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. …

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.

To answer this…

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:

• unique technology (personalization, streaming…

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:

1. 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

As companies grow, product strategies evolve. Here’s how Netflix might communicate its product strategy today. The purpose of this mock strategy is to:

1. Demonstrate how product strategy evolves, and
2. Further illustrate the strategy models.

The GLEe Model

Earlier in this product strategy series, I outlined how Netflix hoped to “Get Big,” “Lead,” and…

What I learned about giving high Net Promoter Score online webinars over the last year, with accelerated learning in the last four weeks.

Like many, I have moved very quickly from in-person to online events. The challenge is to create engaging experiences when you can’t see your audience, they are distracted (by email, Twitter, and COVID19), and the online tools are both flaky and hard to use.

Below are my learnings from this…

Three years ago, I gave my first talk at a Greylock Partners event. When I asked the product leaders what they wanted to talk about, one answered, “I just want to know how Netflix made the wicked hard decisions.”

Figuring out how to make tough decisions is a topic that’s…