I recently heard a great news story on National Public Radio on my way home from work that intrigued me and I thought I’d share with my one reader. Specifically this article talked about metrics used by the hit Netflix show House of Cards. Netflix is a great company to work for if you are a data nerd as they have extremely granular data not only of their customer demographics, but also, and more importantly, of their behavior and treatment of your product.
You’d think an organization with that much data, and a well-earned reputation for data savvy management, would pass those insights on to their production and development teams so they would know the best loved characters, how plot lines were received, and other critical information. So how much does Beau Willimon, the show’s producer and creative driver, see? Well, in his words: “I know virtually nothing.”
Wait, how does that happen? This is Netflix, one of the major companies in the middle of the big data revolution and their hottest product right now is being run by a guy who doesn’t see any of that data? This flies in the face of everything we know and love about data! Aren’t we supposed to be running our business off of every data stream we can find?