What API and data model would support a new Netflix workflow for kids and parents at global scale

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Netflix is a streaming entertainment company; its products include subscription video, original films and series, recommendations, profiles, games, and ad-supported plans.

Netflix wants to introduce a new kids-and-parents workflow that helps families manage how children discover, request, watch, and transition between age-appropriate entertainment across TV, mobile, web, and gaming/live experiences. The workflow must work globally across different languages, maturity-rating systems, household structures, devices, connectivity conditions, and parental expectations.

As a Technical PM, you are asked to define the API and data model needed to support this experience at Netflix scale. The focus is not on designing the visual UI, but on specifying the product and platform capabilities that would allow client apps, backend services, personalization systems, parental controls, content metadata, notifications, and compliance workflows to work together reliably.

Your answer should clarify the user journeys for kids and parents, the core entities and relationships, the API surface area, privacy and safety constraints, and how the system would handle personalization, permissions, localization, observability, and rollout across markets. You should also consider how this workflow coexists with Netflix’s existing profiles, recommendations, maturity settings, viewing history, ads, games, and live content surfaces.

The experience should consider:

- The main parent and child workflows, including discovery, requests, approvals, restrictions, playback access, and ongoing management.

- Core data objects such as household, account, profile, child profile, guardian role, content item, maturity rating, permission, request, approval state, device, session, and audit history.

- API requirements for clients and services, including reads, writes, authorization checks, state transitions, eventing, versioning, and failure handling.

- Global differences in age ratings, legal requirements, language, cultural expectations, consent, and parent-child account structures.

- Privacy, security, and child-safety requirements, including least-privilege access, sensitive data handling, retention, abuse prevention, and parental transparency.

- Integration points with recommendations, search, content metadata, playback entitlement, notifications, customer support, experimentation, and analytics.

- Reliability and scale expectations, including latency, offline or weak-network behavior, consistency trade-offs, observability, incident response, and graceful degradation.

- Rollout considerations such as backward compatibility, migration from existing profiles and parental controls, experimentation, market gating, and success/guardrail measurement.

The goal is to describe a technically sound product architecture that enables a safe, flexible, and globally scalable kids-and-parents workflow while preserving Netflix’s strengths in personalization, streaming quality, localization, and member trust.