netflix agile case study

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Netflix Case Study: Synergizing Lean, Six Sigma, and Agile for Success

Achieving operational excellence requires a synergistic approach that combines Lean’s focus on efficiency, Six Sigma’s emphasis on quality, and Agile’s agility in responding to change. This integration empowers organizations to streamline processes, minimize waste, maximize quality, and foster innovation. Join us as we explore how companies harmonize Lean, Six Sigma, and Agile methodologies to achieve transformative results, featuring insights from a compelling real-case scenario.

Harmonizing Methodologies for Operational Excellence

The Synergy of Lean, Six Sigma, and Agile

• Lean : Focuses on eliminating waste and optimizing processes to enhance efficiency and value delivery.
• Six Sigma : Aims to reduce defects and variations in processes through data-driven analysis and continuous improvement.
• Agile : Prioritizes flexibility, iterative development, and customer collaboration to deliver high-quality solutions quickly.

Case Study: Netflix

Netflix provides a compelling example of integrating Lean, Six Sigma, and Agile methodologies to achieve operational excellence in content production and delivery. “By integrating Lean, Six Sigma, and Agile practices, we’ve been able to significantly enhance our operational efficiency and deliver a superior viewing experience to our customers,” said Reed Hastings, Co-CEO of Netflix.

Step-by-Step Integration Approach

• Example : Netflix set a clear objective to reduce the time from content acquisition to streaming availability by 20%.
• Example : By applying Lean principles, Netflix reduced the lead time for content delivery from six months to three months, resulting in faster releases and increased viewer engagement.
• Example : Netflix employed Six Sigma techniques to achieve a 99.9% uptime for their streaming service, significantly reducing downtime and buffering issues for users.
• Example : Through Agile sprints, Netflix was able to roll out a new recommendation algorithm within two weeks, which led to a 15% increase in user retention.
• Example : Netflix’s continuous improvement initiatives resulted in a 10% annual increase in operational efficiency, as measured by reduced costs and increased productivity.

Key Takeaways for Successful Integration

• Leadership Commitment : Top-level support is crucial to drive cultural change and sustain integration efforts across departments.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration : Encourage collaboration between departments and teams to align goals and streamline processes effectively.
• Data-Driven Decision-Making : Utilize data analytics and metrics to identify improvement opportunities and measure success.
• Flexibility and Adaptability : Embrace Agile principles to respond quickly to market changes and customer needs, ensuring relevance and competitive advantage.

Real-World Impact

Netflix’s integration of Lean, Six Sigma, and Agile methodologies has resulted in significant operational efficiencies, enhanced content quality, and improved customer satisfaction. By leveraging the strengths of each methodology, Netflix continues to innovate and lead in the highly competitive streaming industry.

“Integrating Lean, Six Sigma, and Agile methodologies empowers organizations to achieve operational excellence by optimizing processes, enhancing quality, and fostering innovation.” – Anonymous

Recommended practical books and expert speakers

1. mastering efficiency with lean methodology: insights from general electric and jacob stoller.

Recommended Book:

• Why : Provides deep insights into how CEOs and leaders can implement Lean principles effectively.

Expert Speaker or Interviewee:

• Why : Co-author of “The Machine That Changed the World” and a renowned expert on Lean management. He offers valuable perspectives on Lean principles and their application across industries.

2. Achieving Excellence through Six Sigma Methodology: Insights from General Electric and Mikel J. Harry

• Why : Offers a comprehensive overview of Six Sigma methodology, its principles, and successful implementation strategies.
• Why : Co-developer of Six Sigma methodology. His insights are invaluable for understanding the principles and practical applications of Six Sigma in achieving operational excellence.

3. Innovating with Agile Methodology: Insights from Various Sectors

• Why : Provides practical guidance on Agile project management, estimation, and planning, essential for understanding Agile methodology.
• Why : Co-creator of the Scrum framework and a leading expert on Agile. His insights into Agile practices and their application across industries are highly valuable.

4. Integrating Lean, Six Sigma, and Agile: Strategies for Operational Excellence

• Why : Offers a practical toolkit for integrating Lean and Six Sigma methodologies, including tools for process improvement and optimization.
• Why : Author and expert in Lean software development. Her insights into combining Lean and Agile methodologies are crucial for understanding how to achieve operational excellence through integration.

