that humans are still responsible for what happens.
So it can be that an agent wrote the code or helped to do an analysis when that's not really my background, but it doesn't make people not have the responsibility that comes with what they've created. So I think investing in some of that core infrastructure and practices and reiterating the accountability and responsibility for the outcomes helps to balance some of what's possible with what we should actually be doing. This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercel, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS.
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Coming back to the roles of the product and eng teams, I'm curious how much these roles have changed in the last two and a half years. If you think about product, engineering, design, data science, user research, which roles have changed most? Which roles have changed least? What's most different since two and a half years ago? So you've mentioned some of the things, so I'll reiterate them and then maybe build. I have found that PMs, designers, data scientists are able to get farther in the product development lifecycle before engineering really needs to be front of the line in unlocking things than was true a couple years ago.
I say that with some caution because, like we were talking about, I don't think it's great to all of a sudden have thousands of prototypes if they're not aimed at this is an important problem to solve for the business, and the engineering partners are aware that we're solving that problem and that designers and product managers are going to take the lead in starting to shape the idea. But it's not working in a vacuum, and it's not throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.
But when it's the right problem, approached in a thoughtful way with some alignment on that, I've seen product, design, data science move faster in the direction of let's get to something that's testable on this hypothesis. So that's prototyping, that's writing code. The other thing I've seen as being very valuable is we have a lot of information running around in the virtual walls of Netflix. in unlocking things than was true a couple years ago. I say that with some caution because we were talking about, I don't think it's great to all of a sudden have thousands of prototypes if they're not aimed at this is an important problem to solve for the business.
And the engineering partners are aware that we're solving that problem and that designers and product managers are going to take the lead in starting to shape the idea. But it's not working in a vacuum, and it's not throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. But when it's the right problem, approached in a thoughtful way with some alignment on that, I've seen product design, data science move faster in the direction of let's get to something that's testable on this hypothesis. So that's prototyping, that's writing code. The other thing I've seen as being very valuable is we have a lot of information running around in the virtual walls of Netflix.
We have experiments we've run over decades. We have insights from consumers. We have input from stakeholders across the business. And that was a problem that really presented a challenge of how do we get the most out of that long history of knowledge and learnings to say let's apply that to the problem we've got now to move faster in this is a promising path or this is something that we've learned something about and we could leverage here. And AI is very powerful at distilling information, looking across a broad set of things, doing an analysis around it, getting to the core of here's some insights to start with. I would hesitate to rely on that exclusively,
but I think it's a head start. And I find even in my own work, day to day, instead of sending an email that disrupts someone, remind me, what research did we do, in what year, and what was the question, and what was the test we ran? I can find that almost instantly. Then I can form my own: here's what I find interesting about this. And I've now skipped a couple steps toward is there something actionable here? So that's data analysis. It's modeling. It's distillation of information. And I'm seeing more people do that, to your original question. 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 sitting in finance and content and advertising can do that as well, and then bring back an initial hypothesis where they want to work more deeply with the data scientist and engineer and so on. So there's something there about the hypothesis generation, prototyping, thinking deeply about problems that feels like it's accelerating and that functions are able to do that in a more fluid way. But I still see comparative strengths. So data scientists are still going to be experts at can we trust this data? Are we interpreting it the right way?
What's the data versus judgment that we should be applying here? A product manager is still going to be exceptional at saying have we really framed the what of this, the problem we're solving, in the right way? An engineer still has a craft around the how. How does this scale? What does high quality look like? What problems is this going to create for us based on how we build and deploy something? So I still see the nuggets of that comparative advantage. It's just that we're able to move more fluidly in a lot of steps that normally we would have blockers on. There's so much interesting stuff here. One is this last point you made, something I've been thinking about.
If we all become builders, will we still need separate functions? There's this member of technical staff trend that is happening across the industry where it's like, all right, we don't have a title. You could be anything. You don't have to be in a bucket. What you're saying here is you believe we will continue to have specialties: product person, engineer, data science, designer. While they do more of other functions, there's still a lot of value. And tell me if I'm hearing you correct in having this specific discipline and skill and background. I still see a craft excellence that's really important in the disciplines that I don't think is going away anytime soon.
Even if there's fluidity or blurring of the work across the functional lines, it goes back to what I mentioned earlier of you still have humans who have to make sure that what we're doing makes sense. We're solving the right problems in a way that is best for Netflix members or business stakeholders. And that, if I talk to an engineer, a data scientist, a designer, yes, they speak more languages now than they used to because they have the benefit of these AI tools, but there's still something that is not replaceable when I think about the craft and how they think about what good looks like. And that feels true across all levels. And I still find great engineering
to be scarce, great data science to be scarce, great creativity to be scarce. So yes, some things are easier, but that hasn't dissolved in my mind. Are there functions that you are finding you are hiring more of, the pie chart expanding, say, for engineering or PM or design or something, and then functions you need less of with AI tooling and LLMs rising? I'm not sure that it matches exactly to functions, but I can tell you what we're having, we're seeing more of, we need more of. We need more systems thinkers in a world with AI. That looks a little bit different across functions, but I could play out a couple of examples. So in our core infrastructure team at Netflix
and central engineering, a lot of what made Netflix successful over time was that local teams with specific business problems could move fast to deliver. They very often were not feeling like they needed to be on a central paved path. They built the stack that they needed to solve the problem and have the impact. 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 infrastructure, common paved paths, solving problems once with a core set of capabilities
becomes more important. So we are hiring more people who can look across all the business domains and abstract that to here's the building blocks we're going to need in a world with AI. So that's one of the lenses, but also just with a lens of what got Netflix here doesn't get Netflix there, and we're going to have to have a stronger set of infrastructure to move quickly in this future. So that means that engineering profiles are more distributed systems, more infrastructure, more of that systems- thinking mindset than a local business expertise, though of course we still have people who are deep in personalization and advertising and content delivery.
So it's more something additive for us to have that core infrastructure and systems thinking. If I take another example, design, it's extremely important that our experience design team is developing templates and, again, systems thinking for what does great user design look like at Netflix so that they can enable lots of people, including those who are not designers by training, to develop products that are coherent, that fit into the end-to-end member experience. I get really nervous about having different design languages or different types of user interactions and shipping Frankensteins. So designers need to then be the people we're hiring. Again, for design:
systems thinking, how do we think about templates and expression of the brand and what a good user experience looks like and what is Netflix and the Netflix differentiated special sauce? So there's more people on our design team that have to think that way now than could I help to design a specific feature for a specific product. So there's this stepping back to look at the big picture that I think is happening in every single function, and that requires some reorientation of skills among the existing team and also hiring people who've got that type of expertise. And across all of it, it's a mindset shift. So we are not hiring people who are not excited to explore,
try new things, understand lots is changing, and feel comfortable with that ambiguity, be comfortable that there's a blurring of how we work and how we partner. That's true for people who are already at Netflix and people who we are adding to the team, that that curiosity, innovation mindset has not, it's not been more important, at least in the time that I've been working in this field. On the systems-thinking piece, is the reason this is becoming more important that people are moving so fast that you need to invest in platforms and frameworks and design language and basically teach people to fish so they can not be blocked, or is there other reasons?
I think it's probably velocity. So platforms do have a benefit of leverage. So in general, that's an opportunity with or without AI for a platform to get most teams 80% of the way there, and then they don't have to reinvent those building blocks. We have more bets that we're making across the business, more things we're trying to build. So platform mindsets are good, and it's something that is relatively more recent for Netflix to think about that being a real critical enabler. There is also the sense of a scaffolding in a world of AI. innovation mindset has not, it's not been more important, at least in the time that I've been working in this field.
On the systems thinking piece, is the reason this is becoming more important that people are moving so fast that you need to invest in platforms and frameworks and design language and teach people to fish so they can not be blocked, or is there other reasons?
I think it's probably velocity. So platforms do have a benefit of leverage. So in general, that's an opportunity with or without AI for a platform to get most teams 80% of the way there, and then they don't have to reinvent those building blocks. We have more bets that we're making across the business, more things we're trying to build. So platform mindsets are good, and it's something that is relatively more recent for Netflix to think about as being a real critical enabler.
There is also the sense of a scaffolding in a world of AI. So not just the higher velocity, but you have more people doing more types of work that are different or new, as we were talking about, and there's risk that comes with how do you think about access and identity in that situation? How do you think about security in that situation? How do you think about shipping high-quality code and design and user experiences?
And so I don't think it scales well to have each person who's building something have to go figure out, could you remind me what good looks like here, and what are the bumpers or guardrails I should keep in mind? I think we need to encode that in our paved paths and our ways of working, and for a data science or analytical field to encode, here's the source of truth data, here's how to interpret it, here's how to access it, here's what to do with it or not to do with it, and to be careful with certain types of data.
An organization that has thousands of people can no longer rely on tribal knowledge or I'm going to find the one person who knows this. So this was a challenge that was there before AI. It's probably a more urgent challenge with AI, and I like the idea of using AI or any new tech to motivate, we knew this is work we needed to do, no time like the present to invest in that more heavily across the team. I wonder if another reason for this becoming more valuable is because agents are now doing a lot of work, and giving them the context, giving them the scaffolding, giving them the design language just speeds all that up.
