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debate that idea in public, which is a really great way to learn and get more and
more ideas flowing. So that piece of it is just really energizing.
Gutierrez:
Who drives the data culture and was it present when you joined?
Smallwood:
The data culture was present when I came in and it continues
to get stronger. Regarding who drives it, I would say there's no one person
or organization. It's really a collective effort. You see how much it energizes
everyone to participate in that, so it just feeds off of itself. That said, our CEO,
Reed Hastings, is a big reason we have such a strong data culture. He believes
in causality over correlation and is really strong on making decisions with as
much data as possible rather than just judgment. Good judgment is important,
of course, but trying to back things up with data and analytics has always been
a belief of his, and it's just spread from there.
Gutierrez:
How open is the company internally with its own data?
Smallwood:
Internally, we're very open. In fact, people will be publicly called
out if they are not being open with their data, as it's not seen as a good thing
to hide information that you know. It's encouraged that you think about the
company strategies in different areas of the business, and if you know some-
thing, or if you have an insight or a piece of data that would help some other
organization, you're expected to share that in a way that is useful to the
company. Of course, you also want to do it without drowning people in too
much information, right? There's judgment there, as well as around how much
to share.
Gutierrez:
What have you been working on this year?
Smallwood:
My first thought is that a Netflix year is like a dog year. It's such
a productive company because of the low level of process. This means that we
get a tremendous amount done in a year, so I'll just rattle off a list of some of
the things that we've been working on in the last year. We do a lot of work on
the personalization algorithms and recommender systems and algorithms that
contribute to that space, so this is an area of ongoing continuous optimization.
That's always a big investment, as we're always trying to improve that.
We've also been working on search, as it's a really interesting area within
the Netflix product. We've been trying to make the search experience
really nimble for people. For example, with the search autocomplete—when
you type the letter A, we'd like to instantly know what movie or TV show
you're searching for, based on your history and based on the population
usage of Netflix.
We've developed a big culture of experimentation on the product side, and
now we're trying to bring that same level of rigor to other parts of the busi-