5. Lean Methodology in Marketing and Advertising Agencies

• Why : Explores Lean principles and their application beyond manufacturing, including insights relevant to marketing and advertising agencies.
• Why : Author of “The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses.” His insights on Lean principles in startups and innovation are highly relevant for marketing and advertising agencies.

These recommendations provide a blend of foundational knowledge through books and insights from industry experts who have made significant contributions to their respective fields. They will enrich each article with credible sources and practical insights for readers to learn from and apply in their own contexts.

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How Netflix Became A Master of DevOps? An Exclusive Case Study

Find out how Netflix excelled at DevOps without even thinking about it and became a gold standard in the DevOps world.

Table of Contents

• Netflix's move to the cloud

Netflix’s Chaos Monkey and the Simian Army

Netflix’s container journey, netflix’s “operate what you build” culture, lessons we can learn from netflix’s devops strategy, how simform can help.

Even though Netflix is an entertainment company, it has left many top tech companies behind in terms of tech innovation. With its single video-streaming application, Netflix has significantly influenced the technology world with its world-class engineering efforts, culture, and product development over the years.

One such practice that Netflix is a fantastic example of is DevOps. Their DevOps culture has enabled them to innovate faster, leading to many business benefits. It also helped them achieve near-perfect uptime, push new features faster to the users, and increase their subscribers and streaming hours.

With nearly 214 million subscribers worldwide and streaming in over 190 countries , Netflix is globally the most used streaming service today. And much of this success is owed to its ability to adopt newer technologies and its DevOps culture that allows them to innovate quickly to meet consumer demands and enhance user experiences. But Netflix doesn’t think DevOps.

So how did they become the poster child of DevOps? In this case study, you’ll learn about how Netflix organically developed a DevOps culture with out-of-the-box ideas and how it benefited them.

Simform is a leading DevOps consulting and implementation company , helping businesses build innovative products that meet dynamic user demands efficiently. To grow your business with DevOps, contact us today!

Netflix’s move to the cloud

It all began with the worst outage in Netflix’s history when they faced a major database corruption in 2008 and couldn’t ship DVDs to their members for three days. At the time, Netflix had roughly 8.4 million customers and one-third of them were affected by the outage. It prompted Netflix to move to the cloud and give their infrastructure a complete makeover. Netflix chose AWS as its cloud partner and took nearly seven years to complete its cloud migration.

Netflix didn’t just forklift the systems and dump them into AWS. Instead, it chose to rewrite the entire application in the cloud to become truly cloud-native, which fundamentally changed the way the company operated. In the words of Yury Izrailevsky, Vice President, Cloud and Platform Engineering at Netflix:

“We realized that we had to move away from vertically scaled single points of failure, like relational databases in our datacenter, towards highly reliable, horizontally scalable, distributed systems in the cloud.”

As a significant part of their transformation, Netflix converted its monolithic, data center-based Java application into cloud-based Java microservices architecture. It brought about the following changes:

• Denormalized data model using NoSQL databases
• Enabled teams at Netflix to be loosely coupled
• Allowed teams to build and push changes at the speed that they were comfortable with
• Centralized release coordination
• Multi-week hardware provisioning cycles led to continuous delivery
• Engineering teams made independent decisions using self-service tools

As a result, it helped Netflix accelerate innovation and stumble upon the DevOps culture. Netflix also gained eight times as many subscribers as it had in 2008. And Netflix’s monthly streaming hours also grew a thousand times from Dec 2007 to Dec 2015.

After completing their cloud migration to AWS by 2016, Netflix had:

And it handled all of the above with 0 Network Ops Centers and some 70 operations engineers, who were all software engineers focusing on writing tools that enabled other software developers to focus on things they were good at.

Migrating to the cloud made Netflix resilient to the kind of outages it faced in 2008. But they wanted to be prepared for any unseen errors that could cause them equivalent or worse damage in the future.

Engineers at Netflix perceived that the best way to avoid failure was to fail constantly. And so they set out to make their cloud infrastructure more safe, secure, and available the DevOps way – by automating failure and continuous testing.

Chaos Monkey

Netflix created Chaos Monkey, a tool to constantly test its ability to survive unexpected outages without impacting the consumers. Chaos Monkey is a script that runs continuously in all Netflix environments, randomly killing production instances and services in the architecture. It helped developers:

• Identify weaknesses in the system
• Build automatic recovery mechanisms to deal with the weaknesses
• Test their code in unexpected failure conditions
• Build fault-tolerant systems on day to day basis

The Simian Army

After their success with Chaos Monkey, Netflix engineers wanted to test their resilience to all sorts of inevitable failures, detect abnormal conditions. So, they built the Simian Army , a virtual army of tools discussed below.

