The Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting

Gibson: An essential part of the Netflix culture is to enable teams to become highly aligned and loosely coupled. Highly aligned means each group understands the overall product strategy and how they contribute to the company's success. Loosely coupled means teams occasionally check in with each but avoid the trap of tight coupling, consulting multiple teams for every decision they make.

Another Netflix principle is context, not control. The intent is to provide context through strategy so that focused teams make decisions without consulting anyone. To provide both context and high-level alignment, I brought the leaders of each swim lane together for quarterly product strategy meetings. The goals of this meeting were to provide context through product strategy, metrics, and tactics, ensure alignment across the entire product organization, share results and learnings, to articulate theories and hypotheses for the future, and to determine the level of investment in each swim lane.

There was also a set of guiding principles for this meeting, consistent with the Netflix culture. The coaching was to use CEO level communication. Don't dumb it down for newbies. Engage in lively debate. Use slides, but don't polish them. Slides are a good conversation starter, but you don't want death by PowerPoint. The goal is to deliver crisp articulation of strategy, hypotheses, and results to inspire discussion and debate.

Limit attendance. Once you have more than 15 people in the room, the meeting becomes less effective. The session can include a few key C and VP level leaders, product managers, plus critical consumer insight, data, design, and technology partners. To discourage tight coupling, minimize the number of participants outside the product and tech organization.

Another tip, and this is confusing. The meeting is not a decision-making meeting. If product leaders have successful A/B test results, encourage them to launch the new experience before the meeting. The goal of this meeting is to enable fast paced decision-making, not slow it down.

At Netflix, there were three indirect results of the quarterly product strategy meeting. First, the meeting became a mechanism for the company's culture. By participating in the meeting, leaders learned the skills, behaviors, and values that embodied Netflix's culture. The meeting created a results-focused organization. If your product area moved its proxy metrics, it got more resources. The opposite was true also. You began to learn which product leaders were effective, and over time which leaders' skills were not scaling as the company grew. All three of these outcomes meant the quarterly meetings had a direct effect on the overall culture of the company.

How quarterly product strategy meetings work today. From time to time, I help companies prepare and execute quarterly product strategy meetings. The head of product owns the meeting, determines its attendees, and manages the schedule.

The day before the meeting, the head of product shares the following materials, using Google Slides or Docs. First, a re-articulation of the overall product strategy, including the product vision, the GLEe model; product strategy lockup, the strategy/metrics/tactics lockup; high-level priorities, how you prioritize growth, engagement, and monetization; as well as the rolling four quarter roadmap.

We'll also share the key projects for the upcoming quarter within these Google Slides or Docs, those projects that require cross-functional coordination. Then third, we'll share any insights relevant to the entire product team, usually shared by the leader of the customer insights, design, or data teams.

In turn, the product leaders for each swim lane share these materials in advance. The product strategy for their swim lane, including their strategy lockup and rolling four quarter roadmap. Results and learning from the past quarter. These materials are both design and data rich. For instance, you can see A/B test designs through the eyes of customers, along with detailed data to describe results. The third thing that I require of a product leader for each swim lane, their key hypotheses for the next quarter and how the product leader will evaluate success or failure, often through a progression from existing data to qualitative and A/B test results. As before, the work is both design and data rich.

What that means is you can see the data, the existing data in an area. You can see the data for the A/B test results. Design rich is you can look at it from a customer's point of view, how they see it.

Crafting the agenda. Here is a rough outline for your first quarterly product strategy meeting. An articulation of the high-level strategy by the head of the product team. Key team members can also share insights relevant to everyone in the room. This typically takes 30 to 60 minutes.

The strategy for each swim lane presented by each product leader. Rather than share all materials from the day before, each leader presents a subset of materials. What each product leader discusses is informed by the questions and comments from the shared docs. The goal is a 50/50 balance of presentation and discussion. I allocate 30 to 60 minutes per swim lane, depending on the number of lanes.

The next thing I look for is a wrap-up at the end of the session. This time provides an opportunity for general discussion, to debate unresolved issues, and to frame which information should be shared broadly outside the room. This is typically a 60 minute wrap-up.

Beyond the content, I include meaningful breaks throughout the day. Occasionally we skip these breaks if the teams get behind schedule. I typically include four 15 minute breaks, plus a 30 to 60 minute lunch break, depending on the schedule.

Post-meeting. After the meeting, these are the activities I encourage. I have participants complete a net promoter score survey to understand what went well and what could be better. The intent is to make each meeting better than the one before. It's also good to have all the participants share a meal afterward. You need time to rebuild relationships after heated debate.