Yeah, and 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. The humans are the ones guiding what's the problem we need to solve, do I feel like what we're producing is impactful and high-quality output, but the work will be done by both humans and agents, and that creates velocity and benefits, and it creates risks. And I think that's important, especially from an engineering perspective, that we figure out how to manage that in a way that lets people move quickly but doesn't create undue downside or risks for the company.
This connects so directly with, Jenny Wen was on the podcast. She was head of design for Clock Code and Cowork and had this whole design process is dead thesis. And the pitch there is just, there's no time for design, the design process, and instead, as a designer you're just steering people and pointing them in the direction and adjusting, and also thinking big picture when you have the time. And it feels like that's what you're describing here, is create the platform for people to move fast, and then there's no time for design process of a specific new feature.
I have mixed feelings about that because we do want to enable, with infrastructure and systems thinking, more people to do great work with strong design as part of it. Why not take that opportunity that the new tech provides? But for our most important priorities, design is critical to solve things in the right way, so we do still make time for important design work.
It can move faster. The designers themselves have more tools in their toolkit, so they can do incredible work at a faster velocity, show more options, learn, iterate, test more quickly. 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, we would lose one of the things that makes Netflix great, which is the product, technology, and design makes a lot of complexity invisible and makes for a seamless customer experience. That's a design mindset that has to be core to it. So the work itself might look different, but I don't think we lose the mindset.
That's an awesome counterpoint. So what I'm hearing is trending-up skills, attributes you look for, systems thinking and this mindset of being comfortable and excited about change and what's coming and not being stuck in your own ways. What are you finding is trending down? What are you less looking for that you used to value more highly?
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 examples of that on the team for encoding or how our playback systems work and things that have been incredibly innovative and novel for Netflix. I still believe we need specialized practitioners in those spaces.
But as a general rule compared to five or ten years ago, I would believe we have fewer specialists and more people who are generalist or adaptable in multiple directions. And that could be adaptable across functional expertise. It could be adaptable across flavors of engineering. So can I navigate both back-end and front-end systems? Can I hook into infrastructure with a lot of expertise? I think the mindset now needs to be I can learn that quickly, and that goes back to the systems thinking.
So I think specialists can learn to have a broader array of tools more easily than was true in the past. So we need fewer of them perhaps because talent's able to grow in that direction. And there's something about sticking to a narrow specialty that maybe triggers for me a concern about what about the mindset of growing in different directions and exploring. And I don't want to be too narrow even in my own assessment of that, but it's important that people who are specialists still have that sense of I want to try a new way of solving these problems versus the way we have in the past.
And when you say specialist, are you thinking front end? I'm a front-end engineer versus a back end, or is there other versions of that? Or it could be a domain set of knowledge of I'm a payments expert. I'm an ads marketplace design expert. I'm an expert in this very specific tooling that studio productions use. So there, specialist and subject matter expertise is an advantage, provided that person is willing to grow and extend into, is this really still the right tool or the right way to think about the problem?
So I think it's the layers of the stack from an engineering perspective that there's less specialty, and then tools that are unlikely to be static or to have a lot of inertia around them. I would think we would want people who are able to innovate and imagine what's the future version of this, and so we want more talent like that. Awesome. So coming back to the systems thinking piece, people hearing this are like, okay, I gotta work on my systems thinking skill set. How do people develop the skill? Is it just do it for a long time, work at a lot of complex projects?
I step out one click to the, what am I assuming is true about the broader space in solving this problem? So I was given a task to build some new feature for the Netflix member experience. Let me take one beat and think about what is the bigger consumer problem we're trying to solve here? What's the type of content that this feature is going to be able to build? Is this going to make sense in a way that scales across multiple content types? Or it could be something that's a capability that then is contributed to a platform set of offerings from multiple areas. Is the consumer problem that I'm solving with this feature going to be one of the most important consumer problems that Netflix is going to need to solve as we have an expanding world of entertainment and we want to make it more personalized and immersive?
Those are all questions that, 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. I wouldn't spend too long in the questioning state because are we solving the right problem in the right way that matters for the end consumer? Another way, as you describe it, another way I'm thinking about it is think if you were your manager, how would they, what's their broader perspective across not just your one team and problem and KPI, but larger picture?
I've got advice over years that is similar to that.
That I'm solving with this feature is going to be one of the most important consumer problems that Netflix is going to need to solve. As we have an expanding world of entertainment and we want to make it more personalized and immersive, those are all questions that you don't have to boil the whole ocean. You don't have to solve for Netflix's overall strategy and who we are 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. I wouldn't spend too long in the questioning state, because are we solving the right problem in the right way that matters for the end consumer?
Another way, as you describe it, another way I'm thinking about it is, think if you were your manager, how would they, what's their broader perspective across not just your one team and problem and KPI, but larger picture?
I've got advice over years that is similar to that, which is, are there ways that I can, things I'm directly responsible for, but I thought about it from the perspective of my manager, so not just product and tech but finance and content and other parts of the business. I would naturally zoom out and think about how all these component pieces need to come together and how the whole could be greater than the sum of the parts. I think that's useful thinking, and for engineers to think about how do I leave a better version of these systems, how do I think about the thing that's going to be high quality and scale for others? There's both how do I help my manager, and there's how do I help my colleagues, which is a core part of some of our engineering principles of do the thing that is right for the broader organization instead of just what's right for you locally, set of innovations that we want to make.
That is awesome tactical advice. Making your manager's life easier is always a good tactic, career-wise, for several reasons. Yeah, following the thread a little bit, I know you all added career ladders and levels recently. It was a new thing. You used to not have these things. So on that thread, what have you added to the career ladders within this AI world, if anything, that you find you want people to lean into more, you're looking to more, or not? Did you not change your career ladders and performance criteria?
So 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 have shown up in career ladders and how we talk about it evolves almost by the quarter, if not month or day, because the tech itself is advancing so much. So the most useful thing is not to make it level-specific or role-specific, but to encourage everyone towards the expectation on AI fluency, which doesn't mean use it as a tech for the sake of tech. It's tech where it's useful, to have good judgment about that, and to have the mindset to be open-minded, to explore and try new things. That's the non-negotiable for all roles, and that's true at the senior-most levels of Netflix, where we talk about we too need to have deep fluency in AI, even if we're not writing code as part of our day jobs. So that's changed, and then that's showing up in our hiring practices as well, getting comfortable within interviews, exploring how are people thinking about AI or technology, what are they using in their day-to-day or their current job, how comfortable are they with change and exploration, and even for things like coding interviews, allowing candidates, of course, to use AI tools because that's going to be part of what the work requires now. So those have been shifts that we've made, but I doubt it's a shift that's done versus we're right in the middle of it.
I'm just going to keep following this thread. Obviously, AI is transformative for coding. It's a big unlock for prototyping. Are there other use cases of AI at Netflix that have been really impactful that people may not think about or not realize?
So there's two that come to mind. The first is data analysis, distillation of information, modeling, which is using the tools to get our arms around all the insights we have, similar to what I mentioned before. What experiments have we run? What are the metrics that I should be looking at for a certain problem? What's the consumer research that we've done? And that is much higher velocity and much higher quality, contingent on you check that the results are valid, you work with your local data scientist on am I using the source-of-truth data on this, but that's been a great one, and that's one, personally, that I would say I most use some of these tools for. So that goes beyond prototyping and coding to general analytical thinking and translating data to action and insight.
The other one is on the content production creation part of the business, which has lots of applications. This was true before Gen AI, so ML and AI were deeply used in a lot of the production tools. We've used them to think about how to create promotional assets at scale, how to localize in subtitles and dubs. So Gen AI is a big step function in where the impact can be in creative ideation. We call those things pre-visualization, or basically bringing a creator's vision to life before you even get into the, you bring people to a set and start to actually go through the production itself. There's lots of use cases in post-production. So we recently acquired a company, Interpositive, 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 creators saying, you know what, I would like to try something else to bring this vision to life. But that impact is extremely promising, and we're seeing lots of productions leverage different tools, some of them built in-house, some of them that we enable through other vendors, for those content creation use cases. And then as we think about how content comes to the product, I mentioned localization, subtitles, and dubs, but those all are huge levers when we think about the AI impact. So that, again, goes well beyond prototyping or coding to some of the creative use cases, and you can imagine that just like they work for studio productions, for film and TV, they work for advertising, they work for marketing off-service campaigns, and so those are all areas that we're exploring.
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You mentioned how Netflix has been very early to AI and ML for a long time. Younger people may not remember this. Yeah, the Netflix Prize. Just to show an example of how early you were to AI and ML, people, I think it was a million-dollar prize to optimize the Netflix ranking algorithm a little bit. Whoever could optimize it the most, and I think the winner optimized it by a few percentage points, and it was a huge deal. All these super smart people got around the world, and it happened a few times, right?
