Author Archives: alex94040

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.”

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.” […]

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 […]

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, […]