Two Audiences, One Team
The Talent team at Netflix strives to proactively understand every market they can influence by navigating the innumerable nuances between different consumers, countries, and original content.
Exploring this new terrain has led to a mass of insightful machine learning research to share. Netflix needed a home for this growing pool of information that would make it more visible, digestible, and actionable.
Needing to find solutions to house research on two different sites—internally and externally—we knew the best way to start this project was to run an in-person design sprint for each. I flew out with a project manager and a developer so we could spend time with several stakeholders across multiples teams, gathering context, better understanding the needs of all users, and creating alignment.
These sprints helped us find ways to organize the vast collection of research and give Netflix’s Talent and Market Intelligence teams the flexibility to own their own content. This helped us create a clear information architecture to ensure all content was easy to navigate and consume, and quickly begin exploring solutions.
For Internal Eyes Only
The first project we kicked off was the internal research resource. The Market Intelligence team strives to proactively understand business and market trends around the world and communicate their findings to their internal teams.
As the gatekeepers of this valuable insight, most of their time ends up being consumed by requests from recruiters and hiring managers needing to find talent or understand new regions. To give some valuable time back to the Market Intelligence team, we empowered the recruiters and hiring managers by equipping them with a dedicated website that acted as a central location for all their research needs.
The challenge for us was to create a consistent structure that any department could easily navigate and update. We had Market Intelligence Analysts (MIA) focusing on areas like machine learning, as well as others focusing on film and production. With such a breadth and depth of research, we knew we needed a solution that was flexible, scalable, and most importantly, searchable.
To accommodate for this, we built a straightforward wiki-like website that allowed each department to add the most relevant research. It included a dynamic navigation system and a keyword search, allowing people to quickly funnel themselves to the correct section.
All the Cool Kids Are Doing Research
After finding solutions for Netflix’s internal needs, we switched our focus to the other side of the equation. Netflix didn’t have an organized system in place to consistently share their research or make it easy to find. With their competitors regularly sharing research to the public, this limited visibility put Netflix at a disadvantage when it came to attracting new talent.
We decided to go above the standard blog approach and build a centralized website that showcases recent and relevant research in a more engaging way while matching their brand. This website provides recruiters a resource to share with potential hires and talented scientists and engineers.
I was able to collaborate with the in house development team at Underbelly to bring both of these projects to life. Working together, we were able to better understand our client's needs while delivering tools that increase their day-to-day efficiency and engagement.