Deb Liu: evaluation

Transcript context

…That's such an important point, and a reminder of just the power of incentives and processes and systems and how that more than anything influences how people work. Is there a story or an example that comes to mind of how that went well or didn't go well or something that you changed or someone at eBay or PayPal changed to take advantage of that insight? I just remember we were working on a project called next-gen checkout. It was the next generation checkout, and I was about to go on maternity leave. My son was going to be born, it was my first child, and we kicked off the project. And then right after that, I went on leave. I came back, I actually handed my team over to my colleague who was a friend of mine and he was my successor, Mike Woo, and he took over the team and he was doing a great job and I didn't want to displace him so I went to corporate strategy. I worked with Rajeev who was the CEO of PayPal at the time and did strategy for him. And then eventually, I started the charity and social commerce verticals at PayPal. I was in the verticals job for a while, then I ended up going to eBay. And when I got to eBay, I led the end-to-end buyer experience, including next-gen checkout. And they were still working on it. Actually, and we celebrated. We actually had drinks on the lawn of eBay, and we celebrated when the project was done and my son had just turned two. You think about that, we did the first integration between the two sites. We actually planned it, my team and the team at eBay between the announcement of the integration, which was July, and we shipped it on October when the deal was cleared. We actually, we weren't even allowed to talk to each other for a long time because the deal was actually a due diligence, so we actually only did the integration in a very short period of time. You think about the next gen of that checkout took two years. And then after that we shipped that product and it was successful. And then they said, "Okay, we're kicking off unified checkout. We're going to integrate the checkouts even more." We looked at the roadmap and it was going to be another two years. At that point, I said, "I can't do this again." I ended up leaving to go to Facebook at that point. But what I learned from that experience was that it wasn't for lack of trying or care. It wasn't that the teams weren't working hard. On both sides, the team was eagerly eager to work on it from both PayPal and eBay, but each individual team had insufficient information and support to actually get it done. And that was the big issue. And yet, there was a lot of misunderstandings in between. It was like, "Well, they're not supporting us, they're not picking our features." But actually, I was literally at both sides of the project and that was not really what was happening. What was happening was there was insufficient support on both sides. And so thus, you end up in a case where you end up fighting over prioritization, and in the end, when you're starving, what you're focused on is what you need to get done on your side. And so really I think instead you either fund something like that, fully get it done quickly, or when you elongate it like this where things are just, you're just creating hostility between the teams. It's so cool that you were on both sides of this experience and saw how very different teams and approaches worked. Something that I don't know if people know is that you joined PayPal when you were very young and it was maybe your first PM role and you ended up taking on some significant responsibility super quickly. I'd love to hear a bit about that part of your career and how you were able to take on such a big role so quickly and how you scaled and learned as you went.…

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