Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…There's a couple of things I wanted to follow up on there because there's a lot there. One is this idea of testing the ideal almost and kind of working backwards from that. That's something I always find found really helpful. Is that something that you espouse and find to be really powerful? You know, honestly, I think of these product strategies as these high-level theories, these hypotheses about how you will delight customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways. So I just gave a failed hypothesis, the social one. You actually brought up a winning hypothesis. Personalization delights customers because it makes it easier to find movies you love. It's hard to copy. Netflix sort of knows the movie taste of a billion people worldwide. That's 222 members times about five profiles per person. And then the margin, this is an interesting one. When Netflix is making an investment in a TV show or movie, they kind of can guess how many people will watch it. So they guessed that 100 million people would watch Stranger Things. So they were willing to invest 500 million. They guessed that 20 million people would watch BoJack Horseman. I'm a freak. So they're willing to make 100 million. I call that right-sizing the investment, but that's how personalization helps Netflix to build margin or to build a better business. Anyways, back to your original question. I mainly was just trying to find these high-level theories and hypotheses that I hope would delight in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways. The reality was we'd have 10 ideas and probably six of them would fail, but a lot of value in the three or the four that worked. When we went to TV-based systems, we actually couldn't A-B test at first. So we were going back to qual there, looking over people's shoulders and focus groups, et cetera. But eventually, Netflix could A-B test what's a good experience on a TV-based system. They have server-based systems now where they can create different experiences for different folks. So I guess my short answer was so hard to find these product strategies that work. There was no notion of building a perfect experience of all these things together. So we just took it one theory at a time. Got it. And then on that concept of delight, I've always wanted to ask you this question. I've never had a chance for B2B. Do you find this is also something companies should really prioritize and do because not a lot of B2B products are delightful and a lot of them are still really successful? How do you think about that kind of framework in B2B?…

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