I mean, you said it on my behalf. Often, when there are questions about how is Netflix thinking about AI, it's great to remind people of exactly that point, that this is not new to us, that especially for personalization, it's been central to delivering a great experience to members. It's impossible to take the breadth of content that we have, there's ever more content, that's one of the challenges, which is one of the challenges that Netflix has, and using AI and ML has been a way to do that. You want to personalize the right title for the right person at the right moment. That problem gets harder the more exciting our catalog gets, the greater breadth of content we have, not just film and TV but games and live and podcasts. Personalization becomes even more important and what that experience is. So we can take a lot of that history and say, okay, well now how do we solve this problem, because the tech is even more powerful, but it gives us a running head start in being clear about the problem to solve, how important it is that Netflix solve that for our members. And then the same is true as I was on the creative side of the house. AI and ML have been in things like visual effects or in localizing language for a long time. Now we say, what's the next era of that when the tech is more powerful?
Ever more content. That's one of the challenges, which is one of the challenges that Netflix has, and using AI and ML has been a way to do that. You want to personalize the right title for the right person at the right moment. That problem gets harder the more exciting our catalog gets, the greater breadth of content we have, not just film and TV, but games and live and podcasts. Personalization becomes even more important, and what that experience is. So we can take a lot of that history and say, okay, well, now how do we solve this problem? Because the tech is even more powerful, but it gives us a running head start in being clear about the problem to solve, how important it is that Netflix solve that for our members. And then the same is true as I was on the creative side of the house. AI and ML have been in things like visual effects or in localizing language for a long time. Now we say, what's the next era of that when the tech is more powerful? And in both cases, it ends up taking a strength that Netflix has, which is marrying entertainment and technology and making sure we stay ahead of the game to deliver things that are even better. So I love that it's part of our environment while keeping a great experience.
Yeah, and I love that back then it was called machine learning, and AI was like, no, no, it's not AI. AI is never, never, never, never going to happen. It's just machine learning. Then all of a sudden, you call everything AI, and some of it's machine learning. So it depends, the thing that is of the moment to describe. So I think we could go down a deep, dark hole of all the specific things, but in general, I don't think it would surprise anyone that Netflix is using a broad array. And with so much excitement about what's possible, the fun thing at Netflix for the people who work here is that if you're really passionate about the applications of tech for creative outlets, for consumer products, for infrastructure, we have all of those problems, and AI is a tool that we're very comfortable using to get these great entertainment and technology outcomes.
The other really interesting thing, just to keep complimenting Netflix here, if you look at the early culture deck of Netflix and also our conversation last time, things that emerged from that are things like high agency. This was something core to Netflix in the beginning: high agency, autonomy, high talent density, very bottom-up thinking, super quick experiments and launching, paying top of market. This is all stuff that every AI, this is what I hear constantly now from how the top AI labs operate. So we're all ending here, and this is where Netflix has been forever.
Yeah, it's a little prescient in understanding what makes talent incredible. I've thought about all those aspects of the culture at Netflix as this is, sound a little bit nerdy, but excellence as an operating system. So the goal of all those cultural elements wasn't the end goal themselves. It wasn't, let's just make sure people have as much responsibility as possible, or let's, we don't like process, so let's make sure that we don't have any of that. It was instead a very strongly held opinion that you get to excellence by giving people a lot of agency and accountability, by pushing decisions as deep in the organization as possible, hiring great people who can be trusted to have good judgment and make good decisions. And that ends up driving incredible outcomes, plus a lot more motivation and sense of responsibility. It means every person on the team can feel like I'm being given a lot of keys and a lot of accountability for what happens here. And I myself feel like when you know you're carrying that level of trust and accountability, you want to do your best work. And so there's something that feels very intuitive about what Netflix's culture has always been aiming at: excellence. And when you have great talent and you give them the ability to do their best work without micromanaging it or drowning it in process, you actually get much better outcomes. And so it feels very familiar to us, and it's not something that comes easily. So having culture is not a static thing. Culture needs to grow and evolve as the company gets bigger, the types of problems you're solving change, but the notion that we're going for excellence and trusting that exceptional talent needs to be able to do their best work, that's unchanged and something that I think continues to be a special sauce for us.
I love this concept, excellence as an operating system. It's very systems thinking, you might say, for how to set up a company.
Exactly, Lenny. So for people that, everyone listening to this will want excellence as an operating system. Who would not want this? It'd be helpful for people to hear what are the ingredients to make this happen. One is obviously high talent density, just hiring only the best. Two is accountability. There's the input and the output, essentially: input, amazing people, top people, keep them, make them accountable, give them autonomy. What would you say are the pillars of creating this excellence as an operating system if founders are listening to this, like, I want them to do that?
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, allowing people to take risks and innovate quickly. That's a big part of excellence in the Netflix culture, which is being very comfortable with risk-taking. We don't try to avoid failures. We try to recover quickly when we have them. I think there's been great examples, risk knowing it would be imperfect, knowing we would learn fast and we would be better for it. I've never been prouder of the team, seeing how we worked through that. So you have to be talent density, comfortable that people are going to take the context that you give them, strong judgment and risk-taking, and fight for the things that are the best outcomes for the business. You have to be, so Netflix matters, Netflix members matter. It's not about my own personal success or what I prefer. So there's a selflessness that is part of this excellence operating system.
And then the other thing I would say is some of the things that are, they're really unnatural for humans to do. So I could give a couple examples of things to get comfortable with, which is there are certainly days where I see decisions happening and I think I would make a different decision. Is that really going to be the best thing? But my job, especially in the Netflix culture, is not to step in in every one of those cases and overrule or veto or question someone, especially if it's not material, it's not going to burn the place down. Let people make that decision and learn from it and ask for those reflections afterwards of how did it go? Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the decision was a great one. But that is related to the risk-taking and helping people learn how to feel comfortable making their own decisions, especially when they're not all going to be the right decisions and they're going to learn something tough from it. I felt that myself from my boss and my peers, saying when the stakes are high, when I feel responsible for what the org is doing, to let people lean into risk can be uncomfortable.
And I think that also means in cases where things are not going well, as another example, to not assume that process is going to fix it. So if something, I've learned over the past few years that when planning is difficult, I've never heard someone say, oh, we figured out the perfect way to plan or the perfect way to go through feedback and leveling and compensation. But 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 putting a lot of constraints around it, but it actually goes against the, is there a more creative way to plan or to make people decisions or to make prioritization decisions that actually get us to better outcomes? And so it's a resistance to do the thing that a lot of bigger companies would do and to feel comfortable in that discomfort very often. So that's something I feel in my role, and I would believe a lot of people feel it because you try not to do the thing that is standard.
It's easy to say that and hear that, but I know what you mean, where somebody screws up and you're like, okay, what was the thing that went wrong? Let's put a process in place to avoid this from happening. And what you're saying is you need to resist that because that slows things down, and the best people don't want to be working in a place with all these checklists and process and things like that.
I think the best people want to know there's going to be a blameless retro, and they're going to feel so individually responsible that they're going to say, how do I make sure this doesn't happen again? Not with process, but with how could I share these learnings? How could I grow? I think you get much better outcomes over time, and you get a much stronger team, which I think is part of our role as leaders, of like you're trying to grow a team that
It is standard. It's easy to say that and hear that, but I know what you mean, where somebody screws up and you're, okay, what was the thing that went wrong? Let's put a process in place to avoid this from happening. What you're saying is you need to resist that because that slows things down, and the best people don't want to be working in a place with all these checklists and process and things like that. I think the best people want to know there's going to be a blameless retro, and they're going to feel so individually responsible that they're going to say, how do I make sure this doesn't happen again? Not with process, but with how could I share these learnings? How could I grow? I think you get much better outcomes over time, and you get a much stronger team, which I think is part of our role as leaders. You're trying to grow a team that is resilient and durable and knows how to have great impact. You're not trying to control everything, which is a key to building a team with high talent density.
There's two sides of this that I want to chat about briefly. One is the hiring, and the other is keeping the people. So you're famous for the keeper's test. We talked about this last time. Another unnatural thing for people. People that want to understand what this is can listen to the first conversation, but how has that evolved over the last couple years? Is that still a core part of the—
Keeper's test, but it's equally commonly used to have a conversation about how extraordinary someone is, how well they're doing in a role, because the entry point is for me to say to one of my direct reports, or for them to say to me, how am I doing on your keeper test? And the lion's share of the time, my response is, I would fight so hard to keep you. Let me go through a set of things that I think you're doing such a great job at, what your strengths are, where you're having a lot of impact, here's how you could be even better. So it's an entry into a conversation that is very positive and uplifting for people, but the framing is, do I pass the keeper test? And then, of course, there's the harder situations where I'm evaluating, does someone pass the keeper test, or they're asking me, and this is the toughest thing to say, to be honest, you're not passing that right now. I think you could get there in some cases, and that comes with feedback and what are those milestones, or in some cases you're saying, we've really tried and I don't see the path to success. So it's an anchor and an entry point for a conversation that can go lots of different directions. The thing I like about it is it's good hygiene on feedback and checking in on how things are going and forcing a tough conversation sometimes instead of shying away from it. Or, to keep great talent, you do need to say you're doing great. That's an important part of making people feel recognized and valued. So I don't want it to come across that we just have this very negative view of it. I think there's this positive side of the coin as well.
