● seattle 15 yrs · netflix / google / xbox platform · infra · systems

I lead the platform decisions that make entertainment work at global scale.

I work in the messy intersection of entertainment, engineering, and operations — the places where large organizations tend to lose clarity. I make complexity disappear for users and actionable for teams.

selected systems
Netflix Cloud Gaming 2023–2026
infra · QoE · launch

Taking cloud gaming worldwide

Real-time game streaming is a fundamentally different infrastructure problem than video. Video buffers; games can't — and capacity is finite, so running out means "no," not "slower." There was no existing playbook, so we built one: new hardware, new steering logic, new quality metrics, new cost models. I led product strategy for scaling the platform from our internal-only engineering build to our beta launch through to global availability across four continents — infrastructure readiness, regulatory compliance, launch execution, and media quality.

no playbook → global platform zero to 1
Netflix Cloud Gaming 2023–2026
QoE strategy

Quality is the platform

Video streaming spent two decades defining what quality means. Cloud game streaming had no shared definition — and without one, every team measures something different and no one can say whether the experience is actually good. Quality here is deeply technical: input-to-display latency, frame pacing and stutter, visual fidelity under real network conditions, load times, session reliability — each measured against the jitter, loss, and device constraints of every market we serve. I led the product strategy for quality of experience, partnering deeply with engineering and data teams to turn all of that into a shared definition, a measurement framework, and investment principles for what "good" means across games, devices, and markets. The goal: quality that reflects choices we're making, not gaps we haven't found. Infrastructure gets members into a session; quality determines whether they stay, return, and tell someone else.

defined what "good" means
Netflix Cloud Gaming 2023–2026
controller · member & developer experiences

The phone becomes the controller

Game controllers are for gamers — and Netflix is for everyone. To eliminate that barrier to entry, we built the controller members already carry: the phone in their pocket, ubiquitous and endlessly customizable. The virtual controller transforms your phone into a powerful, flexible way to interact with games and experiences — custom layouts, haptics, voice chat, second-screen play, seamless party and multiplayer. I led the product from first build through continuous evolution alongside the games themselves — grounded in Netflix's streaming values, expanded to meet player needs. It's the critical bridge between members and games, and central to Netflix's strategy for living-room innovation and cross-device play.

turning device reach into actual play
Netflix Content Infrastructure 2020–2023
storage · data

The end of "keep everything forever"

For years, the answer to "what should we keep?" was everything, forever. That works until the trajectory says otherwise — and ours did. The harder problem: we couldn't manage what we couldn't see, so before any policy could change, I drove the data foundation that made storage measurable and attributable across the studio. From there we shipped the first time-based retention rules, controlled retrieval, and an architecture built for smarter rules over time. It also made us think like preservationists: what deserves to survive across generations of technology, how do we keep assets fresh as formats change, and what should we ingest, transport, compute, and store in the first place.

measure first, then decide
Xbox LIVE 2009–2011
portfolio · marketplace

Digital identity, before it was an industry

The question wasn't about selling items — it was how personalization on the platform could evolve, and how far it could go. I developed the strategy and partnered across engineering, studios, and third-party developers to build avatars on Xbox: starting with your profile, expanding into games that supported avatar play, then Kinect, then Xbox itself — watching movies, chatting, live events, with an identity you shaped. The Avatar Marketplace grew inside the 90M+ item personalization portfolio I owned — avatars, themes, gamerpics, and gamertags — and finished 200% over targets in year one. Then identity went beyond games: partnerships with technology, fashion, and entertainment brands, from Skullcandy to Quiksilver to Tokidoki. A decade later, digital identity is one of gaming's biggest businesses — a model the industry caught up to.

identity as the platform, 2009
how i think about platforms

Quality is a definition problem

Quality isn't a feature you ship. It's the platform you build on. But before any organization can improve quality, it has to agree on what quality means — and most skip that step. Teams end up optimizing different numbers, all called "quality," all moving in different directions. That's not a measurement gap. It's a definition gap, and no dashboard fixes it.

Quality of experience is necessary, not sufficient

A flawless session of a game nobody wants retains no one — and a great game nobody can play doesn't either. Members stay for the whole offering: the content, the features, the platform capabilities that make it all work together. Quality of experience is the foundation everything stands on. It's never the whole building.

Ambiguity is the job

The most valuable problems rarely arrive with an owner, a roadmap, or a name. I walk into the unowned space, map it, and leave behind structure that outlasts me. Owning the unowned is a skill — and so is knowing what to hand off.

Fix the floor before chasing the ceiling

No platform delivers one uniform experience — networks, devices, and markets vary too much for that. So the real question is where you invest. My answer: make unacceptable experiences acceptable before making good ones exceptional. Members who hit the worst version of your product leave and remember it. Members in the middle are already playing. The ceiling wins the demo. The floor wins the business.

Infrastructure is a member experience

Every hop in the delivery chain — from the hardware serving the session to the device in the living room — is part of the product, whether you design it or not. Two principles follow. Differences in experience should be operating points you chose with full knowledge of the trade-offs, not accidents you discover later. And when the system hits its limits, communicate limitations rather than fail silently.

When infrastructure constraints require product compromises, who owns the tradeoff? If no one can answer, that's the job.

status
availability open to platform & infra product leadership roles
contact sera.leggett@gmail.com · linkedin