• Latency Monkey

It creates false delays in the RESTful client-server communication layers, simulating service degradation and checking if the upstream services respond correctly. Moreover, creating very large delays can simulate an entire service downtime without physically bringing it down and testing the ability to survive. The tool was particularly useful to test new services by simulating the failure of dependencies without affecting the rest of the system.

• Conformity Monkey

It looks for instances that do not adhere to the best practices and shuts them down, giving the service owner a chance to re-launch them properly.

• Doctor Monkey

It detects unhealthy instances by tapping into health checks running on each instance and also monitors other external health signs (such as CPU load). The unhealthy instances are removed from service and terminated after service owners identify the root cause of the problem.

• Janitor Monkey

It ensures the cloud environment runs without clutter and waste. It also searches for unused resources and discards them.

• Security Monkey

An extension of Conformity Monkey, it identifies security violations or vulnerabilities (e.g., improperly configured AWS security groups) and eliminates the offending instances. It also ensures the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and DRM (Digital Rights Management) certificates were valid and not due for renewal.

• 10-18 Monkey

Short for Localization-Internationalization, it identifies configuration and runtime issues in instances serving users in multiple geographic locations with different languages and character sets.

• Chaos Gorilla

Like Chaos Monkey, the Gorilla simulates an outage of a whole Amazon availability zone to verify if the services automatically re-balance to the functional availability zones without manual intervention or any visible impact on users.

Today, Netflix still uses Chaos Engineering and has a dedicated team for chaos experiments called the Resilience Engineering team (earlier called the Chaos team).

In a way, Simian Army incorporated DevOps principles of automation, quality assurance, and business needs prioritization. As a result, it helped Netflix develop the ability to deal with unexpected failures and minimize their impact on users. 

On 21st April 2011 , AWS experienced a large outage in the US East region, but Netflix’s streaming ran without any interruption. And on 24th December 2012 , AWS faced problems in Elastic Load Balancer(ELB) services, but Netflix didn’t experience an immediate blackout. Netflix’s website was up throughout the outage, supporting most of their services and streaming, although with higher latency on some devices.

Netflix had a cloud-native, microservices-driven VM architecture that was amazingly resilient, CI/CD enabled, and elastically scalable. It was more reliable, with no SPoFs (single points of failure) and small manageable software components. So why did they adopt container technology? The major factors that prompted Netflix’s investment in containers are:

• Container images used in local development are very similar to those run in production. This end-to-end packaging allows developers to build and test applications easily in production-like environments, reducing development overhead.
• Container images help build application-specific images easily.
• Containers are lightweight, allowing building and deploying them faster than VM infrastructure.
• Containers only have what a single application needs, are smaller and densely packed, which reduces overall infrastructure cost and footprint.
• Containers improve developer productivity, allowing them to develop, deploy, and innovate faster.

Moreover, Netflix teams had already started using containers and seen tangible benefits. But they faced some challenges such as migrating to containers without refactoring, ensuring seamless connectivity between VMs and containers, and more. As a result, Netflix designed a container management platform called Titus to meet its unique requirements.

Titus provided a scalable and reliable container execution solution to Netflix and seamlessly integrated with AWS. In addition, it enabled easy deployment of containerized batches and service applications.

Titus served as a standard deployment unit and a generic batch job scheduling system. It helped Netflix expand support to growing batch use cases. 

• Batch users could also put together sophisticated infrastructure quickly and pack larger instances across many workloads efficiently. Batch users could immediately schedule locally developed code for scaled execution on Titus.
• Beyond batch, service users benefited from Titus with simpler resource management and local test environments consistent with production deployment.
• Developers could also push new versions of applications faster than before.

Overall, Titus deployments were done in one or two minutes which took tens of minutes earlier. As a result, both batch and service users could experiment locally, test quickly and deploy with greater confidence than before.

“The theme that underlies all these improvements is developer innovation velocity.” 

-Netflix tech blog

This velocity enabled Netflix to deliver fast features to the customers, making containers extremely important for their business.

