YouSaid · the spoken record

Elizabeth Stone

lines on the record: 85
first: 2026-07-19
most recent: 2026-07-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Contingent on, you check that the results are valid, you work with your local data scientist am I using the source of truth data on this? But that's been a great one. And that's one personally that I would say I most use some of these tools for. So that goes beyond prototyping and coding to general analytical thinking and translating data to action and insight. The other one is on the content production creation part of the business, which has lots of applications. This was true before Gen AI. So ML and AI were deeply used in a lot of the production tools. We've used them to think about how to create promotional assets at scale, how to localize in subtitles and dubs. So Gen AI is a big step function in where the impact can be in creative ideation. We call those things like pre-visualization or basically bringing a creator's vision.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's two that come to mind. So the first is data analysis, distillation of information, modeling, which is using the tools to get our arms around all the insights we have, similar to what I mentioned before. What experiments have we run? What are the metrics that I should be looking at for a certain problem? What's the consumer research that we've done? And that is much higher velocity and much higher quality.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So does it mean that I have an experimentation mindset? Does it mean that I know where AI is useful and not useful? Does it mean that I've actually built things using AI? I feel like the way that has shown up in career ladders and how we talk about it evolves almost by the quarter, if not month or day, because the tech itself is advancing so much. So the most useful thing is not to make it level specific or role specific, but to encourage everyone towards the expectation on AI fluency, which doesn't mean use it as a tech for the sake of tech. It's tech where it's useful to have good judgment about that and to have the mindset to be open-minded to explore and try new things. That's the non-negotiable for all roles. And that's true at the senior most levels of Netflix. Where we talk about we too need to have deep fluency in AI, even if we're not writing code as part of our day jobs. So that's changed.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the way we've approached so far is instead of trying to articulate At each level, exactly how AI changes those expectations to instead put an overlay across all of the talent at Netflix, people on the team and those who are hiring, to talk about an aspiration for AI fluency. And what that looks like is going to vary by function. It's going to vary based on where you are in your career. That could be what level you're in or what type of role or persona work you're doing. the aspiration for AI fluency, which is a tough thing to define.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got advice over years that is similar to that, which is are there ways that I can do my job that helps my manager do their job? And so, if I thought about all the things I'm directly responsible for, but I thought about it from the perspective of my manager, so not just product and tech, but finance and content and other parts of the business, I would naturally zoom out and think about how all these component pieces need to come together and how the whole could be greater than the sum of the parts. I think that's useful thinking. And for engineers to think about how do I leave a better version of these systems? How do I think about the thing that's going to be high quality in scale for others? There's both a how do I help my manager and there's how do I help my colleagues, which is a core part of some of our engineering principles of do the thing that is right for the broader organization instead of just what's right for you locally, that's systems thinking as well. So it's not just seniority, but it's breadth of the way I solve this problem and I build this. Is it going to be useful to my colleagues? And am I going to leave a stronger version of things for the future set of innovations that we want to make?”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do I think that the way I was planning to build this is going to make sense in a way that scales across multiple content types, or it could be something that's a capability that then is contributed to a platform set of offerings from multiple areas? Is the consumer problem that I'm solving with this feature going to be one of the most important consumer problems that Netflix is going to need to solve as we have an expanding world of entertainment and we want to make it more personalized and immersive? Those are all questions that like you don't have to boil the whole ocean. You don't have to solve for Netflix's overall strategy and who are we relative to competition. But you take the thing you're responsible for and you just do one zoom out of the problem you're solving and question that. I wouldn't spend too long in the questioning state because then you're stuck. Then you're not making forward progress. But I think that helps people to think in terms of systems.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Small trick. Each problem you're trying to solve out one click to the like what am I assuming is true about the broader space in solving this problem. So I was given a task to build some new feature for the Netflix member experience. Let me take one beat and think about what is the bigger consumer problem we're trying to solve here. What's the type of content that this feature is going to be able to support?”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A payments expert. I'm an ads marketplace design expert. I am an expert in this very specific tooling that studio productions use. So there. Specialists in subject matter expertise is an advantage provided that person is willing to grow and extend into is this really still the right tool or the right way to think about the problem. So I think it's the layers of the stack from an engineering perspective that there's less specialty and then tools that are unlikely to be static or like to have a lot of inertia around them. I would think like we would want people who are able to innovate and imagine like what's the future version of this. And so we want more talent like that.