A teacher who happened to run product for things you actually use
Most mornings now, Gibson Biddle is answering a stranger's question. A product manager in Berlin wants to know how to prioritize a roadmap. A founder in Bangalore is stuck on pricing. He picks a few each month, writes back at length, and ships the answers to 30,000-odd people who read "Ask Gib," his newsletter on Substack.
It is a strange second act for someone who once held one of the most consequential product jobs in entertainment. From 2005 to 2010 he was VP of Product Management at Netflix, the years when the company stopped being a DVD-by-mail curiosity and started becoming the thing that ate television. He helped grow the subscriber base from two million to thirteen million and watched the monthly cancellation rate fall from roughly ten percent to two. Those are not vanity numbers. A two percent cancel rate is the difference between a business that leaks and one that compounds.
He left the operating world, mostly, and started doing something rarer: explaining it. Not in abstractions, but in stories about the specific decisions he got right and the ones he got wrong. He gives talks - as many as 140 in a single year - runs workshops with pre-built Google Slides, teaches on Maven, and has lectured at Stanford. The pitch is always the same: product strategy is learnable, and here is the grammar.
The HyperCard gambit
Biddle did not arrive in tech the usual way. He was an English major at Amherst, class of 1985, and showed up at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth thinking he was a marketer. He left realizing he wanted to build things. So he took programming courses, taught himself HyperCard on late nights, and built software prototypes for kids. His team won the school's Entrepreneurship Award.
Then came the move that says everything about him. To get a foot inside Electronic Arts, he did not send a resume. He sent a working HyperCard program titled "Who Is Gib?" - a piece of software whose entire job was to argue, by existing, that the applicant could make software. He got in. It is the kind of thing you do when you would rather show than tell.
Games, then kids, then a $3.5 billion exit
At Electronic Arts he produced video games. Then he co-founded Creative Wonders, a children's software company, which sold to The Learning Company. He stuck around as the educational-software business grew - and grew enough that Mattel bought The Learning Company for $3.5 billion. The throughline from games to kids' software to streaming is not industries. It is consumers, and the patient study of what actually makes them come back.
Netflix, and the model that named the work
At Netflix, Biddle distilled the job into three letters that product people now trade like currency: DHM. Delight customers, in Hard-to-copy, Margin-enhancing ways. It sounds simple until you try to hold all three at once. Anyone can delight customers by giving things away. The discipline is delighting them in a way competitors cannot easily clone and that still leaves money on the table for you. Personalization was his favorite example - the more Netflix learned about what you wanted to watch, the better it got, and the harder it became for anyone else to catch up.
He paired it with a second tool, GEM, for sorting what to actually build: does this idea move Growth, Engagement, or Monetization? Together they turn the vague ache of "what should we do next" into something a team can argue about with evidence.
Chegg, an IPO, and a quadrupled top line
In 2010 he became Chief Product Officer at Chegg, the textbook-rental-turned-homework-help company. Under his watch the product expanded, revenue more than quadrupled, and the company went public in 2014. It was proof that DHM was not a Netflix party trick. The same questions worked on students renting calculus textbooks.
Treat your career like a product
The phrase he repeats to younger product people is deceptively plain: treat your career like a product. Run experiments. Watch the metrics that matter. Build a personal board of directors. It is the same advice he gives about software, pointed inward. There is a tidy honesty to a person whose framework for shipping features also explains how he got himself hired with a stack of HyperCard.
He still skis through the winter and does his best creative work late at night, which is roughly when the prototypes got built at Tuck. The job title changed. The habit did not.