Netflix’s new chief product officer also wants to engage your ‘second screen’—the phone you hold while watching TV
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Two women who rose the ranks together are poised to eventually replace JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, a new Wall Street Journal investigation sheds light on Jeffrey Epstein's abuse of young girls, and Netflix's new chief product officer is part of a rare female CPO-CTO team. Enjoy your Tuesday!
- What to watch. Netflix is entering a new era. The company is 26 years old, going back to its DVD-by-mail days, and its streaming operation is in its 16th year. The Hollywood strikes are settled. Last week, Netflix published significant viewership data for the first time—a long-awaited move by actors and creators.
One executive shaping the entertainment giant's next chapter is Eunice Kim, Netflix's new chief product officer. Kim joined Netflix from YouTube almost three years ago and was promoted to the C-suite job from her prior role as VP of product in October.
Now, she works alongside Netflix chief technology officer Elizabeth Stone in a rare female CPO-CTO team. As chief product officer, Kim is responsible for consumers' TV app experience, mobile experience, search and recommendations, and commercial strategy, including pricing structure, ad-supported tiers, and the recent password sharing crackdown.
As Netflix strategizes for the coming decade and beyond, Kim is responsible for evolving the user experience. Netflix has started to introduce gaming and live broadcasts (including the much-delayed Love Is Blind reunion, a "humbling moment," Kim says). A major focus is a more strategic approach to the "second screen," or the phone that viewers often hold in their hand while watching TV. The Netflix mobile app has traditionally been a way to watch Netflix on mobile, no different than the TV app. But Kim sees the mobile app moving forward as a "Swiss army knife" to grab users' attention in different ways.
After watching a show with a plot-twist ending, viewers could receive a mobile push notification that directs them to an explanation of the series' finale. Fashion-inclined subscribers could use Netflix mobile to browse onscreen styles. Netflix could incorporate ads on mobile, rather than on the TV screen, to avoid interrupting viewers as much. Subscribers watching a competition show could vote with their mobile devices. Enhancing the mobile experience also allows for more personalization, compared to TVs, which tend to be communal devices, Kim says.
Onscreen, Kim wants the browsing experience to feel like "unwrapping a gift" when viewers find a new show. She collaborates with Netflix chief content officer Bela Bajaria when developing internal "content intelligence" for shows that predicts the "travelability" of content. "How far does South Korean content travel into the Philippines or to Latin America?" Kim explains. Those predications help the streamer make decisions about how many languages to translate a show into, for example. Netflix's predictive technology can also determine a maturity rating for a series or pinpoint specific points in a show where viewers lose interest.
Kim arrived at Google (and then YouTube) in 2009 through the company's acquisition of Like.com, an image-based search engine for shopping. Before that, she was a brand manager at PepsiCo. She was living in Chicago at the time and figured brand management in CPG was analogous to product management in tech, which was the job she actually wanted. At PepsiCo, she named new orange juice flavors for Tropicana. (She came up with "autumn red medley.")
Leading Netflix's product team is certainly more in line with what Kim set out to do. "Every role I've had at Netflix has been, quite frankly, the best job I've had in my career in the intellectual challenge of it," she says.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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