Netflix invests and experiments significantly in improving development and operations for the engineering teams. But before Netflix adopted the “Operate what you build” model, it had siloed teams. The Ops teams focused on deploy, operate and support parts of the software life cycle. And Developers handed off the code to the ops team for deployment and operation. So each stage in the SDLC was owned by a different person and looked like this:

The specialized roles created efficiencies within each segment but created inefficiencies across the entire SDLC. The issues that they faced were:

• Individual silos that slowed down end-to-end progress
• Added communication overhead, bottlenecks and hampered effectiveness of feedback loops
• Knowledge transfers between developers and ops/SREs were lossy
• Higher time-to-detect and time-to-resolve for deployment problems
• Longer gaps between code complete and deployment, with releases taking weeks

Operate what you build

To deal with the above challenges and drawing inspiration from DevOps principles, Netflix encouraged shared ownership of the full SDLC and broke down silos. The teams developing a system were responsible for operating and supporting it. Each team owned its own deployment issues, performance bugs, alerting gaps, capacity planning, partner support, and so on.

Moreover, they also introduced centralized tooling to simplify and automate dealing with common development problems of the teams. When additional tooling needs arise, the central team assesses if the needs are common across multiple development teams and built tools. In case of too team-specific problems, the development team decides if their need is important enough to solve on their own.

Full Cycle Developers

Combining the above ideas, Netflix built an even better model where dev teams are equipped with amazing productivity tools and are responsible for the entire SDLC, as shown below.

Netflix provided ongoing training and support in different forms (e.g., dev boot camps) to help new developers build up these skills. Easy-to-use tools for deployment pipelines also helped the developers, e.g., Spinnaker. It is a Continuous Delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence.

However, such models require a significant shift in the mindsets of teams/developers. To apply this model outside Netflix, you can start with evaluating what you need, count costs, and be mindful of bringing in the least amount of complexities necessary. And then attempt a mindset shift.

Netflix practices are unique to their work environment and needs and might not suit all organizations. But here are a few lessons to learn from their DevOps strategy and apply:

• Don’t build systems that say no to your developers

Netflix has no push schedules, push windows, or crucibles that developers must go through to push their code into production. Instead, every engineer at Netflix has full access to the production environment. And there are neither strict policies nor procedures that prevent them from accessing the production environment.

• Focus on giving freedom and responsibility to the engineers

Netflix aims to hire intelligent people and provide them with the freedom to solve problems in their own way that they see as best. So it doesn’t have to create artificial constraints and guardrails to predict what their developers need to do. But instead, hire people who can develop a balance of freedom and responsibility.

• Don’t think about uptime at all costs

Netflix servers their millions of users with a near-perfect uptime. But it didn’t think about uptime when they started chaos testing their environment to deal with unexpected failure.

• Prize the velocity of innovation

Netflix wants its engineers to do fun, exciting things and develop new features to delight its customers with reduced time-to-market.

• Eliminate a lot of processes and procedures

They limit an organization from moving fast. So instead, Netflix focuses on hiring people they can trust and have independent decision-making capabilities.

• Practice context over control

Netflix doesn’t control and contain too much. What they do focus on is context. Managers at Netflix ensure that their teams have a quality and constant flow of context of the business, rather than controlling them.

• Don’t do a lot of required standards, but focus on enablement

Teams at Netflix can work with their choice of programming languages, libraries, frameworks, or IDEs as they see best. In addition, they don’t have to go through any research or approval processes to rewrite a portion of the system.

• Don’t do silos, walls, and fences

Netflix teams know where they fit in the ecosystem, their workings with other teams, dependents, and dependencies. There are no operational fences over which developers can throw the code for production.

• Adopt “you build it, you run it” culture

Netflix focuses on making ownership easy. So it has the “operate what you build” culture but with the enablement idea that we learned about earlier.

• Focus on data

Netflix is a data-driven, decision-driven company. It doesn’t do guesses or fall victim to gut instincts and traditional thinking. It invests in algorithms and systems that combs enormous amounts of data quickly and notify when there’s an issue.

• Always put customer satisfaction first

The end goal of DevOps is to make customer-driven and focus on enhancing the user experience with every release.

• Don’t do DevOps, but focus on the culture

At Netflix, DevOps emerged as the wonderful result of their healthy culture, thinking and practices.

Get in Touch

Netflix has been a gold standard in the DevOps world for years, but copy-pasting their culture might not work for every organization. DevOps is a mindset that requires molding your processes and organizational structure to continuously improve the software quality and increase your business value. DevOps can be approached through many practices such as automation, continuous integration, delivery, deployment, continuous testing, monitoring, and more.

