As the Product Lead for Streaming across the Stan and 9Now platforms, Nicolas Szmidt is helping transform how Australians discover entertainment.
Nico recently presented at Google AI Live + Labs and Nine’s bi-annual digital & technology event, Spark, to share Stan's blueprint for scaling personalisation, combating decision fatigue, and driving long-term loyalty for its 2.4 million subscribers. By leveraging Google's Agent Search and machine learning recommendations, Nico's team is ensuring viewers spend less time scrolling and more time watching. Nico shares his career journey, Stan's innovative tech stack, and what it takes to thrive in digital product development at Nine.
A unique opportunity in Australian tech
Nico joined Nine in early 2025, drawn by the unique opportunity to solve a massive user problem for the Stan platform. He recognised that the hardest part of streaming is not acquiring great content, but rather helping people find it. “I spent nearly seven years at YouTube, where recommendations shape what billions of people watch every day. Stan felt like the Australian version of that challenge: an awesome content catalogue, a really engaged audience, and the chance to build a world-class discovery engine for Aussies, right here at home. There was a real chance to rethink discovery from the ground up, on a modern stack, with partners like Google Cloud. That’s rare.”
Combating decision fatigue and driving loyalty
On driving loyalty, Nico shares: “We obsess over one moment: you open Stan, and you either press play or you bounce and go elsewhere. Everything we do (search, recommendations, the user interface) is about shrinking the gap between those two.”
To combat this universal challenge, Stan is moving away from a single homepage built for everyone. Instead, the team is dynamically constructing pages that adapt to individual viewers based on what they actually watch. “In testing, personalised feeds lifted impression-to-play by over 40% and people clicked on almost 60% more unique titles. So people found more stuff they wanted, faster.”
To measure the direct impact of these advancements, engagement remains the team's north star. By following the viewer every step of the way, Nico's team understands what catches their interest and what makes them click. Because engagement moves first, long-term loyalty naturally follows.
Leveraging AI for seamless discovery
Nico’s recent presentations highlight how Stan sets the benchmark in the Subscription Video on Demand space. A key part of this success is the integration of Google's Agent Search and building our foundational models, which puts Stan at the forefront of AI-driven discovery. This technology allows Stan to understand what users mean, not just what they type, delivering true semantic results. “We recovered around 500k searches a month that used to hit a dead end, and lifted search click-through by 13.5%.”
For Nico, the ultimate goal is a completely seamless user experience. Machine learning models pick the titles in each row, and an orchestration layer decides the order of the rows themselves. "The goal is that you never notice any of it. Stan just feels like it gets you.”
A culture of experimentation and bold risks
According to Nico, the key to his team’s success is a landscape that empowers teams to move fast and challenge the status quo.
“We’ve built a culture of experimenting: if something works, we ship it fast. When there’s a big question, like how much of the homepage should be personalised, we don’t settle it in a meeting. We design an experiment and let subscribers decide. Leadership backed that approach, which means the team can be ambitious without being reckless. The loudest voice in the room doesn’t win. The data does.”
Advice for top tier digital talent
When scaling his team, Nico looks for product managers and engineers with deep curiosity, customer obsession, technical depth and a strong bias for shipping small experiments over long-term roadmaps. He also values the ability to collaborate effectively across departments like data, design, content, and marketing.
For ambitious product talent wanting to shape the future of Australian entertainment, his advice is clear. "Fall in love with the problem, not your solution. At Stan’s scale, a small improvement touches millions of users. Get close to your data, get closer to your users, and get comfortable being wrong in public, because that’s how you learn quickly. Just as importantly, stand your ground when the evidence is on your side. Also, make friends outside the product team. The people who know the content and the technology will make you a far more well-rounded product person.”