Awesome. I guess just to explain to people what this is so they don't have to listen to a whole other podcast, I'll try to briefly explain it. The idea here, a part of the Netflix culture, is that when you have people reporting to you, you should not ever just settle. Okay, this person, they're here. I guess we'll keep them around. Is that roughly the way to understand it?
Yeah, and the way it can—it's a corollary to that. If that person came to me today to say they were leaving, would I fight to keep them or not? Or would I say if my sense is a relief of, yeah, it probably would be better? It's the—well, the keeper test is one. Maintaining talent density, context not control among leaders. We talk about being highly aligned but loosely coupled, which is where light process, the minimum to make sure we're clear on the priorities and we can execute them, is what we're solving for. 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, because in the end it's the work and the culture that attract people and retain people, and we need that to be a successful business.
So that's exactly where I was going to go. To make this work, you need to attract the best people. It's always been hard to attract the best people. It feels insanely hard these days. Found to be effective and convincing the top people to still come to Netflix and join versus all the other fancy places they can go?
Yeah, we've always had a lot of competition for talent. It might feel more pronounced right now, but we have great talent on the team. Maybe that goes without saying, but I feel like I should say it out loud because I believe it. We have incredible talent in Netflix, recent hires, long-tenured people. I'm always impressed by the work that the team is doing, so I don't feel like we've suffered or like other companies are vacuuming up all the good people, because so many of them do sit at Netflix. It does feel like we have to be more explicit about the other companies, like some of the frontier labs. So people at Netflix have to be passionate about the application of technology and the application or building products to solve a certain set of problems. You have to love entertainment. You have to love consumer products at scale. You have to love the global nature of that. There are a lot of incredibly talented people who love that sweet spot. I am one of them, together in a way that is remarkable, and you use AI to do it. You use other technologies and products to do it, but that has to be something that drives you to be really excited about a lot of the roles at Netflix. If instead you're inspired by some of the foundational work that the frontier model companies are doing, which is exciting in its own way, it's a different persona. It's of the technology and see the connection to that to things that they love and use every day, like Netflix. That gets me up in the morning, and I think it gets a lot of the team members up, and we have this conversation about that's something special that only talent at Netflix can do, or fill in the blank for another industry that's deep in the application.
Junior people, it feels like everyone's—this is a good example. You're hiring a lot of awesome senior people that have proven they're awesome, and high talent density, high bars. Also, AI makes it so easy to do stuff that people may not be learning how to do anything. Junior engineers, I'm thinking, or junior PMs, junior designers. How do new people become these awesome senior people? Is there anything you think about? Are you hiring junior people? How do you think about this? What happens with junior people not necessarily learning or having a path to learn to become the senior version?
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 was new for us as of a few years ago. Prior to a few years ago, we were only hiring more experienced talent across all the functions. Now we do hire people straight from undergrad and graduate programs, and we'll continue to do that. So even in a world of AI where some things are easier, we were talking earlier about mindset. AI fluency, from my experience, younger folks are more open-minded. They tend to be more native in some of these new ways of working. For a company like Netflix, they're also very fluent in how entertainment is changing, how consumer behaviors are changing, how product and tech is influencing that in the products that they're using. That's really important to have on our team. So there's the part of the persona, which is who are you as a new grad who's an engineer, but there's also who are you as someone who's in their early 20s and has a perspective on the world that is highly valuable and a comfort with the way the world is changing. So that's why I say it's a critical part of our talent strategy.
Okay, so you step into the role and you have AI tools that didn't exist five or ten years ago. I would say mastery of the craft is still very important. So going back to, as the team member, I am responsible for the quality of code that I am submitting for production. I'm responsible for the quality of products that I'm building, how they are designed, what that user consumer—we need to be investing just as much in the mentorship of this is what good looks like, this is how you use these tools, but you still take accountability for what the outcomes are, what the quality of the output is. And I think I mentioned this earlier, I find that mastery and that craft excellence scarce still, so we want to make sure we're teaching that. I think it's a valid concern of how do I get that if I'm not as hands-on as I would have had to be, but you still carry responsibility for reviewing code, testing code, being
So you step into the role, and you have AI tools that didn't exist five or ten years ago. I would say mastery of the craft is still very important. Going back to, as the team member, I am responsible for the quality of code that I am submitting for production. I'm responsible for the quality of products that I'm building, how they are designed, what that user consumer. We need to be investing just as much in the mentorship of this is what good looks like, this is how you use these tools, but you still take accountability for what the outcomes are, what the quality of the output is.
I think I mentioned this earlier. I find that mastery and that craft excellence scarce still, so we want to make sure we're teaching that. I think it's a valid concern of how do I get that if I'm not as hands-on as I would have had to be. But you still carry responsibility for reviewing code, testing code, being able to diagnose problems, knowing what a good product looks like. I think that's a very scarce skill, to say this is excellence in a product that solves a problem that matters and how it's designed.
So I don't think that craft mastery, the importance of it, is going away. Probably the way we train and grow talent has to change because they're going to use different tools. And I can guarantee you that earlier-career talent is going to be teaching older folks like me many new things too. So I think it goes in both directions. Where do you think engineering goes in the, I don't know, 5, 10 years? Do you think people need to still understand code, or do you think there's this abstraction layer that sits on top where you don't even have to learn C++, Java, Python, whatever?
I think there's a difference between being able to write lines of code in a particular language like Python or C++ and understanding how code, computer systems, products work. And I don't think the latter is going away, because if we trusted agents to know all the languages and write all the code, we're not going to know why. Is something, is it a good product? Is it a bad product? Is it working as we expected? When it doesn't, like I mentioned earlier, we take a lot of risk, we fail fast, we recover fast. That requires an understanding of how are these systems working.
I might use an agent to help me understand those things, help me detect an anomaly or something that's broken faster and triage it, but I still need to have a fluency of what is this thing that we're building and how does it work so I know if it's good and I know how to fix it. I hope that doesn't go away, because that's how do we make the world a better place through the stuff that we're building, I think, requires some understanding of what we've built.
What I'm hearing, which makes sense, is you may not have to write the code, but you have to understand it and what's happening. But it's so much harder to, just as a person not writing it, to actually have that instilled in you. I think that's one of the things that the learning curve is very steep on right now.
So looking at some of the code that some of these models or agents are writing, they're very hard to follow. It's like, I know I'm getting better performance from this, but I have no idea why. And if this thing breaks, I'm going to have no idea how to fix it. That makes me uncomfortable. Maybe that's because I'm still on that learning curve of how do we operate in that world, like what's the set of tests or rationalization and understanding that we need to have to get comfortable with it. But at first glance, it looks very unfamiliar and very unsettling.
So I think engineering over time will evolve to be comfortable with that and have fluency in it and know how to guide new tech and agents and new capabilities to make sure that we feel really good about what the output is. I wonder what the metaphor is for this. I continue to be astounded by how much engineering has transformed in two years. It's like a completely different drop-down. You used to sit there in NID and write code, and now you're just talking to agents and reviewing code and shipping 100 PRs a day.
It feels like it's an acceleration of how much engineering has changed, but if you looked over the last 10 years or 20 years, you would say the same thing. So there's just something that's moving faster, and it's hard to wrap our heads around how quickly it's moved in the past couple of years. But it's not totally unfamiliar that engineering or data science or product would have these big shifts, just how filmmaking works. If you look over the last 100 years, it's unbelievably different because of technology and new tools that we've brought to it. It just feels like the cycle is speeding up.
Okay, I want to talk about entertainment for a brief moment. I'm curious just how entertainment will change over time and the next five, ten years. Today we open up Netflix, check out some shows, watch some videos. It hasn't changed in a while, just that idea of cool, I'm gonna watch The Pit and watch it all. I'm gonna watch a movie. I got TikTok, I got Instagram feeds of stuff. How much different do you think this will be in Netflix?
A much greater variety across formats, devices, moments of the day that Netflix needs to be able to serve well in order to meet consumer expectations and hopefully exceed them over time. So when we think about the addition of mobile and TV or cloud games, live content, podcasts, working with a broader set of creators who are now on the Netflix service, all of those things create a greater breadth of what entertainment is, and Netflix is able to define and expand that. And it puts a higher-bar expectation on how do we make sense of that for a Netflix member.
So how do we show you this very seamless journey from I listen to the Bill Simmons podcast to I watch Quarterback because I love that as one of the Netflix offerings in the more traditional film or TV space, to I play the most recent FIFA cloud game, and I want to be able to do that on both TV and on my mobile phone because now I'm on the move, and I want to be able to discover and engage with the content at different moments of the day. That's already a journey that we're building into Netflix, which I think will become stronger and stronger over time.
