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Elizabeth Stone: preference

22 Feb 2024 Lenny's Podcast How Netflix builds a culture of excellence | Elizabeth Stone (CTO)

“It's kind of related to what I was saying earlier, that talent density is a prerequisite for a lot of the other ways we operate. So if we want to create a work environment where we are not prescriptive about how people solve problems or the scope of problems that they could tackle, assuming they're highly impactful for the business, and we don't have a lot of process around that work, so think about being able to make large innovations to our engineering systems or introducing new ways to think about metrics and experimentation, we get a lot of those things because we give people the freedom and the space to explore and question things and experiment in a way with solutions.”

— Elizabeth Stone

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Speaker
Elizabeth Stone
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
preference
Recorded
22 Feb 2024
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…This episode is brought to you by Xplo, a game changer for customer facing analytics and data reporting. Are your users craving more dashboards, reports, and analytics within your product? Are you tired of trying to build it yourself? As a product leader, you probably have these requests on your roadmap, but the struggle to prioritize them is real. Building analytics from scratch can be time-consuming, expensive, and a really challenging process. Enter Xplo. Xplo is a fully white labeled embedded analytics solution designed entirely with your user in mind. Getting started is easy. Xplo connects to any relational database or warehouse. And with its low-code functionality, you can build and style dashboards in minutes. Once you're ready, simply embed the dashboard or report into your application with a tiny code snippet. The best part? Your end users can use Xplo's AI features for their own report and dashboard generation, eliminating customer data requests for your support team. Build and embed a fully white labeled analytics experience in days. Try it for free at xplo.co/lenny. That's E-X-P-L-O.co/lenny. So I asked on Twitter what questions to ask you. And there's a great question that came in from Nan Yu. He's the head of product for Linear and he asks, "What practices does Netflix do that other companies should not attempt to do because their talent level is so much higher than other companies?" That is freedom and responsibility in a nutshell. So let me explain that. It's a good question. It's kind of related to what I was saying earlier, that talent density is a prerequisite for a lot of the other ways we operate. So if we want to create a work environment where we are not prescriptive about how people solve problems or the scope of problems that they could tackle, assuming they're highly impactful for the business, and we don't have a lot of process around that work, so think about being able to make large innovations to our engineering systems or introducing new ways to think about metrics and experimentation, we get a lot of those things because we give people the freedom and the space to explore and question things and experiment in a way with solutions. I think that that would be very hard if not dangerous if we didn't have a high talent density. It's really not a top down do A, then B, then C. Even in how we go through some of our planning processes or thinking about how we think about priorities, there is a lot of room for contribution across all levels of the team and that requires talent density. And then there's things like you have to have amazing people if you're not going to have really strict guardrails that would influence the consumer experience or business stakeholders experience. We do give people a lot of responsibility on those things. So I think the lack of process and prescriptiveness is all hinging on we've got amazing people who are smart, but even better have strong judgment. This is kind of what you always hear from people giving founders advice is, "Just hire amazing people, get out of their way and let them do their job," which is often not a successful experience. What are examples that either things that came out of this freedom, I don't know, products or features or ideas that came out of this or policies or processes you don't have that everyone else might have? So I know there's no vacation time, there's unlimited vacation time, I assume. Is that still a thing? Unlimited vacation time?…

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