Sometimes it's hard to sort out all the issues in real-time. There's often a short-list of topics that require discussion with a smaller team. It's also an excellent habit to summarize the events of the day, especially results and learning, changes in direction, or other decisions that will impact the rest of the company.You can share this list at an upcoming company, board, or executive meeting. It's also good to reference this list at the next quarterly product strategy meeting to reinforce progress.

Here are a few minor details. I find it helpful to meet offsite to minimize distraction. It's also okay for a product leader of one swim lane not to present if there aren't meaningful results or topics in his or her area. Generally, I schedule these swim lanes towards the end of the day in case an earlier team runs over its allotted time. Putting these product leaders at the tail end of the schedule is called red-shirting, a nod to the Star Trek officers who wear red shirts and are routinely killed.

Conclusions. For me, a good meeting is like a movie. There's a script, good and bad surprises, drama, and a denouement, that old-fashioned movie moment when a couple smokes a cigarette in bed, much like dinner and beers after the meeting.

At Netflix, the quarterly product strategy meeting became a cultural mechanism. It reinforced the company's values of intellectual curiosity, courage, and candor. It provided a means to enhance context through strategy, and it enabled fast paced decision-making by individuals expert in their areas. But please don't cut and paste the Netflix culture and its mechanisms into your company. You'll need to experiment to discover what works best for you.

In the next essay, I'll share how I applied the product strategy tools and frameworks at my next startup, Chegg, the textbook rental company. What's next? Essay number 11: A Case Study: Chegg.

Suzanne: This is kind of a reprise of an essay that you had released earlier on the quarterly product strategy meeting. I'm giving you a really soft, "It depends," type of question to answer which is, what is the desired meeting cadence? Again I think so much of the context is you were writing a lot about being at Netflix at a time, and it was of a certain scale. I imagine you, you know the kingpin of products sitting on your throne. Are your product leaders then only coming in at the quarter and then they're empowered all of the time in between? How often are they then meeting with their teams? How does this flow for somebody who has aspirations to be the VP of product of a large scale organization and really needs to understand how to structure regular meetings kind of from the ground up?

Gibson: The reality was each of the product leaders for each swim lane had something that kind of looked like a monthly strategy meeting. They had their own cadence. They would also have executional meetings. I would be invited in for the monthly strat but it wasn't a broad meeting. What was really happening on a quarterly basis was getting alignment across the organization and then enabling the sharing of results and learnings with multiple teams, and developing almost a shared language so that you could argue and debate about things in intelligent ways. The trickiest part about that format is it would be explicit that it's not a decision making meeting.

The way I say that is if a product manager had results in advance, A/B tests, confident, just freaking roll it out. Because the meeting didn't want to slow people down. Other things happening after that meeting was sort of reevaluation of are we putting the right amount of resources against different things? Should we double down in personalization? Should we finally stop banging our head against the wall in friends and social? Those were the things that came up after a meeting.

Suzanne: As the VP of product at that time, at that scale, it's fair to say that these quarterly me etings kind of became your... That was the mind meld point for you more than any of all of these other kind of sub meetings that were probably like, "If you can make it Gib, but if you're busy... We know you're busy."

Gibson: I think that's fair. Interesting for me was I had done variations on meetings like that in the past. The trickiest part is that Netflix doesn't believe in process. It's people over process. But I still needed something like that. At the end of the day it was effective and it actually became a mechanism of the culture of Netflix. It's how people learned the behaviors, and the things that we valued. That was a really interesting side result.

Then my other test is does it still exist? And it does. Then the next test is how did it change? It actually changed in a vector that I do with other startups as well. It became this jeopardy culture. Todd Yeoman is my pal there. He said, "Jeopardy, it's about pushing the button at the right moment in time." That excludes the voice of people who aren't great at debate, who don't think on their feet.

I had independently tried the same thing that he did significantly. That's all about sharing the docs the night before, letting people read, and comment. You got really interesting perspectives from people that were thoughtful that didn't like playing Jeopardy! Then my joke with Todd is the culture at Netflix, people raise their hands which explicitly... I can remember Reed Hastings saying, "You don't have to raise your hand." It's like, "You don't need permission to go to the bathroom." I just really chuckled. I chuckled that it became a hand raising organization, but it was to get all those diverse voices involved in the conversation which is cool.

Suzanne: You've been listening to musings on essay number 10. Thank you.