From Netflix to LinkedIn: PM Lessons from Laura Teclemariam

Laura Teclemariam has had one of the most varied careers in product — from mobile gaming economies at EA to building Netflix's animation studio from the ground up, to owning LinkedIn's core identity products. In this episode, she joins Lily and Randy to trace the through-line of her "jungle gym" path, unpack what gaming taught her about retention, why entertainment sharpens your product instincts in ways big tech can't, and how she's now teaching the next generation of PMs at UC Berkeley — with AI at the centre of everything.

Chapters
00:00 — Intro: The feedback you didn't see coming at LinkedIn
02:00 — Laura's background: engineer, founder, consultant, PM
03:50 — Why a nonlinear career is more coherent than it looks
06:00 — Gaming as the most honest product environment
07:20 — Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, mods, and retention crisis
09:00 — How gaming metrics (DAU, retention) predicted big tech's future
12:10 — Data ends debates in tech; taste ends them in entertainment
13:05 — Netflix Animation: building a studio's product function from scratch
15:15 — Storyboards as prototypes, animatics as MVPs
19:40 — Tool consolidation: going from 400 to 130 tools across productions
22:05 — Build vs. buy decisions when the budget is a feature film
26:40 — What it takes to hire PMs for entertainment vs. general tech
28:20 — STAR interviews and evaluating stakeholder chops
29:20 — Why LinkedIn came next: curiosity about social network retention
31:50 — The weight of building for 1B+ users and LinkedIn's trust-first culture
35:50 — Profile, Messaging, Groups: LinkedIn's original value proposition
37:00 — Teaching advanced product management at UC Berkeley
38:10 — The course thesis: AI for everything, and the "great convergence"
42:00 — Does the PM/design/engineering triad collapse with AI?
45:30 — What Laura's students taught her about curiosity and safe-to-fail environments


Key Takeaways
— Games are the most honest feedback environment. Players don't care about your roadmap or your release date — they care whether the experience is worth 10 or 100 hours of their time. That honesty sharpens product instincts fast.
 — Retention is a foundational skill, not a vertical one. Whether it's a mobile RPG, a streaming platform, or a social network, understanding why people come back (and why they don't) is one of the most transferable things a PM can learn early.
— In tech, data ends the debate. In entertainment, taste does. Laura's argument isn't that one is better it's that tech products would be improved if they ended with delight, not just with metrics.
— Scale changes the emotional weight of product decisions. Moving from 200M users to 1B+ isn't just a number change. At LinkedIn, every design decision touched people's economic identity — their ability to get a job, build a business, or be seen in the world.
— The "great convergence" is already happening. Laura's Berkeley course treats the PM/design/engineering triad as effectively merging — not because teams disappear, but because AI lowers the cost of building so much that the real work shifts to the question: should we build this at all?
— The best innovation comes from feeling safe to fail. What her students reminded her: when people aren't protecting their jobs or defending legacy decisions, they ask better questions, challenge more openly, and build with genuine curiosity.