Today in a keynote at Spring One, Tom Gianos from Netflix talked about their internal data platform. He listed several components, ending with quick mention of the “Insights Services” team, which studies how the platform is used inside Netflix. A team of people that learns about how internal teams use an internal platform to learn about whatever they’re doing. This is some higher-order learning going on.
It’s like, a bunch of teams are making shows for customers. They want to get better at that, so they need data about how the shows are being watched.
So, Netflix builds a data platform, and some teams work on that. The data platform helps the shows teams (and whatever other teams, I’m making this up) complete a feedback loop, so they can get better at making shows.
Then the data platform teams want to make a better data platform, so an Insights Services team collects data about how the data platform itself is used. I’m betting they use the data platform for that. I also bet they talk to people on the shows teams. Then Insights Services closes that feedback loop with the data platform team, so that Netflix can get better at getting better at making shows.
Essential links in this loops include telemetry in all these platforms. The software that delivers shows to customers is emitting events. The data platform jobs are emitting events about what they’re doing and for whom.
When a human does a job, reporting what they’re doing is extra work for them. (Usually flight attendants write drink orders on paper, or keep them in memory. The other day I saw them entering orders into iPads. Guess which was faster.) In any human system, gathering information costs money, time, and customer service. In a software system, it’s a little extra network traffic. Woo.
Software systems give us the ability to study them. To really find out what’s going on, what was working, and what wasn’t. The Insights Services team, as part of the data platform organization, can form hypotheses and then test them, adding telemetry as needed. As a team with internal customers, they can talk to the humans to find out what they’re missing. They can get both the data they think they need, and a glimpse into everything else.
Software organizations are a beautiful opportunity for learning about systems. We can do science here: a kind of science where we don’t try to find universal laws, and instead try to find the forces at work in our local situation, learn them and then sometimes change them.
When we get better at getting better — wow. That adds up to some serious acceleration over time. With learning loops about learning loops, Netflix has impressive and growing advantages over competitors.