Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:37:56 · Elizabeth Stone, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:37:56] S1: And there's a lot of AI use cases that are not generative use cases. So, 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 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 at the center of them. And it's good not to forget that that's true. Even if Netflix isn't branded as an AI company, AI is a tool that we're very comfortable using to get these great entertainment and technology outcomes. [00:38:37] S0: 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 emerge from that are things like high agency. This was something core to Netflix in the beginning. High agency, autonomy, high talent density, very bottoms-up thinking, super quick experiments and launching, paying top of market. 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.
00:39:13 · Elizabeth Stone
[00:39:13] S1: 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 going to 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. 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 do think that the newer era companies are picking up on something that is feeling very familiar to us. And it's not something that comes easily. So, culture's 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.
00:41:11 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elizabeth Stone
[00:41:11] S0: I love this concept. Excellence as an operating system. It's very systems thinking you might say for how to set up a company. [00:41:18] S1: Exactly, Lenny. [00:41:20] S0: So, 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, the top people, 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 and like, I want them to do that?
00:41:51 · Elizabeth Stone
[00:41:51] S1: 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 of that. Our foray into live was a wonderful example of being comfortable taking a ton of 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 very clear that what you're doing is driving outcomes for consumers and Netflix. 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 it's related to the risk taking. And 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, "This is your decision. I can provide input. I can help you brainstorm. It's yours in the end." And it just doesn't come naturally.
00:44:19 · Elizabeth Stone
When the stakes are high, when I feel responsible for what the org's 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. 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, 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 at Netflix feel it, because you try not to do the thing that is standard.
00:45:39 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elizabeth Stone
[00:45:39] S0: 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 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 processing gates and things like that. [00:45:58] S1: No. 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 do work differently to make sure that I get to a better outcome next time? When you are trusting people to take those reflections and learn and 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 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.