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About the mindset of growing in different directions and exploring. And I don't want to be too narrow even in my own assessment of that, but it's important that people who are specialists still have that sense of, I want to try a new way of solving these problems versus the way we have in the past.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But as a general rule compared to five or ten years ago, I would believe we have fewer specialists and more people who are generalists or adaptable in multiple directions. And that could be adaptable across functional expertise. It could be adaptable across flavors of engineering. So can I navigate both backend and front-end systems? Can I hook into infrastructure with a lot of expertise? I think the mindset now needs to be I can learn that quickly. And that goes back to the systems thinking. So I think specialists can learn to have a broader array of tools more easily than was true in the past. So we need fewer of them, perhaps, because talent's able to grow in that direction. And there's something about sticking to a narrow specialty that maybe triggers for me a concern about what”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The days of very narrow deep specialization feel more limited to me. I can come up with examples where we still need it because there's an industry or technology expertise where there's only a few people in the world who really know how things work. We have examples of that on the team for encoding or how our playback systems work and things that have been incredibly innovative and novel for Netflix. I still believe we need specialized practitioners in those spaces.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like Netflix, I feel like we would lose one of the things that makes Netflix great, which is the product technology and design makes a lot of complexity invisible and makes for a seamless customer experience. That's a design mindset that has to be core to it. So the work itself might look different, but I don't think we lose the mindset.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have mixed feelings about that because we do want to enable with infrastructure and systems thinking more people to do great work with strong design as part of it. Why not take that opportunity that the new tech provides? But for our most important priorities, design is critical to solve things in the right way. So we do still make time for important design work. It can move faster. The designers themselves have more tools in their toolkit so they can do incredible work at a faster velocity, show more options, learn, iterate, test more quickly. But I think it would be a mistake to say design and deep design expertise in thinking gets squeezed out just because we can write code faster. We can do data analysis faster that feels like at least for a large scale consumer product.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and one of the visions we have at Netflix is we will have so many agents that are contributing to doing work that you need to be able to reason and rationalize throughout that. You know, the humans are the ones guiding what's the problem we need to solve? Do I feel like what we're producing is impactful and high quality output. But the work will be done by both humans and agents. And that creates velocity and benefits and it creates risks. And I think that's important from, especially from an engineering perspective that we figure out how to manage that in a way that lets people move quickly but doesn't create undue downside or risks for the company.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I don't think it scales well to have each person who's building something have to go figure out. Could you remind me what good looks like here and what are the bumpers or guardrails I should keep in mind? I think we need to encode that in our paved paths and our ways of working. And for a data science or analytical field to encode, here's the source of truth data. Here's how to interpret it. Here's how to access it. Here's what to do with it or not to do with it and to be careful with certain types of data. I don't, an organization that has thousands of people can no longer rely on tribal knowledge or I'm going to find the one person who knows this. So this was a challenge that was there before AI. It's probably a more urgent challenge with AI. And I like the idea of using AI or any new tech to motivate, like we knew this is work we needed to do. No time like the present to invest in that more heavily across the team.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's probably velocity. So platforms do have a benefit of leverage. So in general, that's an opportunity with or without AI for a platform to get most teams 80% of the way there. And then they don't have to reinvent those building blocks. We have more bets that we're making across the business. More things we're trying to build. So platform mindsets are good. And it's something that is relatively more recent for Netflix to think about that being a real critical enabler. There is also the sense of a scaffolding in a world of AI, so not just the higher velocity, but you have more people doing more types of work that are different or new, like we were talking about. And there's risk that comes with how do you think about access and identity in that situation? How do you think about security in that situation? How do you think about shipping high quality code and design and user experience?”