So the future that I can explore in lots of different directions depending on what I'm looking for in the moment, and the challenge Netflix has is we've got to make discovery and engagement much easier than it feels today. We have tons of content. It can feel very fragmented, especially when you consider all the services or offerings out there, and I think Netflix is very well positioned to understand how to solve that problem across entertainment, product, and tech. The other element of this is AI, obviously. As an outside observer, it's so interesting to see how in tech it's like AI, I love it, it's the future, it's the best. In Hollywood, it's like no, shut it down.
There's a mix. There's a very wide array. So 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 production. It's not consistent with my vision. That's fine. We work with those creators.
There's other creators, a growing number of them, I would say, who are very interested in exploring, wait, can these gen AI tools make something possible that wasn't possible before? Can I tell a story in a new way? Can I make that story higher quality and more resonant for audiences? Can I do things that are extra creative in how I think about bringing a story to life? And we support them as well, and we support all the folks who are in the in-between.
And then that's a really important position for going to be entirely new formats that unbelievable creators help to bring to life, and Netflix wants to participate in that, which means we need to have a flexibility in the tools that we provide and the types of partnerships we have, and to really have a creator-enablement view rather than a prescriptive we only do this one way. I think people are going to be surprised by just how good AI— Do you think we'll love it?
I have a hard time picturing entertainment that doesn't have humans at the heart of it. So that's humans in the creation of the storytelling, which I think is a scarce and valuable skill. Storytelling is one and the same with humanity and knowing what connects with people. So I think humans will be part of the, will always be a core part of humanity. And I think watching characters on screen who don't have that humanity feels less compelling to me.
And what the power of storytelling really is, to see another human and to watch how they perform a role or bring an emotion to life, that's such a human element. Will AI help to bring that to life, will play a material part in some of those productions or how we get them to look and feel a certain way? This one way, I think people are going to be surprised by just how good AI... You think we'll love it?
I have a hard time picturing entertainment that doesn't have humans at the heart of it. So that's humans in the creation of the storytelling, which I think is a scarce and valuable skill. Storytelling is one and the same with humanity and knowing what connects with people. So I think humans will always be a core part of humanity, and I think watching characters on screen who don't have that humanity feels less compelling to me. The power of storytelling really is to see another human and to watch how they perform a role or bring an emotion to life. That's such a human element.
Will AI help to bring that to life? Will it play a material part in some of those productions or how we get them to look and feel a certain way? Definitely. But I don't see the version of it that doesn't have the human as the backbone.
There's a quote that I think is misattributed to Salman Rushdie, which is, "When a child is born, they first ask for food and water and protection, and then they ask for, 'Tell me a story.'" It's a thing going back since the beginning of time, that storytelling has been a key part of community and social networks and human feeling and connection. So I love the idea that technology can amplify that and can bring that to life in very new, novel, exciting ways. But to say storytelling wouldn't have that humanity at the center feels like something would be missing.
We're going to see some wild shit over the years. There's no question about that, and a lot of it could be very entertaining. I don't debate that either. But I think there's going to be a broad range, and I think Netflix needs to be at the center of shaping that and bringing that to life, which is our plan. Amazing. Well, we covered a lot of ground, Elizabeth. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you wanted to...
I would underscore that this is a really exciting time to be building products and entertainment. Everything we talked about, what's changing in tech and consumers and what entertainment is, we're at this unbelievable high-velocity innovation period. So it's what keeps me at Netflix. I think it's a fun place to be. I would be missing something if I didn't reinforce that. I think that's true.
I also think that, as an industry, we spend a lot of time sometimes talking about the pure tech or the capability, and we lose the forest for the trees. We're trying to build great consumer products that people love. We're trying to make great entertainment that people love and that's their favorite thing. I don't want that to be lost. And of course, there's amazing tech and product stuff that sits underneath, but in the end, the thing that's most inspirational is what do we bring to people around the world.
And along those lines, there's been such a, the opposite of glut, drought, of new consumer products, consumer experiences. There are very few successes. Almost no consumer startup works, and AI feels like an opportunity for something else to work. And I feel like... Netflix is one of the... Well, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? Okay, I'm ready. All right. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? I have to come up with different books than I list. So I worked on Wall Street, and I like reminding people what it was like in the way-back time.
Favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed, which is maybe too hard for someone working at Netflix, but... The list is very long. The most recent, I watched Remarkably Bright Creatures after a recommendation from my mom. It's a tear-jerker. Talk about the human part of storytelling. Favorite product you recently discovered that you really love? Critical for my health and well-being: Eight Sleep. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life?
I often go back to the things that my parents instilled in me in very early times. So, at the risk of repeating, maybe first, something good happens every day, watch for it, even in the most... times. 5% of effort usually makes all the difference. These are awesome. They hit me. Final question. I don't know anything about this, but you mentioned you're doing some kind of cycling event. Tell us what's going on. What are you doing here?
So my husband and I are doing a trip where we ride alongside the Tour de France for the last week of the race. So the Tour is three weeks. The last week has a lot of mountain stages, so we get to ride part of the route each morning and then watch the race in the afternoon. Not for the faint of heart, so I'm trying to train up so I can enjoy those rides. It's supposed to be vacation, after all. My God, I love this vacation. I love professional sports. It's fun to be able to participate in it. So is this like racing, or you just try to go nonchalantly through the course?
You go nonchalantly, but still very hard. Yeah, it's physically and mentally challenging, and it's not a race, but I don't want to be at the back of the pack. So I gotta be comfortable enough to hold my own. Wow. I love how different this is from your job. It feels like it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it... So that's a good first stop, usually.
And how listeners can be useful: try all the new stuff that we're putting out there. Watch the live events, play the games, have fun with the new vertical video feed that we have on mobile called Clips, send us feedback. So we wanna make it better. And a lot of these things are new zero-to-one efforts for us. So we're trying to get to great and excellent as quickly as possible. I love that the homework is go watch Netflix. And you can also watch other things, tell us how we can be better, but I'm definitely interested in how can we be better at Netflix. I love it. I'm gonna go do that. Elizabeth, thank you so much for being here and being here again.
Thank you for having me. Always fun. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at LennysPodcast.com. See you in the next episode. to design a specific feature for a specific product. So there's this stepping back to look at the big picture that I think is happening in every single function and that requires some, yeah, reorientation of skills among the existing team
and also hiring people who've got that type of expertise and across all of it, it's a mindset shift. So we are not hiring people who are not excited to explore, try new things, understand lots is changing and feel comfortable with that ambiguity, be comfortable that there's a blurring of how we work and how we partner. That's true for people who are already at Netflix and people who we are adding to the team that that curiosity, innovation mindset has not, it's not been more important at least in the time that I've been working in this field. On the systems thinking piece, is the reason this is becoming more important that it is, people are moving so fast
that you need to invest in platforms and frameworks and design language and basically teach people to fish so they can not be blocked or is there other reasons? I think it's probably velocity. So platforms do have a benefit of leverage. So in general, that's an opportunity with or without AI for a platform to get most teams 80% of the way there and then they don't have to reinvent those building blocks. We have more bets that we're making across the business, more things we're trying to build. So platform mindsets are good and it's something that is relatively more recent for Netflix to think about that being a real critical enabler. There is also
the sense of a scaffolding in a world of AI. So not just the higher velocity, but you have more people doing more types of work that are different or new like we were talking about and there's risk that comes with how do you think about access and identity in that situation? How do you think about security in that situation? How do you think about shipping high quality code and design and user experiences? And so I don't think it scales well to have each person who's building something have to go figure out, could you remind me what good looks like here and what are the bumpers or guardrails I should keep in mind? I think we need to encode that in our paved paths
and our ways of working and for a data science or analytical field to encode, here's the source of truth data, here's how to interpret it, here's how to access it, here's what to do with it or not to do with it and to be careful with certain types of data. I don't, an organization that has thousands of people can no longer rely on tribal knowledge or I'm going to find the one person who knows this. So this was a challenge that was there before AI. It's probably a more urgent challenge with AI and I like the idea of using AI or any new tech to motivate, like we knew this is work we needed to do, no time like the present to invest in that more heavily across the team.
