Who am I and how did I get here?
I’m a Group Product Manager at eBay. I’ve worked here off and on since 2002. In my first experience eBay was a client. I was an Accenture consultant at the time eBay and eBay was an absolutely awesome place to be staffed because there was so much happening.
For the next two years I worked in quality assurance roles, product management roles, and project management roles across a variety really cool projects delivering a variety of core products: Selling Manager, Selling Manager Pro, eBay Picture Services, and a redesign of eBay Stores.
Leaving the Borg
I left eBay briefly in 2005, but a member of the eBay Stores team that I had worked with (Eric Shoup) encouraged me to apply for a product management role at eBay. We worked pretty closely. I think he could tell there were days when I was frustrated and he he’d ask me, “So are you ready to leave the borg?”
I wasn’t at first, being very content with the opportunities I had within Accenture at eBay. Over time though that changed.
The Rise and Fall of AEPD
The Accenture team I had been a part of grew to be quite large and was became known as the Accenture eBay Product Development team. I ended up leaving the consulting practice and joined Accenture’s services team as AEPD’s Product Management Liaison.
There were some trade-offs to transitioning out of the consulting practice, but it was a long-term engagement that allowed me to work locally and to focus on an area that I found particularly interesting – product management. Unfortunately the role ended up being something quite different than advertised. It was far more QA focused than it was PM focused.
I had an opportunity to lead a large QA team, which was a good experience. However, the QA team was located in India, which was made things very challenging. I learned a lot and the team was great, but I basically worked around the clock. That was followed by another QA lead role on a marathon-sprint project (16 hour days seven days a week for almost four straight weeks) at PayPal. After that I was rewarded with a PM role that allowed me to reunite with the eBay Stores team. It was an awesome role, but one that forced me to work through my Christmas vacation.
After a difficult year full of professional challenges and disappointments the AEPD team was officially ended. I was given the choice to go back into the consulting practice, but the only open roles were in Dallas and L.A. So instead I elected to stay in the services practices and Accenture Services team at SBC (now AT&T) in June of 2005.
As luck would have it though the SBC team did not have a roll immediately available and so for the first time in almost three years I was on the bench. As I began to think through the type of role that awaited me at SBC I realized that I was ready to leave the borg.
Joining eBay
In between computer-based trainings I worked on my eBay resume and before I knew it I was back on the eBay campus interviewing for open PM roles. My last round of interviews was actually on the day I was leaving for an extended vacation. On my way home from the interview I received a call from the SBC team telling me they finally had a role for me.
I told the manager I spoke with thanks, but that I was literally in the process of leaving on a previously-planned, two-week vacation so he shouldn’t plan on seeing me on Monday. eBay offered me a job while I was on vacation and I accepted their offer. I also arranged a start date that allowed me to extend my vacation an additional week.
I joined eBay in late 2005. As fate would have it, I did not join the eBay Stores team though. Instead I was hired by Aaron Forth and ended up joining the User Acquisition product team. That was an absolutely awesome experience. I ended up working on a team full of fun and talented people.
