Where is Your Skip Intro Button?

In May of 2017 Netflix introduced the “Skip Intro” button and changed the way we watch TV. Now viewers could binge their favorite shows and skip the long repetitive introductions. Not that we hated introductions or that we had no use for them, but when you watch 6 episodes of Tiger King in one sitting you don’t really need to watch that same intro over and over and over again.

In an interview with Cameron Johnson who is the Director of Product Innovation he revealed that “We did research and found that in about 15% of the time members were manually advancing the series within the first five minutes. This gave us confidence that a lot of people wanted to skip the intro.”

5 years later the “Skip Intro” button is pushed 136 million times per day, 49.6 billion times per year and has saved viewers an astonishing 195 years of cumulative watch time. Netflix tracked what their users wanted (and didn’t want) and provided a solution.

Where is the “Skip Intro” opportunity in your business? Every business has one. Something that provides minimal value to your customers that you can stop doing. Netflix created a button that magically takes us to the part of the show we want. How can you magically transport customers through the parts they don’t value to get to the juicy center of the reason they hired you.

It’s not always clear, but that’s where the opportunity lies. If it was clear everyone would do it just like everyone followed Netflix with their own version of the button soon after it release. It’s your job as a leader to see the path none of your competition has seen before and create the next industry standard we will all start copying. Today is the day to start looking.