I wonder if another reason for this becoming more valuable is because agents are now doing a lot of work and giving them the context, giving them the scaffolding, giving them the design language, just speeds all that up. Yeah, and 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 feel like what we're producing is impactful and high quality output, but the work will be done by both humans and agents and that creates velocity and benefits and it creates risks and I think
that's important from, especially from an engineering perspective that we figure out how to manage that in a way that lets people move quickly but doesn't create undue downside or risks for the company. This connects so directly with, Jenny Wen was on the podcast, she was head of design for Clock Code and Cowork and had this whole design process is dead kind of thesis and the pitch there is just, there's no time for design, the design process and instead as a designer you're just kind of steering people and pointing them in the direction and adjusting and also thinking big pictures when you have the time and it feels like that's kind of what you're describing here
is like create the platform for people to move fast and then there's no time for like design process of a specific new feature. I have mixed feelings about that because I, we do want to enable with infrastructure and systems thinking more people to do great work with strong design as part of it. Why not take that opportunity that the new tech provides but for our most important priorities design is critical to solve things in the right way so we do still make time for important design work. It can move faster. The designers themselves have more tools in their toolkit so they can do incredible work at a faster velocity, show more options, learn, iterate, test more quickly
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 we would lose one of the things that makes Netflix great which is the product technology and design makes a lot of complexity invisible and makes for a seamless customer experience. That's a design mindset that has to be core to it. So the work itself might look different but I don't think we lose the mindset. That's an awesome counterpoint. So what I'm hearing is kind of trending up skills, attributes you look for,
systems thinking and this kind of mindset of being comfortable and excited about change and what's coming and not being stuck in your own ways. What are you finding is trending down? What are you less looking for that you used to value more highly? 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 examples of that on the team for encoding or how our playback systems work and things that have been incredibly innovative and novel for Netflix. I still believe we need
specialized practitioners in those spaces. But as a general rule compared to five or ten years ago, I would believe we have fewer specialists and more people who are generalist or adaptable in multiple directions. And that could be adaptable across functional expertise. It could be adaptable across flavors of engineering. So can I navigate both back end and front end systems? Can I hook into infrastructure with a lot of expertise? I think the mindset now needs to be I can learn that quickly and that goes back to the systems thinking. So I think specialists can learn to have a broader array of tools more easily than was true in the past. So we need fewer of them
perhaps because talent's able to grow in that direction. And there's something about sticking to a narrow specialty that maybe triggers for me a concern about what about the mindset of growing in different directions and exploring. And I don't want to be too narrow even in my own assessment of that, but it's important that people who are specialists still have that sense of I want to try a new way of solving these problems versus the way we have in the past. And when you say specialist, are you thinking like front end? I'm a front end engineer versus a back end or is there other versions of that? Or it could be a domain set of knowledge of I'm a payments expert. I'm an
ads marketplace design expert. I'm an expert in this very specific tooling that studio productions use. So there specialist and subject matter expertise is an advantage provided that person is willing to grow and extend into is this really still the right tool or the right way to think about the problem. So I think it's the layers of the stack from an engineering perspective that there's less specialty and then tools that are unlikely to be static or like to have a lot of inertia around them. I would think like we would want people who are able to innovate and imagine like what's the future version of this and so we want more talent like that. Awesome. So coming back
to the systems thinking piece people hearing this are like okay I gotta work on my systems thinking skill set how do people develop the skill other is it just do it for a long time work at a lot of complex projects like I step out one click to the like what am I assuming is true about the broader space in solving this problem so I was given a task to build some new feature for the Netflix member experience let me take one beat and think about what is the bigger consumer problem we're trying to solve here what's the type of content that this feature is going to be able to !
build this is going to make sense in a way that scales across multiple content types or it could be something that's a capability that then is contributed to a platform set of offerings from multiple areas is the consumer problem that I'm solving with this feature going to be one of the most important consumer problems that Netflix is going to need to solve as we have an expanding world of entertainment and we want to make it more personalized and immersive those are all questions that 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 I wouldn't spend too long in the questioning state because are we solving the right problem in the right way that matters for the end consumer another way as you describe it another way I'm thinking about it is like think if you were your manager how would they what's their broader perspective across not just your one team and problem and KPI but larger picture I've got advice over years that is similar to that which is are there ways that I can things I'm directly responsible for but I thought about it from the perspective of my manager so not just product and tech but finance and content and other
parts of the business I would naturally zoom out and think about how all these component pieces need to come together and how the whole could be greater than the sum of the parts I think that's useful thinking and for engineers to think about how do I leave a better version of these systems how do I think about the thing that's going to be high quality and scale for others there's both how do I help my manager and there's how do I help my colleagues which is a core part of some of our engineering principles of do the thing that is right for the broader organization instead of just what right for you locally set of innovations that we want to make that is awesome tactical
advice making your manager's life easier is always a good tactic career wise several reasons yeah following the thread a little bit I know you all added career ladders and levels recently it was like a new thing you used to not have these things so kind of on that thread what have you added to the career ladders within this AI world if anything that you find you want people to lean into more you're looking to more or not like did you not change your career ladders and performance you know criteria so 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 have shown up in career ladders and how we talk about it evolves almost by the quarter if not month or day because the tech itself is advancing so much so the most useful thing is not to make it level specific or role specific but to encourage everyone towards the expectation on AI fluency which doesn't mean use it as a tech for the sake of tech it's tech where it's useful to have good judgment about that and to have the mindset to be open minded to explore and try new things that's the non negotiable for all roles and that's true at the senior most levels of Netflix where we talk about we too need to have deep fluency in
AI even if we're not writing code as part of our day jobs so that's that's changed and then that's showing up in our hiring practices as well getting comfortable within interviews exploring how are people thinking about AI or technology what are they using in their day to day or their current job how comfortable are they with change and exploration and even for things like coding interviews allowing candidates of course to use AI tools because that's going to be part of what the work requires now so those have been shifts that we've made but I doubt it's a shift that's done versus we're right in the middle of it I'm just going to keep following this thread obviously AI is
transformative for coding it's a big unlock for prototyping are there other use cases of AI at Netflix that have been really impactful that people may not think about or not realize so there's two that come to mind so the first is data analysis distillation of information modeling which is using the tools to get our arms around all the insights we have similar to what I mentioned before what experiments have we run what are the metrics that I should be looking at for a certain problem what's the consumer research that we've done and that is much higher velocity and much higher quality contingent on you check that the results are valid you work with your local data
scientist on am I using the source of truth data on this but that's been a great one and that's one personally that I would say I most use some of these tools for so that goes beyond prototyping and coding to general analytical thinking and translating data to action and insight the other one is on the content production creation part of the business which has lots of applications this was true before Gen AI so ML and AI were deeply used in a lot of the production tools we've used them to think about how to create promotional assets at scale how to localize in subtitles and dubs so Gen AI is a big step function in where the impact can be in creative ideation we call those
things like pre visualization or basically bringing a creator's vision to life before you even get in to the you bring people to a set and start to actually go through the production itself there's lots of use cases in post production so we recently acquired a company interpositive 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 creators saying you know what I would like to try something else to bring this vision to life but that impact is extremely promising and we're seeing lots of productions leverage different tools some of them built in
house some of them that we enable through other vendors for those content creation use cases and then as we think about how content comes to the product I mentioned localization subtitles and dubs but those all are huge levers when we think about the AI impact so that again goes well beyond prototyping or coding to some of the creative use cases and you can imagine that just like they work for studio productions for film and TV they work for advertising they work for marketing off service campaigns and so those are all areas that we're exploring this episode is brought to you by Mercury radically different banking loved by over 300,000 entrepreneurs and now with command
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past year I just asked how much have I made from X over the past year 10 seconds later I have an answer it is so freaking cool visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes mercury is a fintech company not an FDIC insured bank banking services provided through choice financial group and column NA members FDIC you mentioned how Netflix has been very early to AI and ML for a long time younger people may not remember this ! !
