Netflix's Blueprint for Building Inspired Engineering Teams | Carol Barrett

**Carol Barrett** (0:00)
Nobody will prioritize it for you. So we try to advocate good judgment from the ground up, from the most initial ways in which you do it. How do you apply good judgment? You can ask for context among the various projects and then you can decide where it makes sense for you.
That said, you're not doing it in vacuum because you do have the list of what is important for the business and where do I want to invest my time. So under a wide construct, you can ask for that context to help improve your judgment and how you prioritize your work. And I think that has been the singular, I would say, very powerful way in which engineers feel empowered to how they spend their time, how they spend their day, and eventually how they spend their quarter.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:40)
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**Carol Barrett** (1:42)
Thank you, Conor. I'm happy to be here.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:44)
And I should clarify, not the actual CIA, actually Netflix, but it's a fun acronym, and I'd love to dig into this a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your team and what it covers, and then we can dive into the topics?

**Carol Barrett** (1:54)
Yeah, absolutely. And I have to say, you know, it's when I was introducing the organization, the CIA, we would just laugh because consumer identity and access, it's meant to be that we keep your secrets.
We know your identity, we keep your secrets. And as the name states, we basically look after all of the concerns of our identities, the consumers that use our services, in terms of their identity, their email and credentials, as well as authentication concerns and authorization concerns. So they have the ability to access both our product and our content. And we basically deal with all of the systems and technology that handles all of that at Netflix.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:36)
Kind of important. Maybe crucial, one would say. So let's open up with this. It feels like doing more with less is kind of a common trope.
But is it actually true? Or do you believe it's an increasing problem or so?

**Carol Barrett** (2:49)
So that's an interesting, it is a common trope, but it's such a misnomer. Because when you say doing more with less, like, what does that mean, right? And so what we're seeing is that we are, because we serve all of Netflix and we serve all of our product priorities, we constantly have, we're constantly in the middle of the action in many ways, like the CIA thrilling action as well.
But it's fun because we get to get involved in all of the various product innovations. And at the same time, we also have to invest in keeping our systems healthy, because our subscriber base relies on us to be able to get access to their content. And so this is constant juggling of prioritization that we normally have to do. And you know, this, the doing more with less, I'm like, you know, you can't, you can't wash your laundry with less detergent that stuff.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:37)
What about AI?

**Carol Barrett** (3:39)
And is AI going to automate everything, maybe eventually, but it's, you know, it's not, I don't believe it's quite there yet for the kind of use cases that we would need. So yeah, so it's, it's, it is something that we constantly consider.
One of the ways in which we have, we're trying to attempt, I would say, to solve it is through this concept of annual planning. So at Netflix, we only used to do quarterly planning. We just sort of paid attention to what we were doing in the next quarter at most the next couple of quarters.