Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:45:58 · Elizabeth Stone, Lenny Rachitsky
[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. [00:46:41] S0: 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, they can listen to the first conversation, but how has that evolved over the last couple of years? That still a core part of the culture, this idea of the keeper's test?
00:47:05 · Elizabeth Stone
[00:47:05] S1: It's often cited in a way where you think of keeper's test as that moment where you decide to let someone go, that they're not the right fit for the role and the conversation about that. 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. 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. 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.
00:48:53 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elizabeth Stone
[00:48:53] S0: Awesome. I guess just to explain to people what this is so they don't have to go 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 always be thinking, would I hire this person today knowing what I know about them? And if not, then I should probably let them go. And the idea there is to keep the high bar, to 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? [00:49:21] S1: 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 relief of, oh, yeah, it probably would be better to have someone else in this role, I should've taken action and having that conversation sooner. [00:49:41] S0: As you said, it's so many uncomfortable things you have to do to maintain this culture.
00:49:41 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elizabeth Stone
[00:49:41] S0: As you said, it's so many uncomfortable things you have to do to maintain this culture. [00:49:47] S1: Yeah. 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 attracts people and retains people. And we need that to be a successful business. [00:50:22] S0: 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 very hard to attract the best people. It feels insanely hard these days with the amount of dollars flying around, the fancy AI labs, so much competition. It's crazy. What have you found to be effective in convincing the top people to still come to Netflix and join versus all the other fancy places they can go?
00:50:49 · Elizabeth Stone
[00:50:49] S1: 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 at 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 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 explicit about the types of people and talent that tend to thrive at Netflix versus 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, between tech and product and entertainment. And how do you make those things come together in a way that's 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 a different... Here's the problem space that I want to work in. But I don't think there's a shortage of people who get really excited about the applications of the technology and see the connection to that, to things that they love and use every day, like Netflix. And so, 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 of it. I think that's inspiring.
00:52:54 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:52:54] S0: I want to touch on a couple things that I've been thinking about in this world of AI that we're approaching. One is junior people. It feels like everyone's just like... 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, just AI makes it so easy to do stuff that people may not be learning how to do anything. Like 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 person?