Yeah the Netflix prize like just show an example of how early you were to AI and ML people I think it was a million dollar prize to optimize the Netflix ranking algorithm a little bit like whoever could optimize it the most and I think the winner optimized it by a few percentage points and it was a huge deal all these super smart people got around around the world and it happened a few times right I mean you said it on my behalf often when there's questions about how is Netflix thinking about AI it's great to remind people of exactly that point that this is not new to us that especially for personalization it's been central to delivering a great experience to members it's
impossible to take the breadth of content that we have there's ever more content that's one of the challenges which is one of the challenges that Netflix has and using AI and ML has been a way to do that you want to personalize right title for the right person at the right moment that problem gets harder the more exciting our catalog gets the greater breadth of content we have not just film and TV but games and live and podcasts personalization becomes even more important and what that experience is so we can take a lot of that history and say okay well now how do we solve this problem because the tech is even more powerful but it gives us a running head start in being
clear about the problem to solve how important it is that Netflix solve that for our members and then the same is true as I was on the creative side of the house AI and ML have been in things like visual effects or in localizing language for a long time now we say what's the next era of that when the tech is more powerful and in both cases it ends up taking a strength that Netflix has which is marrying entertainment and technology and making sure we stay ahead of the game to deliver things that are even better so I love that it it's part of our environment while keeping a great experience yeah and I love that back then it was called machine learning and AI was like no no
it's not AI AI is never never never never going to happen it's just machine learning well then all of a sudden you call everything AI and some of it's machine learning so it depends like the thing that is of the moment to describe so I think we down a deep dark hole of all the specific things but in general I don't think it would surprise anyone that Netflix is using a broad array and with so much excitement about what's possible the fun thing at Netflix for the people who work here is that if you're really passionate about the applications of tech for creative outlets for consumer products for infrastructure we have all of those problems and AI is a tool that we're very
comfortable using to get these great entertainment and technology outcomes the other really interesting thing just to kind of keep complimenting Netflix here if you look at the early culture deck of Netflix and also our conversation last time things that emerged from that are things like high agency this was like something core to Netflix in the beginning high agency autonomy high talent density very bottom thinking super quick experiments and launching paying top of market this is all stuff that every AI like this is what I hear constantly now from how the top AI labs operate so we're all ending here and this is where Netflix has been forever yeah it's a little prescient
in understanding what makes talent incredible I've thought about all those aspects of the culture at Netflix as this is ! sound a little bit nerdy but excellence as an operating system so the goal of all those cultural elements wasn't the end bone themselves it wasn't let's just make sure people have as much responsibility as possible or let's you know we don't like process so let's make sure that we don't have any of that it was instead a very strongly held opinion that you get to excellence by giving people a lot of agency and accountability by pushing decisions as deep in the organization as possible hiring great people who can be trusted to have good judgment and make
good decisions and that ends up driving incredible outcomes plus a lot more motivation and sense of responsibility it means every person on the team can feel like I'm being given a lot of keys and a lot of accountability for what happens here and I myself feel like when you know you're carrying that level of trust and accountability you want to do your best work and so there's something that feels very intuitive about Netflix's culture has always been aiming at excellence and when you have great talent and you give them the ability to do their best work without micromanaging it or drowning it in process you actually get much better outcomes and so I feeling very familiar
to us and it's not something that comes easily so having culture is not a static thing culture needs to grow and evolve as the company gets bigger the types of problems you're solving change but the notion that we're going for excellence and trusting that exceptional talent needs to be able to do their best work that's unchanged and something that I think continues to be a special sauce for us I love this concept excellence as an operating system it's very systems thinking you might say for how to set up a company exactly Lenny so for people that like everyone listening to this will want excellence as an operating system like who would not want this it'd be helpful for
people to hear what are the ingredients to make this happen one is obviously high talent density just hiring only the best to is accountability kind of there's like the input and the output essentially input amazing people top the top people keep them make them accountable give them autonomy what would you say kind of like the pillars of creating this excellence as an operating system if people if founders are listening to this like I want them to do that 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 allowing people to
take risks and innovate quickly that's a big part of excellence in the Netflix culture which is being very comfortable with risk taking we don't try to avoid failures we try to recover quickly when we have them I think there's been great examples risk knowing it would be imperfect knowing we would learn fast and we would be better for it I've never been prouder of the team seeing how we worked through that so you have to be talent density comfortable that people are going to take the context that you give them strong judgment and risk taking and fight for the things that are the best outcomes for the business you have to be so it Netflix matters Netflix members matter
it's not about my own personal success or what I prefer so there's a selflessness that is part of this excellence operating system and then the other thing I would say is some of the things that are they're really unnatural for humans to do so I could give a couple examples of things to get comfortable with which is there are certainly days where I see decisions happening and I think I would make a different decision like is that really going to be the best thing but my job especially in the Netflix culture is not to step in in every one of those cases and overrule or veto or question someone especially if it's not material it's not going to burn the place down let people
make that decision and learn from it and ask for those reflections afterwards of how did it go maybe I was wrong maybe the decision was a great one but that it's related to the risk taking and the like help people learn how to feel comfortable making their own decisions especially when they're not all going to be the right decisions and they're going to learn something tough from it I felt that myself from my boss and my peers saying when the stakes are high when I feel responsible for what the org is doing to let people lean into risk can be uncomfortable and I think that also means in cases where things are not going well as another example to not assume that process is
going to fix it so if something I've learned over the past few years that when planning is difficult I've never heard someone say like oh we figured out the perfect way to plan or the perfect way to go through feedback and leveling and compensation but 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 putting a lot of constraints around it but it actually goes against the like is there a more creative way to plan or to make people decisions or to make prioritization
decisions that actually get us to better outcomes and so it's a resistance to do the thing that a lot of bigger companies would do and to feel comfortable in that discomfort very often so that's something I feel in my role and I would believe a lot of ! feel it because you try not to do the thing that is standard it's easy to say that and hear that but I so know what you mean where somebody screws up and you're like okay what was the thing that went wrong let's put a process in place to avoid this from happening and what you're saying is like you need to resist that because that slows things down and the best people don't want to be working in a place with all these
checklists and process and things like that I think the best people want to know there's going to be a blameless retro and they're going to feel so individually responsible that they're going to say how do I make sure this doesn't happen again not with process but with like how could I share these learnings how could I grow I think you get much better outcomes over time and you get a much stronger team which I think is part of our role as leaders of like you're you're trying to grow a team that is resilient and durable and knows how to have great impact you're not trying to control everything which is a key to building a team with high talent density there's kind of
there's two sides of this that I want to chat about briefly one is the hiring and the other is keeping the people so you're famous for the keepers test we talked about this last time another unnatural thing for people people that want to understand what this is they can listen to the first conversation but how has that evolved over the last couple years that still a core part of the ! keepers test but it's equally commonly used to have a conversation about how extraordinary someone is how well they're doing in a role because the entry point is for me to say to one of my direct reports or for them to say to me how am I doing on your keeper test and the lion share of the
time my response is I would fight so hard to keep you let me go through a set of things that I think you're doing such a great job at what your strengths are where you're having a lot of impact here's how you could be even better so it's an entry into a conversation that is very positive and uplifting for people but the framing is do I pass the keeper test and then of course there's the harder situations where I'm evaluating does someone pass the keeper test or they're asking me and this is the toughest thing to say to be honest you're not passing that right now I think you could get there in some cases and that comes with feedback and what are those milestones or in some
cases you're saying we've really tried and I don't see the path to success so it's just it's an anchor and an entry point for a conversation that can go lots of different directions and the thing I like about it is it's good hygiene on feedback and checking in on how things are going and forcing a tough conversation sometimes instead of shying away from it or to keep great talent you do need to say you're doing great like that that's an important part of making people feel recognized and valued so I don't want it to come across that we just have this very negative view of it I think there's this positive side of the coin as well awesome I guess just to explain to people
what this is so they don't have to listen to a whole other podcast I'll try to briefly explain it the idea here a part of the Netflix culture is that when you have people reporting to you you should not ever just settle okay this person they're here I guess we'll keep them around is that roughly the way to understand it yeah and the way it can it's sort of a corollary to that if that person came to me today to say they were leaving would I fight to keep them or not or would I say if my sense is a relief of yeah I probably would be better it's the well the keeper test is one maintaining talent entity context not control among leaders we talk about being highly aligned but
loosely coupled which is where light process you know the minimum to make sure we're clear on the priorities and we can execute them is what we're solving for 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 because in the end it's the work and the culture that attracts people and retains people and we need that to be a successful business so that's exactly where I was going to go so to make this work you need to attract the best people it's always been hard to attract the best people feels insanely hard these days found to be effective and
convincing the top people to still come to Netflix and join versus all the other fancy places they can go yeah we've always had a lot of competition for talent it might feel more pronounced right now but we have great talent on the team maybe that goes without saying but I feel like I should say it out loud because I believe it we have incredible talent in Netflix recent hires long tenured people I'm always impressed by the work that the team is doing so 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 it does feel like we have to be more more explicit about the other companies
like some of the frontier labs so people at Netflix have to be passionate about the application of technology and the application or building products to solve a certain set of problems you have to love entertainment you have to love consumer products at scale you have to love the global nature of that there are a lot of incredibly talented people who love that sweet spot I am one of them together in a way that is remarkable and you use AI to do it you use other technologies and products to do it but that has to be something that drives you to be really excited about a lot of the roles at Netflix if instead you're inspired by some of the foundational work that the
frontier model companies are doing which is exciting in its own way it's a different persona it's of the technology and see the connection to that to things that they love and use every day like Netflix and so that you know that gets me up in the morning and I think it gets a lot of the team members up and we have this conversation about like that's something special that only talent at Netflix can do or fill in the blank for another industry that's deep in the application junior people it feels like everyone's like this is a good example you're hiring a lot of awesome senior people that have proven they're awesome and you know high talent density high bars also just AI