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To look at the big picture that I think is happening in every single function, and that requires some reorientation of skills among the existing team and also hiring people who've got that type of expertise. And across all of it, it's a mindset shift. So we are not hiring people who are not excited to explore try new things, understand lots is changing and feel comfortable with that ambiguity, be comfortable that there's a blurring of how we work and how we partner. That's true for people who are already at Netflix and people who we are adding to the team, that that curiosity innovation mindset has not, it's not been more important, at least in the time that I've been working in this field.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's extremely important that our experience design team is developing templates and again systems thinking for what does great user design look like at Netflix so that they can enable lots of people, including those who are not designers by training, to develop products that are coherent, that fit into the end-to-end member experience. I get really nervous about having different design languages or different types of user interactions and shipping Frankenstein's basically. So designers need to then be the people we're hiring, again, for design systems thinking. How do we think about templates and expression of the brand and what a good user experience looks like and what is Netflix and like the Netflix differentiated special sauce so there's more people on our design team that have to think that way now than could I help to design a specific feature for a specific product? So there's this stepping back.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Engineering profiles are more distributed systems, more infrastructure, more of that system thinking mindset than a local business expertise. Though of course we still have people who are deep in personalization and advertising and content delivery. If I take another example like design,”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They very often were not feeling like they needed to be on a central paved path. They built the stack that they needed to solve the problem and have the impact. In a world of AI with agents operating across multiple systems, wanting source of truth data, the importance of having preferred paved paths that get the most of the benefits and produce some guardrails so we can make sure we're doing good work. Common infrastructure, common paved paths, solving problems once with a core set of capabilities becomes more important. So we are hiring more people who can look across all the business domains and abstract that to here's the building blocks we're going to need in a world with AI. So that's one of the lenses, but also just with a lens of what got Netflix here doesn't get Netflix there. And we're going to have to have a stronger set of infrastructure to move quickly in this future. So that means that”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, that it matches exactly to functions, but I can tell you what we're having, we're seeing more of we need more of. Need more systems thinkers in a world with AI. That looks a little bit different across functions, but I could play out a couple examples. In our core infrastructure team at Netflix and Central Engineering. Lot of what made Netflix successful over time was that local teams with specific business problems could move fast to deliver.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I still see a craft excellence that's really important in the disciplines that I don't think is going away anytime soon. Even if there's fluidity or blurring of the work across the functional lines, it goes back to what I mentioned earlier of you still have humans who have to make sure that what we're doing makes sense. We're solving the right problems in a way that is best for Netflix members or business stakeholders. And that if I talk to an engineer, a data scientist, a designer, yes, they speak more languages now than they used to because they have the benefit of these AI tools, but there's still something that is not replaceable when I think about the craft and how they think about what good looks like. And that feels true across all levels. And, you know, I still find great engineering to be scarce, great data science to be scarce, great creativity to be scarce.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An initial hypothesis where they want to work more deeply with the data scientist and engineer, and so on. So there's something there about the hypothesis generation prototyping, thinking deeply about problems that feels like it's accelerating and that functions are able to do that in a more fluid way. But I still see comparative strengths. So data scientists are still going to be experts at can we trust this data? Are we interpreting it the right way? What's the data versus judgment that we should be applying here? A product manager is still going to be exceptional at saying, have we really framed the what of this, like the problem we're solving in the right way? An engineer still has a craft around the how. How does this scale? What does high quality look like? What problems is this going to create for us based on how we build and deploy something? So I still see the nuggets of that comparative advantage. It's just that we're able to move more fluidly in a lot.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To start with, I would hesitate to rely on that exclusively, but I think it's a head start. And I find even in my own work day to day, instead of sending an email that disrupts someone of like, remind me what research did we do in what year and what was the question and what was the test we ran, I can find that almost instantly. Then I can form my own. Here's what I find interesting about this. And I've now skipped a couple steps towards, is there something actionable here? So that's data analysis. It's modeling. It's distillation of information. And I'm seeing more people do that to your original question. So instead of that needing to be only the experts who were here for 20 years and saw every experiment or know where to find it, we're now able to do that faster within product and tech across all functions. And a big unlock for us is our business stakeholders sitting in finance and content and advertising can do that as well. And then bring back.