at Netflix
The Messaging team at Netflix creates & delivers multi-channel messaging experiences across the customer lifecycle to drive acquisition, retention & member engagement. We also provide our platform as a service for company-wide messaging needs.
JOIN THE TEAM
Netflix is a global company and we are committed to building an employee base that matches the diversity of our customers. You can find more details on our Inclusion and Diversity Page on our jobs portal.
Netflix also has a robust & global Employee Resource Group program. ERGs, are vital in creating a more inclusive environment for all employees, specifically folk who are from historically underrepresented and/or marginalized communities.
Stories
building high performing product development engineering teams
In this talk, George Abraham, speaks about building and empowering high-performing product development teams by developing curiosity for the Business and Product and empathy for your Partners and Customers.
Notification Strategies For Payment Issues
Payment issues are a commonplace in a subscription model. Helping customers resolve their payment issues is an important area of innovation for subscription businesses. Max Mautner a senior software engineer on the Messaging Experiences team spoke at the 2022 SubSummit on notification strategies for payment issues.
PM & EM Partnership
A strong Engineering Manager and Product Manager partnership is a key to building and shipping great products. In this talk Timi Kosztin and George Abraham talk about a few key drivers to build a trusting EM/PM partnership.
Venue: Product Festival, Feb 2022, Virtual
Asian American and Pacific Islander HUb
Netflix’s Celebrate Asian American & Pacific Islander Stories collection includes series, films and specials starring AAPI talent, including “Kim’s Convenience,” “Always Be My Maybe,” the “To All the Boys” franchise, and “Never Have I Ever.”
The in product experience uses an in app message to set context about the collection and invites customers to view the collection
Kids Activity Report
A tool for parents to better understand and monitor what their kids are watching. Called the Kids Activity Report, the breakdown includes data on what type of programming kids are spending the most time watching, who their favorite character is, and recommendations for new shows based on their interests.
MESA: Building a Personalized Messaging System at Netflix
In this talk, Grace Huang a Machine Learning Manager at Netflix takes the audience through a tour of the continuous explore and exploit system that we have iterated on, and showcases a few particularly complex and fascinating challenges with offline evaluation and experimentation.
Black Lives Matter Collection
Netflix promoted the “Black Lives Matter” collection to U.S. subscribers, featuring over 45 titles about racial injustice and the experience of Black Americans.
The in product experience used an in app interstitial message to make a bold statement and invited members to view the collection.
Read the full article on Variety
Video Content Marketing: The Making of Clips
Xuan (Alex) Liu a Data Scientist on the Netflix messaging team has published a paper along with researchers from Santa Clara University, Harvard Business School, and the University of Maryland on an optimization approach to produce short video clips from existing video material and to study the effectiveness of these clips at generating consumer response. The paper won the 2018 MSI/Root Award (webinar included) and the 2020 Donald R. Lehmann Award.
INCREMENTALITY-FOCUSED MESSAGING @ NETFLIX
A talk by Chris Beaumont a Data Scientist at Netflix, about a simple but novel way to continuously measure the incremental impact of a message.
Venue: SF Growth Engineering Meetup, May 2019
Focus Areas FOR Messaging Engineering AT NETFLIX
Platform
The Messaging Platform Team is responsible for innovation and production of the platform required to support messaging at Netflix. The team builds and scales micro services to support the diverse messaging needs at Netflix from innovation on the product to the needs for the Netflix Studio. Innovation on the platform keeps the team nimble, data driven, scaleable, and stable. The team is constantly exploring additional communication channels.
Personalization
The Personalization Team is invested in the innovation and production of systems for algorithmic based messaging experiences. A decision framework that determines messaging dimensions such as frequency, message selection, channel, time of send, etc for every Netflix profile is the primary service the personalization team owns. The team creates and runs algorithm based experiments.
Customer Engagement
The team owns the creation and production of messaging experiences to drive member engagement. The main focus is running experiments to provide value to our customers through relevant engaging messages. Some areas we innovate on are:
Launch of new seasons of shows
Arrival of new titles in the Netflix catalog
Titles that are coming soon to Netflix
Recommendations on what to watch
Customer Growth
The team owns the creation and production of growth messaging experiences to drive acquisition. The main focus is running experiments to persuade customers to try Netflix. Some example experimentation areas are:
Persuading potential customers who did not complete signup to try Netflix
Persuading former customers to try Netflix again
Account
From password recovery to account notifications, the team owns the creation and production of a customer's account related messaging.
We experiment on critical account related messaging areas such as:
Payment issues
Pricing
Account security
Showcase
Outbound Channel: Email
Messages across the customer lifecycle
Signup Drop Off
Account
Engagement
Rejoin
Outbound Channels: Push, SMS, Messaging Apps
Push Notifications
SMS
In-app Notification Center Messages
In-app Interstitial Messages
In-app Messaging Landing Experiences
Highlights
Scale
Billions of messages a week
Multiple channels
Thoughtful orchestration
Algorithmically driven
Platform
Our platform is built on a microservice architecture model. Most services are written in Java and deployed on AWS across three regions.
Experimentation
Experimentation is deeply ingrained in our culture. In messaging we experiment on a number of dimensions.
Design
How a message looks and feels. We experiment with images, CTAs, layouts, etc.
Frequency
How often we send a message. Are we sending too many, too few, how far apart.
Personalization
Highly personalized messaging for each profile based on personalization algorithms.
Timing
The time and day to send a message to be the most relevant for a user.
Outbound Channels
Messaging experiences on outbound channels such as email, push notifications, and landing pages.
In-App Channels
Messaging experience inside the Netflix app on various devices
Copy
Copy matters. We test copy on a variety of areas including body, subject line, preview text, and CTAs.
Behaviour
Messaging based on user behavior. For instance - reminders through email and in the app.