Netflix's "Context, Not Control": How Does it Work?

If you’ve read the Netflix culture deck, you may recall seeing the title of this article crop up a few times. While “Freedom and Responsibility” gets a lot more press, one could argue that “Context, Not Control” is even more influential in establishing the relationship between employees and their managers. An exact quote from the culture deck states that “high performance people will do better work if they understand the context”. Fleshing this out further, if your team is fully cognizant of their purpose and how it maps to their company’s current state of business, they can make much better decisions and accomplish far more than through a top-down management model. As a fairly new Netflix engineering manager, here is my perspective on how this actually works.

First off, the engineers on my team are all professionals with years of expertise in their craft. I have neither the place, the time, nor the desire, to micromanage or make technical decisions for them. This statement may surprise some. In fact, many new Netflix employees wonder just how well we adhere to our values during everyday work. Do they hold up or do managers resort to less idealistic behavior when under pressure? A few months in, I can state with absolute certainty that following a “context, not control” model of leadership is not a suggestion or a lofty ideal, but indeed how managers are expected to lead.

I do, of course, voice my opinion on proposed courses of action, especially when difficult decisions must be made. As managers, we are expected to challenge whether or not a solution meets the requirements of our users. Part of our job is to question choices and ask whether or not alternatives were considered, especially when a proposal involves immature technology. However, at the end of the day, I do not control my team’s actions. As the people directly working on the problems at hand, they have the most context in their realm. I will never tell them that they must adopt a specific database, language, or tool for some vague, undisclosed reason (if you're an engineer who’s ever been on the receiving end of one of those decisions you know just how powerless you end up feeling). Instead, given that they have the right context, I trust them to make the decisions they believe to be in Netflix’s best interest.

In order to help set that context, Netflix executives share extensive documentation from each quarterly business review with every employee, at all levels in the company. Major decisions are communicated, along with supporting information which gives insight into the factors and alternatives that were considered through memos, open FAQs, and presentations. Consequently, in cases where we do need to adopt a new tool, or change the way we work, the reasons are well thought out and clearly communicated to all affected. Thanks to this level of transparency, each team understands the environment in which they operate and the high level business goals they, and every other team, are striving to support. Quite frankly, the quantity of information that’s available from all of our major departments can be overwhelming, and everyone quickly needs to learn how to filter relevant topics versus those leading to rabbit holes of intellectual curiosity!

That said, these memos are still fairly high level. For example, while it's great to know which countries we're launching in next and what we expect the related challenges will be, that information alone may lack the granularity required to make low-level product decisions. Therefore, managers spend most of their time talking to people across departments and teams in order to uncover opportunities and understand relevant users and stakeholders. Through this discovery process, they further augment and refine the context most relevant to their team. This is where trust becomes a two-way street: while I rely on my team to make the correct technical decisions, they in turn need me to search for and provide the right information. When a manager does their job effectively, the team’s decisions are truly well informed, allowing them to focus most of their time and energy on building the best products possible. If the team makes a bad decision, it is likely due to their manager failing to set the right context.

An interesting by-product of this environment is that people are very quick to take time out of their busy schedules and catch you up on what they’re doing. At first I couldn’t quite put my finger on why this was the case, but I now have a theory: such informal discussions are not just a valuable tool to inform others of your challenges and accomplishments, but also a forum to exchange knowledge with other people, thereby making everyone more effective partners with one another. Maybe I should find a way to AB test this theory...

So, does all of this work perfectly? Of course not. There are always challenges involved when groups of intelligent, passionate, and highly motivated people work together. Occasionally the boundaries between two team’s responsibilities can get fuzzy and need to be clarified. At other times we may be sharply divided on an issue with no easy solution. Regardless, our disciplined focus on culture ensures that when heated discussions do arise, these conversations are around how to best improve our products, culture, and company.

Finally, an essential part of my role is to seek out and recruit exactly the right people to raise our overall effectiveness and challenge us to become even better. For reasons I now hope are obvious, experience and a good cultural fit, in addition to technical skills, are critical. Because a team with the right people, armed with the correct context, and the freedom and responsibility to make their own decisions is a truly impressive force and one that I am proud to serve every day!