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product design, data science move faster in the direction of let's get to something that's testable on this hypothesis. So that's prototyping, that's writing code. The other thing I've seen as being very valuable is we have a lot of information running around in the virtual walls of Netflix. We have experiments. We've run over decades. We have insights from consumers. We have input from stakeholders across the business. And that was a problem that really presented a challenge of like how do we get the most out of that long history of knowledge and learnings to say let's apply that to the problem we've got now to move faster in this is a promising path or this is something that we've learned something about and we could leverage here. And AI is very powerful at distilling information, looking across a broad set of things, doing an analysis around it, getting to the core of here's some insights.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you've mentioned some of the things, so I'll reiterate them and then maybe build. So, I have found that PMs, designers, data scientists are able to get farther in the product development life cycle before engineering really needs to be front of the line in unlocking things than was true a couple years ago. I say that with some caution because like we were talking about, I don't think it's great to all of a sudden have thousands of prototypes if they're not aimed at this is an important problem to solve for the business and the engineering partners are aware that we're solving that problem and that designers and product managers are going to take the lead in starting to shape the idea, but it's not working in a vacuum and it's not throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. But when it's the right problem, approach in a thoughtful way with some alignment on that.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clarity on source of truth data, guardrails on shipping code to production or testing before we make large changes, thinking about opportunities where we can trust the output of AI versus we should have a process or review that helps us check that we're getting high quality outcomes. And the importance of reiterating that humans are still responsible for what happens. So it can be that an agent wrote the code or I helped to do an analysis when that's not really my background, but it doesn't make people not have the responsibility that comes with what they've created. So I think investing in some of those core infrastructure and practices and reiterating the accountability and responsibility for the outcomes helps to balance some of like what's possible with what we should actually be doing.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That it's good for people to be exploring what's possible. And then, like I mentioned earlier, the benefit of having product and tech teams together is that if the business problem is clear, I think it's okay and it's healthy for there to be some fluidity in the roles that people play because instead of having to wait for the engineering team to be ready to be able to prototype something, product and design can move faster on it, but they should still work with their engineering partner to think through how should we productize this? How do we scale it? What are the guardrails for it? So I don't think it makes the functional expertise obsolete. I think it means that teams have to be more comfortable with maybe this helps us move faster in a certain direction from an organizational perspective, things I think about to make this more coherent or less frustrating are some of the things that have to be in place for us to get the benefits rather than the cost.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hear it within Netflix for sure. I think anytime a new technology comes along, especially one that's as transformative as Gen AI, you go through a storming phase before you go through the forming phase of things. And I think we are in the middle of that right now. I don't think that means we should put AI back into the box and say, let's not use it because this is complicating all of our preconceived notions about our roles. But I do think it means we have to be much more thoughtful about how do we get the benefits while reducing the costs. I think it's a great thing that people are experimenting with how can I develop an idea faster, prototype an idea, put together an initial set of code that would allow us to test it. Do I believe that means anyone should be shipping code to production, that everyone should actually be doing everything? Probably not. But I think”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Small trick. Each problem you're trying to solve step out one click to the what am I assuming is true about the broader space.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We need more systems thinkers, people who can look across all the business domains and abstract that to here's the building blocks we're going to need”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talent density is the non negotiable, being very comfortable with risk taking in cases where things are not going well and not assume that process is going to fix it.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Netflix's culture has always been excellent as an operating system. It's a resistance to do the thing that a lot of bigger companies would do and to feel comfortable in that discomfort very often.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I still see a craft excellence that's really important that I don't think is going away anytime soon. I still find great engineering to be scarce, great data science to be scarce, great creativity to be scarce.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anytime a new technology comes along, you go through a storming phase before you go through the forming phase of things. We are in the middle of that right now. I don't think that means we should put AI back into the box and say, let's not use it.”
2026-07-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source