My first year as VP Product at Netflix

**Gibson Biddle** (0:01)
Hello, everyone. My name is Gibson Biddle, and I would like to talk about my first year at Netflix. First, I'd like to welcome the 2,300 subscribers in our first two months to this Ask Gib PM newsletter. Thanks a ton for being part of the journey. This is an exclusive podcast for subscribers of the Ask Gib PM newsletter, and I hope you enjoy it. So, I've been doing quite a bit of writing in the last couple of months, and I've been reflecting on a few questions that I've already answered. First was an essay about who you learn from. Another one was how to handle CEO pet projects. And then a third question that I haven't answered is, hey, can you talk about the first 90 days in your job? And in this case, I'm going to talk about the first year on the job. And I'm hoping for this podcast, you'll reflect on the focus of your job, whether it's the first three months, the first year, or your first three years. And there's three key themes that I want to talk about. The first is the importance of figuring out what the job is, what it really is, defining the three to four things you're going to do in that year and then execute against those ideas. And then the third is simply to endure and learn from your many mistakes. I will share with you some of my favorite mistakes from my first year working at Netflix. So first, I want to set the stage and give you a sense of what led me to interviewing with Netflix in 2005 I had had success with a kid's software startup called Creative Wonders. We had sold that company to the learning company. We sold that company to Mattel. And then I went dropped into the.com era at familywonder.com. We sold that company to Sega Japan. At which point I decided I was going to take a year off. I wasn't going to answer any phones. And that was a great year. I went to my kid's school. I was like a math tutor in elementary school for both of my daughters and their classes. I got way into triathlete lawns. I got fit. And I liked it so much that I didn't work the second year either. And then I started my job search. I've written about that, how to find a great job on Medium. It's worth reading.
But I had connected with Gracia Huntington, the recruiter at Netflix, really the day that they decided they were going to hire a VP of product.
And my thing is, I look for startups with a proof of concept that are ready to scale. And Netflix looked like that. It was about a million members. It was a DVD by mail Business.
And I love that transition. There's this transition from starters, the people who start the company, to builders. From going off a gut intuition to this notion of consumer science, better living through data and math. From sort of a Wild West environment to a more disciplined environment as you grow. So Netflix looked great to me. I loved it as a service. I was in the San Francisco Bay area where we're just showed up the next day. It was still a startup in an elementary school building in Los Gatos, about an hour south of San Francisco. And the culture was not yet fully articulated. We didn't publish the culture deck until like 2009
But there I was. And I was interviewing with them. And this is when I began the process of trying to figure out what the job really was. So a little bit of context. The last person who was the VP of product had been there for nine months. And that seemed to be sort of the average tenure. There was a long line of dead bodies in the role. And because of that, I really evaluated carefully to try to figure out what the job really was and whether I had the skills to be successful at it. And then in the interview process, the questions were pretty indicative of what was going on. One of the first questions was, have you ever let someone go? And of course, I had graduated beyond that stage where you procrastinate. I had actually let 100 people go one day at a development group in Minneapolis in a past job.
But I knew it was likely they didn't believe that they had the right people in the role. The second question was, have you ever let, how should marketing and product work together? And that was a clear sign to me that those two organizations weren't working effectively. The next was, are you comfortable with debate and disagreement? And I was beginning to sense that that was where there was a misfit between the last person. And I was talking to very candid people in these interviews. The next was, can you do consumer science? And Reed Hastings asked that of me. I was used to four sources of data, basically qualitative focus groups and usability, surveys, existing data. And I knew the fourth was basically A-B testing. But truthfully, I had very little experience. Most people in 2005 didn't optimize. Leslie, for instance, wasn't born till 2010 But Netflix had a homegrown A-B test system. But one of the things I was picking up was the starters really weren't into it. They just saw the extra work. And I began to understand this is going to be a big part of my job. And then another question was, how do you get everyone moving in the right direction? And this question didn't shock me, because as companies get bigger, you have lots of questions about how everything fits together, what's important, what's not. How do we make decisions, all those things.