Ask Gib: “What specifics in a daily routine separate a good Product Manager from a great Product Manager?” Short answer: Begin your day with intent, minimize meetings, spend time with customers, manage your own career, balance time between doing/thinking, plus some other good habits (don’t watch TV!). Most product leaders spend their time doing the necessary evils of their job and get sucked into too many meetings. …

Short answer: Both require you articulate product strategies (problems to be solved), metrics (lead indicators), then guess which projects will move your metrics, over time. Choose what works for you. (Gib’s note: You can now subscribe to my essays on Medium and I noticed I now have hundreds of subscribers…

From its startup in 1998 to today, a detailed history of the strategy, metrics, and experiments Netflix executes to develop a personalized experience focused on delivering its members movies they love — Introduction This essay details Netflix’s progress from its launch in 1998 to the recent launch of its “I feel lucky” button — a merchandising tactic where Netflix members rely totally on Netflix’s personalization algorithms. It’s a messy journey, with an evolving personalization strategy propelled by Netflix’s ability…

Short answer: I learned from bosses & peers, including famous peeps like Reed Hastings, Patty McCord, and Dan Rosensweig. But mainly, I learned by doing, supercharged by feedback from many “Friends of Gib.” (Note: This essay is from my free “Ask Gib” newsletter on Substack, where I answer a few product and leadership questions each week. You can sign up here.) Given rapid changes in product management roles and technologies, most of my learning has come from bosses and peers.

Two Netflix cases illustrate how the DHM strategy model helps product leaders balance delight and margin. Over two decades, Netflix improved its subscribers’ monthly cancel rate from 10% to 2%. They did this by balancing delight against margin (profit) while building a durable, hard-to-copy advantage. I call it the DHM model: Delight customers in Hard-to-copy, Margin-enhancing ways. Today, Netflix’s hard-to-copy attributes are:

Disney+ has a shared viewing mode. So do Amazon Prime Video and Hulu. There’s even a “Netflix Party” Chrome extension available in the Google Play store. So, why won’t Netflix launch the feature? As a product leader, your job is to delight customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways. On the face of it, a Netflix Party feature seems to combine all three elements: Delight. During COVID19, when we all crave connection, enabling members to watch the same TV show or movie simultaneously makes sense…

(I’m not convinced that all Medium readers know this.) I look through my data, and there are so many single claps. I recognize that the clap on Medium borrows from real-life behavior — you clap more for something you love. But online, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter perpetuate a one-clap system. So it’s strange to clap more than once on Medium. Go crazy, clap all you want! Gib

Applying my strategy frameworks to Netflix today. — As companies grow, product strategies evolve. Here’s how Netflix might communicate its product strategy today. The purpose of this mock strategy is to: Demonstrate how product strategy evolves, and Illustrate the strategy models. The GLEe Model Earlier in this product strategy series, I outlined how Netflix hoped to “Get Big,” “Lead,” and “Expand”…