Architecting Access: Designing a Clear, Scalable, and Secure Access System for Netflix Studio

Access management might sound straightforward, but at global scale, it’s one of the most complex domains imaginable. Who gets in? What can they see and do? How long should they have access? And how do you make it’s all secure, compliant, and usable by engineers, operations, and partners around the world?

At Netflix, the legacy access system for studio applications offered little structure and almost no guidelines. Components were inconsistently designed, confusingly named, and nearly impossible to navigate. Too often, people didn’t even understand what they were granting access to, weakening trust and creating security risks.

Over two years, Jordan led the zero-to-one design of Access Manager, Netflix’s new global access management system for studio applications and data. The work required more than new screens and workflows – it demanded a new way of thinking about access itself. Information architecture became the toolkit and the glue that made clarity possible.

The project included:
• Clarifying terminology so engineers, security experts, and end users spoke the same language.
• Building concept models that made invisible relationships visible.
• Ensuring the UI reflected the system’s underlying logic.
• Creating naming guidelines (and even an AI assistant) to support clarity at scale.
• Producing an explainer video that demystified access for busy teams.

These IA-driven moves transformed a chaotic, fragile system into one that is structured, comprehensible, and scalable, empowering employees, partners, and teams across the Netflix studio to work with clarity and confidence.

In this lightning talk, Jordan shares how practices like modeling, naming, and visualization can turn overwhelming complexity into human-centered systems. Attendees will leave with practical ways to apply IA as a tool for clarity, alignment, and trust in their own complex environments.