At Simform, our engineering teams will help you streamline the delivery and deployment pipelines with the right DevOps toolchain and skills. Our DevOps managed services will help accelerate the product life cycle, innovate faster and achieve maximum business efficiency by delivering high-quality software with reduced time-to-market.

Hiren Dhaduk

Hiren is CTO at Simform with an extensive experience in helping enterprises and startups streamline their business performance through data-driven innovation.

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A Case Study Of Dev Ops At Netflix

DevOps and its advantages

‍ DevOps, which bridges development and operations, is designed to increase the frequency and quality of code releases. In an ideal setup, you should have a high level of confidence when you go live with code releases in a frequent and highly-automated manner.

High automation leads to time and cost savings and greater development efficiency. These benefits are likely to be seen more and more as applications and development teams scale. Having confidence in fast and agile code releases is key to fostering an efficient and mobile development team.

In this article: • I will provide a case study of DevOps at  Netflix • I will be looking at the benefits of growing with cloud-based services, containerisation and building for failure • I’ve chosen to look at Netflix because of the scale at which the company operates and because of their strong technical reputation. They were, for example, early adopters of microservices  • I’ll finish with a short summary of the benefits of building a business that understands and takes advantage of a positive DevOps culture

Leveraging existing cloud services

‍ From its roots as a DVD rental business, Netflix introduced its online streaming offering in 2007. Since then, it has grown to a position where in 2015 the service accounted for over  36% of downstream internet traffic in North America  in 2015. Andin 2017 its users streamed a little over a billion hours of content each week. 

To help handle this scale the company started moving to cloud providers in 2008, a process they finished in January 2016.

“ Our journey to the cloud at Netflix began in August of 2008, when we experienced a major database corruption and for three days could not ship DVDs to our members. That is when we realised that we had to move away from vertically-scaled single points of failure, like relational databases in our datacentre, towards highly reliable, horizontally-scalable, distributed systems in the cloud.” –  Yury Izrailevsky, VP, Cloud Computing and Platform Engineering, Netflix.

You can achieve horizontal scaling by adding more machines to your resource pool, as opposed to scaling vertically where you boost the performance of your existing machines. Horizontal scaling can provide more options to scale dynamically and should reduce the risks of downtime.

As a company that has to handle large amounts of traffic, Netflix points to the scalability advantages of the cloud as one of the key drivers for their decision to migrate. You could build all of these features from scratch. But this would move the focus of your company away from its business needs and towards the inevitable technical challenges, it would have to tackle to scale effectively and reliably.

“Letting Amazon focus on datacentre infrastructure allows our engineers to focus on building and improving our business.” John Ciancutti,Co-founder, 60dB .

Netflix also point towards a certain level of uncertainty around predicted  trends in traffic and uptake in new features . Leveraging existing cloud services with growth plans in place takes the guesswork out of scaling. If a company predicts they are going to grow by 50% over the next six months then they will want to be confident their infrastructure can handle this increased traffic. Short peaks in traffic, where traffic goes up for a brief period of time but then returns to its normal rate, should also be handled. With cloud services this is all taken care of, which means that, because you are less concerned with how you will scale, you can focus instead on building a great product.

‍ Building with containers

‍ Containerisation is a method of abstracting away an applications run time environment so you can run it consistently on different platforms. Containerisation with Docker has become increasingly popular in the past few years. Beyond promoting consistency between environments, a key advantage of containerisation is that containers can be destroyed and created very quickly. This helps with scaling, reliability and efficient rollbacks. In April 2017, Netflix surpassed one million containers launched a week. Scaling with cloud services and containerisation often go hand in hand and there are applications such as Kubernetes which help to automate this process. Netflix have developed their own container management tool called Titus.

“ Titus is Netflix’s infrastructural foundation for container-based applications. Titus provides Netflix scale cluster and resource management as well as container execution with deep Amazon EC2 integration and common Netflix infrastructure enablement. ” – Andrew Spyker, Andrew Leung, Tim Bozarth, Netflix Technology Blog.

Titus’ role is to manage containers. Netflix decided to build their own container management software because of their own unique requirements. They also found themselves in a situation where they were migrating existing cloud applications to a containerised environment. Titus allows existing applications to run without modification in a container. It also integrates with AWS, handles  resources sharing and manages capacity . The application thereby reduces the friction and scaling issues that arise when running an application in a containerised environment.

