Last week I wrote about why we spend twenty minutes scrolling Netflix and leave without watching anything. The post came out of 159 conversations I ran over WhatsApp, with ReveLumi.
There was material I didn’t use, and it’s more interesting than the diagnosis. Alongside the complaints, people offered suggestions. Nobody asked them to. They simply described what they wanted, with the clarity of someone who lives with the problem every day.
No ideation workshop, no sticky notes. Just open questions and people talking.
What they told us
Ask us. This was the most recurring request, and the most disconcerting.
“There could be a way to talk to the platform so it understands what you’d like to watch that day.”
“I think it could ask me questions, or ask me to rate what I’ve already watched. Today it’s just thumbs up or thumbs down.”
“Netflix’s algorithm doesn’t offer me things I like. There could be a minimal questionnaire so the offering is more accurate.”
People are asking, in plain words, to be asked. They notice that the product tries to guess what they want, gets it wrong, and never does the simplest thing: ask.
Bring the critics inside. Since they leave the platform to check a rating before deciding, the suggestion came ready-made:
“A great idea would be for Netflix to bring in a list of films and series ranked by the main critic sites, like IMDb.”
Give us control.
“Let the user build their own filters.”
“I’d change how the offerings are laid out, I’d create other categories, since the catalog is enormous.”
Consider my moment.
“Since it depends on the mood of the day, maybe something related to that?”
The answer that floored me
In the middle of the conversations, someone answered the question about what would solve their problem on Netflix:
“Yes, a chat or conversational AI agent like you would help.”
Read it again, with the context: she was being interviewed by a conversational AI agent. And she told the agent that an agent would solve her problem. She lived the solution in the very moment she described it.
She felt, in the conversation itself, the difference between being guessed at and being asked. And she knew how to name it.
No dashboard would produce this list
Think about what Netflix has. The full click history, screen time, completion rates, A/B tests running all the time. And think about what the data would say about these requests.
The data would show that people spend a long time on the browsing screen. It wouldn’t say that they want to be asked. The data would show that they abandon the session. It wouldn’t say that they went to check the IMDb rating and never came back. The data would show a drop in engagement on a Tuesday night. It wouldn’t say that the person was exhausted and wanted something light.
All of this came out of conversations that lasted a few minutes, over two days, with no interviews scheduled.
This is not a roadmap
And here comes the part that matters, especially for people who build products.
None of what’s above is a list of things to build. The conversation doesn’t give you the answer. It brings us closer to the problem, and sometimes arrives with suggestions for a solution. But the responsibility to extract the insight, and then to find the solution that makes sense, still belongs to the person who builds the product.
When someone asks for “a minimal questionnaire,” the value isn’t in the questionnaire. It’s in what it reveals: this person wants to be heard instead of guessed at. The right solution could be something else entirely, and finding out which one takes solution discovery, testing, measuring, learning.
Remember what we saw in the post about ROI: about two thirds of product ideas fail to improve the metric they were meant to improve. Talking to customers doesn’t change that statistic. What changes is the quality of what goes into the testing queue. A hypothesis born from a real pain, heard from dozens of people, has a better chance of landing in the third that works than a hunch from a meeting room.
And in the end, the product work stays the same as always: find the solution that solves the customer’s problem and delivers results for the company. The conversation doesn’t replace that work. It gives you better raw material to do it.
And your customers?
They live with your product every day. They already know what’s broken, they’ve already imagined how it could be better, and they’ve probably already solved on the outside what you don’t solve on the inside.
They don’t have your roadmap. But they have the problem it’s supposed to solve. Nobody asked them.
Data tells us what happened. Customers tell us why. And it’s on us to figure out how.
Want to see how it works? Try being interviewed by ReveLumi about how you choose what to watch.
Book a demo session with the founders
If you’d like to learn more about ReveLumi, book a demo session with Anderson and me. We’ll show you what ReveLumi does today, what we’re planning for it in the future, and answer any questions you have.