You’re absolutely right — the concept itself isn’t new, and many teams across the industry (and even within Netflix) have been practicing elements of it for years. What motivated this piece now is less about introducing a novel idea, and more about articulating a shared direction for how we evolve at Netflix’s current scale.

As our data landscape, teams, and use cases have grown, the challenges have shifted from building pipelines to building cohesion - ensuring data products are discoverable, trustworthy, and intentionally designed across many domains. This article is meant to capture that inflection point: not a reinvention, but a reflection of where we are and a signal toward how we want to operate going forward.