Netflix has added a new position called Chief Platform Officer, and has appointed VP of Product Development, Greg Peters, to the position. GigaOm points to an SEC filing showing the news.
The document is dated for July 30th, so it’s been a couple weeks, and Netflix has not made a formal statement about the issue. Nor has it commented on the matter to the media.
Peters’ LinkedIn profile still has VP of Product Development as his title.
Prior to Netflix, Peters held positions at Macrovision, Mediabolic and Red Hat. His previous co-workers seem to hold him in high regards.
David Goldberg, who worked with him at Mediabolic has this to say about him on LinkedIn: “Greg is an excellent manager – probably one of the best I have seen. While at Mediabolic, he took the engineering team from a group of talented people, to a crack team that hit all major milestones for perhaps 25 simultaneous projects. The company was a startup, so some amount of ‘overworking’ is typical I guess. However, Greg was great at managing team fatigue and keeping his finger on the pulse of each engineer – and at reporting these issues in a professional manner to management so that corrective action could be taken quickly and effectively. I could not recommend Greg more as a manager or colleague.”
“Greg’s management style creates predictable expectations of the engineers and sets predictable outcomes on which the rest of the organization relies to do business,” said Chris Bogart, who reported to Peters at NOCpulse.
Janko Roettgers, who broke the news of Peters’ promotion at GigaOm, suggests that his job isn’t changing much beyond a new title and possibly better pay, but notes that Netflix needs TVs to get better at handling its content. This will surely be an increasingly important task as more and more devices come to market.
The company must also work to get its new user profiles feature working on as many devices as possible.