Monday, February 02, 2015

Dianne Marsh at Netflix

I liked this extract from her interview (11 minutes):

"Charles full question: Something I know from listening to you present, and also talking to Adrian Cockroft and people like that, is basically Netflix was designed for speed of execution essentially; to get things done really quickly. So from a kind of people point of view, what are some of the things that slow people down and what do you look for and try and take out of the process?
Yes, you are right. What we want to be able to do at Netflix is push things out really quickly: keep people moving. A manager’s role at Netflix is really just to get out of the way, you know hire really great people and get out of the way. I think what a lot of companies make the mistake of doing is hiring really great people and then putting a lot of processes in their way and a lot of gates that actually slow them down, or question the direction that those people want to take; and instead we really want those people to do what we hired them for, and frankly what we pay them for, which is just to build great software; and so a manager’s job at Netflix, my job at Netflix, is to make sure that I give my team context about what the rest of the company is doing, and give context about what my team is doing to the rest of the company, so that we can all make great decisions together about what to do. I get out of the way of the decisions that my team make, so that they can independently come up with great ideas, and I don’t have to stand in the way and decide which things have legs and which things don’t. Instead I just depend on the wisdom of the people that we hire to be able to make those decisions."

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