Elizabeth Stone: recommendation

Transcript context

…Are there functions that you are finding you are hiring more of, like the pie chart pie expanding, say for engineering or PM or design or something, and then functions you're 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 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 examples. So, in our core infrastructure team at Netflix in 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 system 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, like design, it's extremely important that our experienced 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, basically. 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. g 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, it's not been more important, at least in the time that I've been working in this field.…

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