[SoftwareMaven]

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.

[rfairfax]

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.