makes it so easy to do stuff that people may not be learning how to do anything they're like junior engineers I'm thinking or junior PMs junior designers like there's just like how new people become these awesome senior people is there anything you've you think about are you hiring junior people how do you think about this what happens with junior people not necessarily learning or having a path to learn to become the senior version 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 was new for us as of a few years ago so prior to a few years ago we were only
hiring more experienced talent across all the functions now we do hire people straight from undergrad and graduate programs and we'll continue to do that so even in a world of AI where some things are easier we were talking earlier about mindset AI fluency from my experience younger folks are more open minded they tend to be more native in some of these new ways of working for a company like Netflix they're also very fluent in how entertainment is changing how consumer behaviors are changing how product and tech is influencing that in the products that they're using that's really important to have on our team so there there's the part of the persona which is who are you
as a new grad who's an engineer but there's also who are you as someone who's in their early 20s and has a perspective on the world that is highly valuable and a comfort with the way the world is changing so that's why I say it's a critical part of our talent strategy to the okay so you step into the role and you have AI tools that didn't exist five or ten years ago I would say mastery of the craft is still very important so going back to as the team member I am responsible for the quality of code that I am submitting for production I'm responsible for the quality of products that I'm building how they are designed what that user consumer we need to be investing just as
much in the mentorship of this is what good looks like this is how you use these tools but you still take accountability for what the outcomes are what the quality of the output is and I think I mentioned this earlier I find that mastery and that craft excellence scarce still so we want to make sure we're ! teaching ! that I think it's a valid concern of how do I get that if I'm not as hands on as I would have had to be but you still carry responsibility for reviewing code testing code being able to diagnose problems knowing what a good product looks like I think that's a very scarce skill to say this is excellence in a product that solves a problem that matters and how
it's designed so I don't think that craft mastery the importance of it is going away probably the way we train and grow talent has to change because they're going to use different tools and I can guarantee you that earlier career talent is going to be teaching older folks like me many new things too so I think it goes in both directions where do you think engineering goes in the I don't know 5 10 years do you think people need to still understand code or do you think there's this abstraction layer that sits on top where you don't even have to learn C++ Java Python whatever I think there's a difference between being able to write lines of code in a particular language like
Python or C++ and understanding how code computer systems products work and I don't think the latter is going away because if we trusted agents to know all the languages and write all the code we're not going to know why is something is it a good product is it a bad product is it working as we expected when it doesn't like I mentioned earlier we take a lot of risk we fail fast we recover fast that requires an understanding of how are these systems working I might use an agent to help me understand those things help me detect an anomaly or something that's broken faster and triage it but I still need to have a fluency of what is this thing that we're building and how does
it work so I know if it's good and I know how to fix it I hope that doesn't go away because that's how do we make the world a better place through the stuff that we're building I think requires some understanding of what we've built what I'm hearing which makes sense is you may not have to write the code but you have to understand it and what's happening but it's so much harder to just as a person not writing it to actually you know have that instilled in you I think that's one of the things that the learning curve is very steep on right now so looking at some of the code that some of these models or agents are writing they're very hard to follow it's like I know I'm
getting better performance from this but I have no idea why and if this thing breaks I'm going to have no idea how to fix it that that makes me uncomfortable you know maybe that's because I'm still on that learning curve of how do we operate in that world like what's the set of tests or rationalization and understanding that we need to have to get comfortable with it but at first glance it looks very unfamiliar and very unsettling so I think engineering over time will evolve to be comfortable with that and have fluency in it and know how to guide new tech and agents and new capabilities to make sure that we feel really good about what the output is I wonder what the
metaphor is for this where this like it's I continue to be astounded by how much engineering has transformed in like two years it's like a completely different drop down you're just used to sit there in NID and write code and now you're just talking to agents and reviewing code and shipping 100 PRs a day It feels like it's an acceleration of how much engineering has changed but if you looked over the last 10 years or 20 years you would say the same thing so there's just something that's moving faster and it's hard to wrap our heads around how quickly it's moved in the past couple of years but it's not totally unfamiliar that engineering or data science or product would
have these big shifts just how filmmaking works if you look over the last 100 years it's unbelievably different because of technology and new tools that we've brought to it just feels like the cycle is speeding up okay I want to talk about entertainment for a brief moment I'm curious just like how entertainment will change over the time and the next five ten years just you know today we open up Netflix check out some shows watch some videos it hasn't changed in a while just that idea of like cool I'm gonna watch the pit and watch it all I'm watch a movie I got TikTok I got Instagram feeds of stuff like how much different do you think this will be in I Netflix a much
greater variety across formats devices moments of the day that Netflix needs to be able to serve well in order to meet consumer expectations and hopefully exceed them over time so when we think about the addition of mobile and TV or cloud games live content podcasts working with a broader set of creators who are now on the Netflix service all of those things create a greater breadth of what entertainment is and Netflix is able to define and expand that and it puts a higher bar expectation on how do we make sense of that for a Netflix member so how do we show you this very seamless journey from I listen to the Bill Simmons podcast to I watch quarterback because I love that
as one of the Netflix offerings in the more you could say traditional film or TV space to I play the most recent FIFA cloud game and I want to be able to do that on both TV and on my mobile phone because now I'm on the move and I want to be able to discover and engage with the content at different moments of the day that's already a journey that we're building into Netflix which I think will become stronger and stronger over time so the future that I can explore in lots of different directions depending on what I'm looking for in the moment and the challenge Netflix has is we've got to make discovery and engagement much easier than it feels today we have tons of content
it can feel very fragmented especially when you consider all the services or offerings out there and I think Netflix is very well positioned to understand how to solve that problem across entertainment product and tech the other element of this is AI obviously as an outside observer it's like so interesting to see how in tech it's like AI I love it it's the future it's the best in Hollywood it's like no shut it down there's a mix there's a very wide array so we 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 production it's not it's not consistent with my vision that's fine we work with those creators there's other creators a growing number of them I would say who are very interested in exploring wait can these gen AI tools make something possible that wasn't possible before can I tell a story in a new way can I make that story higher quality and more resonant for audiences can I do things that are extra creative and how I think about bringing a story to life and we support them as well and we support all the folks who are in the in between and then that's a really important position for going to be entirely new formats that
unbelievable creators help to bring to life and Netflix wants to participate in that which means we need to have a flexibility in the tools that we provide and the types of partnerships we have and to really have a creator enablement view rather than a prescriptive we only do this one way I think people are going to be surprised by just how good AI you think we'll love it I have a hard time picturing entertainment that doesn't have humans at the heart of it so that that's humans in the creation of the storytelling which I think is a scarce and valuable skill you know storytelling is one and the same with humanity and knowing what connects with people so I think humans
will be part of the will always be a core part or a humanity and I think watching watching characters on screen who don't have that humanity feels less compelling to me and what the power of storytelling really is to like see another human and to watch how they perform a role or like bring an emotion to life that's such a human element will AI help to bring that to life will play a material part in some of those productions or how we get them to look and feel a certain way definitely but I don't see the version of it that doesn't have the human as the backbone there's a quote that I think is misattributed to Salman Rushdie which is when a child is born they first ask for
food and water and protection and then they ask for tell me a story it's a thing going back since the beginning of time that storytelling has been a key part of community and social networks and human feeling and connection so I love the idea that technology can amplify that and can bring that to life in very new novel exciting ways but if to say storytelling wouldn't have that humanity at the center feels like something would be missing we're going to see some wild shit over the years there's no question about that and a lot of it could be very entertaining you know I don't debate that either but I think there's going to be a broad range and I think Netflix needs to be
at the center of shaping that and bringing that to life which is our plan amazing well we covered a lot of ground Elizabeth before we get to our very exciting lightning round is there anything else that you wanted to I would underscore that this is a really exciting time to be building products and entertainment everything we talked about of like what's changing in the tech and consumers and like what is entertainment we're at this unbelievable high velocity innovation period so it's what keeps me at Netflix I think it's a fun place to be I would be missing something if I didn't reinforce that I think that's true I also think that as an industry we spend a lot of time
sometimes talking about the pure tech or the capability and we sort of lose the forest for the trees we're trying to build great consumer products that people love we're trying to make great entertainment that people love and it's their favorite thing that I don't want that to be lost and of course there's amazing tech and product stuff that sits underneath but in the end the thing that's most inspirational is what do we bring to people around the world and along those lines there's been such a the opposite of glut drought of a consumer new consumer products consumer experiences like there's very few success like almost no consumer startup works and AI feels like an
opportunity for something else to work and I feel like ! Netflix is one of the well with that we reached our very exciting lightning round I've got five questions for you are you ready okay I'm ready all right what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people I have to come up with different books than I list so I worked on Wall Street and I like reminding people what it was like in the way back time favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed which is maybe too hard for someone working at Netflix but the list is very long the most recent I watched Remarkably Bright Creatures after a recommendation from my mom it's a tear jerker
talk about the human part of storytelling favorite product you recently discovered that you really love critical for my health and well-being ate sleep do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life I often go back to the things that my parents instilled in me in very early times so the risk of repeating maybe first something good happens every day watch for it even in the most ! ! times 5% of effort usually makes all the difference these are awesome they hit me final question I don't know anything about this but you mentioned you're doing some kind of cycling event tell us what's going on what are you doing here so my husband and I are
doing a trip where we ride alongside the Tour de France for the last week of the race so the tour is three weeks the last week has a lot of mountain stages so we get to ride part of the route each morning and then watch the race in the afternoon not for the faint of heart so I'm trying to train up so I can enjoy those rides it's supposed to be vacation after all my god I love this vacation I love love professional sports it's fun to be able ! participate in it so is this like racing or you just kind of try to go nonchalantly through the course you go nonchalantly but still very hard yeah it's physically and mentally challenging and I you know it's not a race but I don't
want to be at the back of the pack so I gotta be comfortable enough to hold my own wow I love how different this is from your job it feels like it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it So that's a good first stop usually. And then how listeners can be useful, try all the new stuff that we're putting out there. Watch the live events, play the games, have fun with the new vertical video feed that we have on mobile called Clips, send us feedback. So we wanna make it better. And a lot of these things are new zero to one efforts for us. So we're trying to get to great and excellent as quickly as possible.
I love that the homework is go watch Netflix. And you can also watch other things, tell us how we can be better, but I'm definitely interested in how can we be better at Netflix. I love it. I'm gonna go do that. Elizabeth, thank you so much for being here and being here again. Thank you for having me. Always fun. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast.com.
See you in the next episode.