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[Francisco Raya]

So, make sure your product and content teams spend lots of time upfront outlining their high-level strategies and proxy metrics so, together, they can build both customer and shareholder value without slowing decision-making through meddlesome coupling.

Collaboration requires that team members understand each others\u2019 roles, strategies, and metrics. In this case, the product team\u2019s job is to design and build the homepage while the content team acquires the content. Both teams align by understanding each others\u2019 high-level strategies and metrics but rarely meddle in other function\u2019s decisions.

I started at Netflix in 2005. In my first week, the head of content pulled me aside to show me his Netflix homepage. He asked, \u201CWhy is Sideways on my homepage? It\u2019s an expensive new release.\u201D

I asked him, \u201CDo you think you\u2019ll like it?\u201D He answered, \u201CYes!\u201D I reminded him that my job was to balance customer delight against the cost of delivering that delight, and for him, we thought the cost of Sideways was worth it. I also reminded him that the site was highly personalized, so not everyone had the film on their homepage-- we merchandised it for him because we understood his unique movie tastes.

At Netflix, I ran a quarterly product strategy meeting that included the CEO and twenty design, tech, data science, and product leaders. The content team wanted to attend the meeting but Reed Hastings, the CEO, was against it. \u201CThe goal is tight alignment and loose coupling. If the content team engages in product decisions, it will slow decision-making. Likewise, we don\u2019t want the product team to weigh in on content investment.\u201D The product meetings continued without the content team.

The concept of tightly aligned and loosely coupled means that each function (finance, marketing, product, content) is aligned via broadly communicated strategies and metrics, plus a clear definition of each function\u2019s role. At Netflix, we achieved this alignment through company quarterly business reviews, where each team broadly communicated its high-level strategies and metrics across the entire organization.

I left many years ago, but my guess is the product team owns the homepage design, while the content team focuses on content acquisition. Both teams focus on retention but have very different proxy metrics. Below, I make guesses about each function\u2019s proxy metrics:

The product team\u2019s proxy metric is the percentage of Netflix members who watch at least 40 hours/month. (My guess: 60%.) The more hours members watch, the longer they stay with the service, which increases lifetime value.

The key to content and product collaboration? Each team\u2019s role is clear. And the two organizations ensure tight alignment by sharing their high-level strategy and metrics. Both organizations work hard to create both member and shareholder value but focus on different proxy metrics to achieve this. From time to time, they check in to communicate key changes in their strategies or decisions that might have a broad impact across the organization\u2014 that\u2019s the loose coupling.

Complexity is unavoidable. But consumers and providers alike can find ways to limit their exposure to it and reduce or remove it from their systems over time. Finding ways to reduce the surface area of coupling is a good place for both groups to start.

I want to show a graphic bar about my sales but I have two microservices, the first one is the sales-service and the another one product-service. In this case I have to select the period I want to filter and then select the sales and after select the products from these sales, but I'm calling the product-service directly with REST and if my product-service going down fails every thing. What is the correct way to work in this scenario?

I really mean that. You should design your services in a way that does not require synchronous communication with other services to fulfill a business case. Doing otherwise, as you noted, leads to runtime coupling.

Obviously if you have a "product-service", that already suggests this is something pretty much every other service will need. You baked coupling into the architecture by cutting it up in a specific way.

Specifically in this case: the "sales" service should have all the data for the report, so it does not have to communicate. You might find that this data is actually not needed elsewhere, so there would be no real duplication of data.

Obviously this is not for everything. Most notably Netflix is doing coupling and "synchronous" calls, that's why they have all the cool frameworks for these sorts of things. But they also have a specific use-case, which might not be the same as yours.

Without going into the details of choosing between a monolithic app versus a Microservice architecture, what your diagram is missing a Registration and Discovery service such as Spring Cloud Netflix Eureka or Consul.

With your current architecture diagram ,i can understand that you are making synchronous call to recieve data hence sale service has to wait for data to come from all the service to get the full result hence more delay in the output.

We underestimate how much a mediocre person can bring down performance in a team. Also tolerating mediocre people is a clear sign to everyone that excellence is not valued; this can encourage high performers to leave.

One important distinction that Hastings makes is between operational roles (driver, maintenance man) and creative roles. The best cleaner can at best do 2x (usually not even that) output of the average cleaner, but the best script buyer can generate 10-100x the output (revenue) of the average. Given this, he suggests that you could divvy your team up into operational and creative roles and focusing the top of personal market payment policy on creative workers.

One interesting point that Erin makes is that a lot of the traditional salary-planning frameworks such as raise pools and salary bands are reminiscent of an era in which manufacturing was centre-stage. As we move towards a world where creative thinking rules, and one person can single-handedly make a difference / do the work of 2-5 other people, then we need to rethink these concepts.

Family is not a good metaphor for a high-performing talent dense workforce, says Reed. Instead a better metaphor is a sportsteam. Members of the team have their focus areas, but they also have to work with each other for a common goal. And yes, if you dont perform, then you can be removed.

One interesting point. Reed says you have to remove any shame for anyone let of from Netflix. It is like being let go from a top sports team. You have to be awesome to make the team in the first place, he says. In this regard, he mentions Patty McCord, the long time Head of HR and Leslie Kilgore, the long time Head of Marketing as examples of old timers who grew out of the role.

Netflix is huge on transparency internally. Everyone knows confidential financial data and there is no hiding of internal metrics that in many other peer companies is kept secret. That said the penalties for any transgression is very high.

One interesting point that emerged is the tendency to overshare even when it can cause undue stress to an employee like telling a colleague in advance if her division might be yanked, even if the chances are only 25% etc. While publicly talking about a learning incident, like a sacking or harassment, then Netflix encourages open conversation. But if the incident is a personal one (like a alcoholism issue), then Netflix encourages people not to talk publicly and to speak to the concerned person directly.

Reed says some expense will increase with freedom. But the costs from overspending are outweighed by both the gains that freedom provides as well as the savings of finance and procurement teams put in place to oversee the controls.

At Netflix, decision-making and especially decisions on new, big ideas are delegated to the person driving the initiative. After all you paid top of personal market to get this person. So ensure that you give her the complete context, and then leave her to make the judgement. Then, trust her judgement and move ahead. The more the boss moves out of the decision approver role, the entire business speeds up and innovation increases.

Highly aligned, loosely coupled is a mantra at Netflix. Loose coupling refers to decentralized decision-making. High alignment refers to the clear, shared context between the leadership and the team.

Reed says: when one of your team members does something dumb, dont blame them. Instead ask yourself what context you failed to set. Did you share the common goals and strategies, the assumptions and the risks, that will help them make good decisions? are you and your employees highly aligned on vision and objectives?

Erin introduces the metaphor of pyramid vs a tree to contrast centralized decision-making at companies such as Disney with the decentralized approach at Netflix. Reed at the roots, holding up Sarandos on the trunk which supports the outer branches where local executives take decisions.

To wrap this section, the Netflix OS eschews traditional policies and controls such as vacation policies, reimbursement policies, KPIs, bonuses, conract signoffs by senior people, salary bands etc. Some are schewed because they slow decision making or reduce speed of movement, some because they introduce rules and controls that hinder innovation and initiative. If you want to build an agile, innovative org, and develop a culture of freedom & responsibility (as they term the Netfilx culture OS), then you can remove these rules and processes as Netflix has done.

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