Our good friend Alex Kirtland has a long interview of Alan Lewis of eBay:
Photo: Alan Lewis
Alex Kirtland: Finally, Meg Whitman recently talked about how important improving the eBay user experience is to success of eBay. How has that had an impact on the culture / work style of eBay’s development teams?
Alan Lewis: This shift has been in motion for many years, actually. For a long time at eBay, the biggest problem was scale. Much of the engineering effort and time spent developing the website would go into things that the user would never see. We got better and better at keeping the site up, and we got to a place where we were more confident in our ability to handle the continued growth. So a few years back we started to put a much higher priority on improving the user experience, which we all knew was in need of improvement.
The reorganization that was done at the beginning of 2007 was by no means the first step – as I said the company as a whole recognized the problem long before that. The executives, I think, realized that the company had to be structured differently to tackle the user experience improvements that were needed.
As somebody “in the trenches†here at eBay I have been very pleased with how the culture has shifted. People are willing to take more risks now. When I propose doing something, it is rare that I hear someone saying “no, that’ll never work,†but instead they will say “ok, let’s try that out and see what we can learn from it.â€
A message that our prediction exchanges and prediction software vendors should listen to.