Building for failure

‍ On Christmas Eve 2012 Netflix experienced a partial outage to their service that lasted a number of hours. The cause of this was a fault wit AWS. 10 In 2014 it was estimated that an hour of  downtime would cost Netflix $200,000  .  More recent AWS outages have seen major websites taken offline. However, Netflix’s platform can now cope with these kinds of issues. ‍

To help prepare for these scenarios, Netflix builds for failure. This means accepting that at some point parts of your applications are likely not to work as expected. With this expectation in place, you can prepare, in the best way possible, for these eventualities.

The ‘Netflix Simian Army’ is part of the company’s efforts to build for failure. For example, they have a tool they call ‘Chaos Monkey’ which helps them to test the stability of their production applications.

“ A tool that randomly disables our production instances to make sure we can survive this common type of failure without any customer impact. The name comes from the idea of unleashing a wild monkey with a weapon in your data centre (or cloud region) to randomly shoot down instances and chew through cables — all the while we continue serving our customers without interruption .” – Netflix Technology Blog.

Teams, working to engineer a solution to protect against potential faults, should be all the more motivated to build a good solution if they know that such problems will be simulated in real production environments. Having control over the timing of these simulations allows you to allocate suitable resources. And by actually simulating the failures that Netflix is building for, the company is able to learn from these experiences and better protect itself against unplanned failures of a similar nature.

Creating a DevOps culture

‍ I’ve looked at some of the practices Netflix promote in their DevOps culture, as well as briefly looking at some of the tools they have developed as a result of this. At its core, a positive DevOps culture should promote frequent releases, high automation and software reliability. Furthermore, it’s advisable to share a high-level understanding of some of the motivations and objectives of a great DevOps culture amongst your larger business team. This will promote the stability and upgradability of applications, and help you to align your development and operations environments with the greater goals of your business as you strive for success in the online world.

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5 Lessons Agile Teams Can Learn From Netflix

Emerging from the days of video rentals and cable came a new way to digest as many movies and television shows as we want, when we want — Netflix.

There’s no doubt that the binge-watching business is booming. Netflix enjoys  109.25 million customers  and subscribers consume more than  140 million hours of content  every day, which means it doesn’t look like they’re going the ways of Blockbuster anytime soon.

So why do streaming services experience such high success compared to our previous viewing options? Why do people spend  120 minutes per day on Netflix , but only 30 – 60 minutes per week watching regular television? If you consider that Netflix is operating in an Agile fashion, it makes sense.

That’s not to say that the development team does or does not follow an  Agile methodology , but it has to do more with the way that Netflix releases content. Similar to Agile development, it seems like Netflix also strives to focus on fast feedback, iterative changes, and cross-collaboration.

By taking a closer look at the way the company operates behind the scenes (or should we say, behind the screens), Agile development teams can learn quite a bit from Netflix. If you’re still not convinced, here are a few ways Netflix echoes Agile development and can teach teams to be more successful when building, testing, and delivering software.

• Do Better Than a Pilot Episode  – Have you ever noticed that Netflix doesn’t have pilot episodes? That’s because a pilot episode is essentially a big test to see whether the network and the network’s audiences like the first episode enough to keep watching more. But what happens if they don’t? A lot of time and money wasted. Instead, Netflix pulls the perfect “ balance of intuition and analytics ” during production so that they know shows will be successful.  House of Cards was greenlighted  based on deep data analytics that told Netflix it would be well-received. In fact, Netflix Originals have a 35% higher success rate than new TV shows released on-network. Don’t wait until the end of development to test, and don’t let your users find faults for you. Integrate testing into every step of the software development lifecycle so you can be sure you’re delivering something your customers will love.
• Integrate Feedback  –  As per the manifesto , one of the key components of a successful Agile team is allowing for fast feedback, and just as importantly, implementing it in your next release. You don’t have to tell Netflix twice. Take House of Cards again — amid recent allegations about Kevin Spacey, there was a decision to be made about keeping him on the cast or canceling the show, both of which the company knew would agitate viewers. Instead, they decided to continue production with  Robin Wright as the lead , showing that integrating feedback is a win-win. Whether that feedback is from testers while the application is in production or from customers after the software is delivered, incorporating feedback maintains continuous growth and improvement.
• Be Compatible with Your Customers  – Netflix supports 900 different devices — that’s almost as many as CrossBrowserTesting has in the cloud. Between laptops, smartphones, and tablets, not to mention different browsers, operating systems and screen sizes, consistency is key. Netflix has a huge customer base, which means they probably have a lot of diversified device usage. If they didn’t make the application accessible to each one of those, they simply would not enjoy the amount of success they do today. Cross-browser testing is a no-brainer, so be sure to not to skip it if you really want to release a high-quality application for every user.
• Release Often  – One of the major advantages of Agile is that it allows teams to release software more often instead of having longer release cycles and only delivering every few months or even years. Netflix has found that releasing new movies and shows every on a weekly basis keeps customers excited and intrigued, so they don’t get bored by the same selections over and over. That means once bingers are done with Stranger Things, they still have the next season of Black Mirror to look forward to. It’s no secret that consumer expectations and demands these days are high — they constantly want their hands on the next best thing. But at the end of the day, it’s pretty straightforward. If people want to consume your product, give them the means that allows them to do that as much as they want with  Continuous Integration and Delivery .
• Embrace Detailed User Stories  – A user story describes a software feature as a customer would see it. The goal of Agile is to bring user stories from ideation to deployment, considering who the user is, what they want to accomplish, and how they accomplish it with that feature. Netflix takes this to the next level by understanding every user story with  advanced personalization . In fact,  75% of Netflix views are a result of their recommendation engine . By creating different trailers and artwork for content based on viewers previous movie and show choices, they’re able to more precisely communicate recommendations with people based on their interests and behavior. Take it from Netflix and get familiar with user personas and the customer journeys that take place throughout your application to better plan throughout development.

