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by rfairfax 5365 days ago
What's going on at Netflix? If you ask employees, they'll tell you that the culture - often praised for its high performance standards - is a culture of fear. It's a product management-driven organization where PMs aren't afraid to use the poor performance card to remove subordinates who don't go along with their ideas. The emperor has no clothes. In Netflix's case, the emperor is any product manager. It's no wonder there was little pushback internally on Qwikster - the name or the concept. Who has the guts to say no?

A company with a culture of fear is a company that is on a death spiral. Hopefully Mr. Hastings has the self-awareness to recognize this problem and the gumption to act on it.
2 comments
dmuino 5364 days ago
I'm a Netflix employee. If you ask me I'll tell you in no uncertain terms that it's not a culture of fear. I've been here for one year and have only seen one person removed for performance reasons. Fear is never a driving factor in any of my decisions.

Employees ask tough questions during company meetings and our executives are incredibly open. I guess we've become complacent because their decisions had been bold and right before these past couple of months. I believe this is why there was not a stronger push back internally.

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SoftwareMaven 5364 days ago
I would hope Netflix would be a product management driven company. Companies that aren't make far more stupid decisions than companies that are. I'm not sure what that has to do with the rest of your post.

The culture of fear, OTOH, is problematic in the extreme. It doesn't matter what the organization looks like if people are afraid to do and/or show their research for fear of pissing off the powers that be.

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rfairfax 5364 days ago
My point on the company being PM-driven was not that PM-driven on its own is necessarily bad. The point was that the organization responsible for ideas and their execution (in Netflix's case, product management) combined with a culture of fear is a bad thing. It means that ideas are not challenged or questioned to the extent that they should. Apologies for not making that clear ... and no offense to product management as a discipline or career choice.
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