No. If I was the PM responsible for this area, I would not launch a group watch feature.
Netflix is maturing, but there are still many areas of opportunity that the team can address that would enhance the user experience. ‘Watching with Friends’ has come to the forefront of many users minds as the COVID-19 pandemic has evolved, and yet it should not warrant a position on our product roadmap at this time.
At its core, Netflix is on a mission to entertain the world. With more than 17,000 titles globally as of April 2022, we are certainly tracking to that mission. On any given day, you’ll overhear friends sharing their shock about the latest developments in Anna Delvey’s story, or gossiping about what’s going to happen with Shayne and Natalie on Love is Blind. Entertainment, and the way our users engage with content, is certainly a social capital driver, but it is also at its core inherently personal. We’ve seen how our content can build communities, but community building is not our job – delivering world-class content and an outstanding user experience is our job. As the company continues to scale and we look to the next phase of Netflix, we must continue to work on delighting our user in the core app experience. Assigning resources to ancillary product features that target a select group of users will pull our team’s focus away from what matters.
Group Watch Parties is not a feature that is likely to see widespread adoption.
If we think about this feature in the context of who it would be built for – families separated by geography, partners in long-distance relationships, friends who dispersed after college, etc – it sounds like a game-changer. But then we need to think about how much that target represents in our total user-base. This is not likely to be a quick-ship feature, and in reviewing the roadmap there are a number of other features planned that will impact a more significant portion of our user-base globally. Additionally, we can’t be certain that users in that specific target demo would actually adopt this feature. In our limited set of user-interviews, two users who are in long-distance relationships and have tried similar features (via third-party interfaces) indicated that the experience was lacking, and actually detracted from their viewing experience. That’s important – will we build this feature for a specific target, and then see limited uptake?
Group Watch Parties is not core to the Netflix experience.
Our app and content delivery experience has evolved significantly since we started streaming in 2007, but there is always opportunity to make it better. Especially as the field grows with phenomenal experiences being offered from our competitors. We need to keep up. We’re better served putting our engineering resources on other core user challenges such as Recommendations, Watch Next, and other discovery related features. These will keep users on our platform, especially when they are being drawn in my different directions from each platform that is offering different content. When someone says ‘What should I watch tonight?’, we want them to come to us – and we can continue to grab them with strong experience and discovery features that keep them coming back for ‘what’s next.’ That’s the core of our experience. Group Watch Parties will be a novel experience for the user on the occasions that they decide to use it, but it’s not likely to keep them coming back for that ‘what’s next’ – especially as other platforms are already implementing similar features (thus leaving us undifferentiated).
There are alternative options that don’t impact core experience or leverage resources.
We’ve seen third-party engineers take a crack at this challenge already – that’s great! We can continue to allow for third-party services to attempt to tackle this challenge, enabling the target demographic to leverage this feature when they want without it needing to be an embedded core experience feature on the Netflix app. If we need to, we can likely trade off a limited set of resources to build out our API to enable a better third-party experience (while ensuring user security and absolutely no impact to core NFLX experience). Smaller target demographic focused challenges will always exist, but there is likely always going to be a set of technical talent somewhere willing to take on this sort of engineering problem. We should enable them to do so without needed to commit significant resources. It’s a win-win.
All in all, the Group Watch Party feature would be a win for a select number of Netflix users, but when we think about our broader user-base, and the Netflix mission, it does not warrant roadmap priority or resource allocation. If given more time, I would like to complete more user interviews, but preliminary customer research supports this conclusion. We can, and should, allocate resources to features that surprise and delight our user-base broadly.