Gibson Biddle

How do companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Starbucks stay on top and thrive while companies like Blockbuster and Sears fade away? What do these companies do right that other companies are doing wrong? The difference is using big data to delight their customers. As a product specialist for Netflix, Gibson Biddle was customer obsessed. He was always testing ways to make the customer experience better. In this entertaining and interactive talk, Gib uses real-life case studies to show how companies can use big data to delight customers in hard to copy and margin enhancing ways just like Netflix.

Learn how the Netflix team made tough decisions about people, product, and business as the company grew to support more than 120 million members worldwide. This is a behind-the-scenes talk, revealing Netflix’s decision-making process and the importance of strategy, data, and intuition to make great decisions.

In this highly interactive talk, Gib presents five, “What would you do?” case studies. He outlines Netflix’s long-term product strategy and illustrates the importance of defining clear tactics and metrics against each strategy. You’ll be surprised at the extent Netflix learned through mistakes to become the worldwide streaming giant that most people know and love today.

How do you reconcile vision and execution? Netflix Former Product VP Gibson Biddle shares the two models he uses to define product strategy and to answer the question, “How can you delight customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways?” He’ll share how he puts strategy into practice via carefully defined metrics and tactics and how to run a product strategy meeting, demonstrating the fast-paced “debate, decide, and do” environment at Netflix as he presents two modern-day, Netflix cases.

Building a recognizable brand is one of the most difficult tasks for a new company. Discover how exceptional teamwork between marketing and product creates a hard-to-copy, strategic advantage. In this talk, Gib will show two positioning and branding models and how Netflix applied these models to build a brand and product that more than 120 million love today, as well as the mistakes the company made along the way.

Satisfying disagreeable customers is a problem for all companies. Find out how to move beyond customer focus to “customer obsession” via consumer science to discover what delights customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways. Learn how to get insight from four sources of consumer insight, then evaluate these ideas through various research techniques. In this talk, Gib will illustrate these tactics using examples from Netflix, then, put the techniques into practice with a highly interactive, modern-day Netflix case.

Imagine you’re the CEO and need to face employees at your company after your market cap has fallen from $40B to $10B. What will you say? That was the position Reed Hastings was in after his failed attempt to separate the DVD and streaming services of Netflix via the launch of Qwikster. In this talk, Gib illustrates the leadership skills you need to learn to lead at scale, and to face the challenges of growth and an occasional disaster.

Today, Netflix can predict the movie tastes of 120M members worldwide. How do they do it? In this talk, Gib will show why Netflix focused on personalization as a way to delight customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways. Audiences will also discover how human judgement + algorithms + presentation layer tactics improved retention and learn the behind-the-scenes account of how the $1 million Netflix Prize that improved collaborative filtering.

How do you become a great product leader? After a 25 year career, Gibson Biddle, former product VP/CPO at Netflix and Chegg, knows the ups and downs of being a product leader. In this inspirational talk Gib, audiences will leave with

1.) the technical and functional leadership skills required of product managers

2.) how a highly strategic, experimental approach to careers accelerates learning, and

3.) how a “personal board of directors” helps jumpstart and extend your career.

Chegg is a textbook rental company whose mission is to “help students save time, save money, and get smarter.” Today, the company has a market cap of $2B and saves more than 20 million students hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

In this highly interactive talk, Give presents five “what would you do?” mini-cases that focus on the toughest decisions about people, product, and business. This behind-the-scenes account reveals both Chegg’s successes and failures and reinforces the importance of strategy, consumer science, and intuition in making great decisions.

One of the greatest challenges at a fast-growing startup is to enable good, fast consumer and data-driven decisions. It’s easy when the company is a dozen people, but how do you scale the fast decision-making of startups when the company grows beyond one hundred people— without overwhelming the company with a suffocating process?  

In this workshop, you’ll learn:

• How to define a product strategy, the metrics that help to measure success, as well as the key projects or tactics against each strategy
• The techniques Gib uses to maintain maniacal focus to delight customers in margin-enhancing, hard-to-copy ways
• How to run effective quarterly product strategy meetings, and
• Why this meeting not only helps to accelerate learning and the pace of innovation, but also how it’s used to maintain alignment throughout organizations.

This 90-minute workshop is designed for VP or Director-level “heads of product” and is also useful for any product manager that is running their own engineering, design and data team.

Innovation is a challenge for all companies. In this talk, Gib shares The Guerrilla Guide to Production Innovation.  In this presentation, you will:

• Learn the surprisingly timeless principles of product innovation.
• Discover 10 traits of highly innovative companies like Netflix, Apple, Google, Amazon and Uber.
• Learn how to apply these principles to your company in order to help develop a more innovative culture.