Whether you  stream shows or surf TV channels , there’s a lot we can learn from the media mogul. As Agile teams embrace speed and quality throughout testing and development, Netflix provides the blueprint for success from production to breakout deployment.

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Agile ways of working at Netflix Learning and Organizational Development

learn about practical examples of Agile HR, to expand your case example library and to be inspired by a company like Netflix sharing their journey!

Netflix is an entertainment company entertaining millions of customers globally by creating great stories from anywhere and offering greater choice and control for people everywhere through their product. We have the absolute delight to invite Juleah Szopo, Director Learning and Organisational Development at Netflix Talent, who is serving the employees and leaders across Netflix globally.

The L&OD team’s mission is to accelerate Netflix’s ability to entertain the world by sparking curiosity and unleashing possibilities. We do this by creating and delivering impactful, engaging, and inclusive learning and org development solutions that inspire the best work of our lives. Our solutions are focused on scaling Netflix culture, strengthen leaders, and enable effective teams and organizations. More recently, we’ve started building key talent management practices that optimize our internal talent through an intentional approach to growing and developing our employees to meet the future needs of our organization.

Juleah is a leading voice in learning engagement and learning culture and is currently a Learning & Organizational Development Leader for Netflix.

Juleah is fascinated by organizational culture and is a true believer in the power of human potential. She is a builder at heart, with a natural ability to to turn ideas into reality. As a visionary thinker who is inspired by the future and what could be, she constantly strives to create alternative ways to solve challenges.

Hard problems excite her, especially challenges related to scaling and evolving company culture, developing key talent populations, and inclusion, diversity and equity work. Knowing how to connect the dots, understand others’ needs and motivations, and never re-inventing the wheel, has allowed her to move across different HR disciplines over her career. Juleah’s career spans global industry experience in: High Tech, Entertainment, Financial, and the Energy sector.

Outside of her love for what she does professionally, she’s an avid reader who constantly convinces friends, and friends of friends, to join book clubs. Traveling across the world with her husband is a privilege she is forever grateful for, where their intense interest in food and wine drives their travel agendas.

In a conversational meetup Juleah will be joining our founder, Riina Hellström, to share her team’s journey to adopt a fully Agile development model. The team members are professionally trained Agile HR Certified Practitioners and have been practicing Agility for a year, modifying a valuable and suitable Agile approach to designing and developing their learning, talent management and employee experience solutions.

Themes we will be discussing:

• The story of the L&OD team – successes, learnings and insights from a one-year agile journey
• How Agility brings value to global learning and employee engagement solutions.
• Sharing reflections on how Juleah’s team works with Agile organizational development with a global, diverse and fast-based employee population.
• Netflix L&OD’s agile model – how did the team tweak Agility to fit the purpose?
• Practical tips and recommendations, warnings and fails.

Agile HR Community organises Agile HR case study meetups for peer learning purposes.

You are warmly welcome to join us to learn about practical examples of Agile HR, to expand your case example library and to be inspired by a company like Netflix sharing their journey!

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