So glad to get more coverage for the team and the personalization work we’ve been doing at eBay. eMarketer interview: eBay Incorporates Machine Learning to Overhaul Email Marketing Platform
Author Archives: alex94040
Email Marketing Secrets from Uber, eBay, and REI
Proud to see external validation of our CRM and personalization approaches in email: http://marketingland.com/3-brands-email-marketing-right-211020
CRM and Personalization: Email Tech Is Now Ad Tech
eBay has come a long way in our CRM and email marketing in the past two years. Personalization is a relatively easy task when you’re dealing with just one region and one vertical and a hundred thousand customers. With 167M active buyers across the globe, eBay’s journey to help each of our buyers find their […]
CRM and Personalization at eBay – Interview
Here’s the Information Week interview about the CRM and personalization system my team built at eBay.
May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor
In life as in work, we’re constantly dealing with uncertainty. As parents, employees, leaders, we look at the future and estimate the odds: what’s the chance that our teenage son will do drugs? What’s the chance that this system’s load will exceed what we designed it for? How likely is this risky investment to result […]
If your team isn’t on-track, try this
The most concise, truly beautiful definition of leadership I’ve heard is “having others WANT to follow you.” This definition means two things 1) that you’re actually moving somewhere, not standing still and 2) that others are convinced, not coerced, into going along. There are so many leadership books out there, some talking about vision, some […]
Your team just screwed up badly — here’s what you do next
You’ve been there. Someone on your team just screwed it up. Your production website went down in the middle of the night, it took hours to bring it back up. It’s 10am the next day, you’re at your daily standup, and the culprit is looking down, ashamed and quiet; the team is noticeably uncomfortable and […]
Machine Learning and Digital Marketing: Melding Human and Machine
In digital, you can easily spot two opposing camps — the artists and the quants. Artists are folks like the New York Times: Pulitzer prize-winning journalists use their intuition and skill — their unique talents — to create one-of-a-kind stories, and the judgment of the Chief Editor is pure gold. Artists create incredible brand value; true loyalty — lifelong fans. Quants are […]
Paid Apps Model Revisited
How many times have you hesitated before buying a 99-cent app? You’re staring at the reviews. Looking for a Lite version to try out first. Catching yourself at the thought: “I’ve spent more time thinking about buying this thing than the 99 cents that it’s worth.”
Are Your Company Values Just Empty Words?
I had a chance to interact with two companies recently: Homegrown and City of Bellevue Utilities. These two companies helped me crystallize the difference between “value statement on the wall” and “values that are coming through to customers.” Homegrown’s tagline is “sustainable sandwich shop.” Their About Us page has the word “organic” mentioned 22 times. It says that “stores are designed to […]
Full Price is for the Lazy, or Stop Financing Their Marketing
In life as in business, if you are willing to invest effort into something, you will do better – a lot better – than average. Today’s story is about a real-estate purchase – and how doing your homework makes a 10x price difference for services. Did you notice that you just paid your agent $1000/hour? Basic dynamics of […]
Handling “Scary” Interview Questions
I had the privilege of speaking in front of the Code Fellows class this week; as a part of the talk, I took “scary” interview questions from students and attempted to create framing for answering them. Here are a few: “What are your greatest weaknesses?” “Do you have questions for me?” What to do when […]
Why Are We Working on This?
You’re a recent grad from a top engineering school. You come to a hot startup, and in your second week, you volunteer to implement an ambitious new feature. You slave away at it for a week, burning the midnight oil, trying to impress your new colleagues. You’re brilliant: you find an ingenious algo that solves […]
Hire for Velocity of Learning
Let’s say you have an opening on your technology team: An urgent need for engineer that will expand your application written on top of the Spring Framework in Java. You use Puppet for deployment, and Jenkins for managing your builds. So naturally, you craft a job description that says “must know Spring, Jenkins, and Puppet.” […]
Dogfooding: Find a way to be your own customer
This article was originally published as a guest post on Geekwire; it is republished here for the readers of this blog. In early ‘90s, while working on Windows NT, Microsoft popularized an idea to make everyone on the team use early builds of their own software. Back then, it was quite a painful request — imagine developing an […]
Hackathons at Startups: Creative ‘Fresh Air’
This article was originally published as a guest post on Geekwire; it is republished here for the readers of this blog. Every now and again, we hear about hackathons: Startup Weekend, Facebook’s famed all-nighters, Hack Week at Dropbox. However, in a startup, it’s so difficult to imagine how organizing a hackathon can be anything but harmful: “What do you mean, […]
Measuring interruptions: How to keep your team in the ‘zone’
This article was originally posted as a guest post on Geekwire; it is republished here for the readers of this blog. When you look at productive output from a software development team, there’s one factor that almost always predicts problems. You can have top talent; an outstanding idea; great agile process. And yet, if you don’t […]
Facebook: The personalization engine for all of the Web
This article was originally posted as a guest post on Geekwire; it is republished here for the readers of this blog. Facebook and its third-party applications today know a hell of a lot about each us: what content we read (Washington Post Social Reader); what music we listen to (Spotify); what movies we watch (Netflix). […]
Offer a Conversion Path!
I’ve had a curious experience with Amazon EC2 recently, and it made me think of a the process of adoption of new systems and services. In short: it doesn’t matter how good your product is, if it’s too hard to switch from the old way of doing things to your new-and-revolutionary gizmo. Let me share […]
Influence of Your Work on the World
As I was finishing school, I had a dream – I wanted my job to maximize my influence. I wanted the product of my craft to touch, in a meaningful way, as many people as possible, helping them in small and large ways. It’s mostly pride and desire to maximize the control over your environment: […]