Extract from No Rules Rules, a book by Reed Hastings & Erin Mayer.

Memento update - Product Management Team: Chris J

Around 18 months ago, I brought a memo to the product strategy meeting outlining an idea to include supplemental title-level metadata such as actor bios and related titles into our second screen playback experience.

Following a vibrant debate, I decided to pursue the project. We moved forward building the Memento's experience on Android mobile. This project took more than a year. Last September we had a release build that we launched in a small test.

In February, I concluded that we should not move forward and ended projects.

It is important to underscore that the decision to pursue Memento and continue investing in it throughout was solely mine. This outcome and the resulting cost are my complete responsibility. Having invested in this for over a year and then decided not to launch has wasted time and resources and also brought learning. Some of my takeaways:

• There was real opportunity cost in pursuing this project which, as a result, slowed us down on important mobile innovation. This was a big miss from me on leadership and focus.
• I should have more thoughtfully considered the limited ability to gain insight from the small second screen population. I assumed that it would grow larger, but I was wrong.
• I should have considered more deeply the suggestion from the initial strategy meeting that Darwin would be a better test platform for this idea. This reminds me to be open to challenging my own preconceived notions.
• When I decided to pursue this after the product strategy meeting, I should have come back with a memo to debate the notion of launching with a flat holdback. This was misaligned with how we approach product innovation—not how we do things here.
• As I got into the project I should have realized its declining value and shut it down months ago. The crash rates in September should have been a clear signal to me to halt our work on it. The end always seemed near, which was an illusion. As it often is.