I interviewed Barb in April, when I visited eBay San José for a workshop on the AdCommerce project.
10. April 2008, San José, USA
Barb started at eBay in October 2005 as a Product Manager (PM) for Internet Marketing. Before that she was Product Manager at Amazon.com. She started her career at Amazon in accounting, became a financial analyst later, did business development which led her to product management. Now at eBay Barb cares for optimization of advertising performance from the product side and for new advertising solutions – together with me J
We met at the eBay Campus in San José. which was recently given its new name "Whitman Campus".
Hi Barb, what´s a product you really like to use?
I´m kind of a gadget girl and like everything that´s gadgety. So even if it’s an expected answer, I like the iphone a lot. Every week I´ll find a new use for it. It really makes my life easier. That´s what I like: it’s multifunctional AND makes life easier – you don´t have that in a lot of products. Also, it’s not over when you bought it. It gets new features every day, like the new GPS in combination with Google maps (works by triangulating cell phone tower signals). And you can add all that new stuff with just two clicks.
What makes a website a good product?
It´s quite similar for me. It must be easy to use and easy to find what you´re looking for but also have a good selection. I like www.netvibes.com as an example. It’s a modular portal, fully customizable to your needs and taste, you can include your Facebook news, eBay account, flickr pictures, gmail or even Fedex tracking. I already use it to summarize 10 things, which saves a lot of time. It’s super easy to set up and fun to use.
How did you become a PM?
It was not really a planned step. As a financial analyst at Amazon, I wanted to become more a part of the real business instead of just interpreting data. I wanted to make things happen, so I joined business development and then PM. A PM at Amazon is much different from eBay. At Amazon you are much more acting as a business owner and are responsible for a P&L, while at eBay you are more writing down requirements and working with developers. One of the first things I did at Amazon was to bring in all the inventory of Target, a large US retailer. It was when Amazon was mainly selling media and this large amount of Target´s inventory needed to be translated into Amazon catalogues and data structure. But it was also about giving Target sufficient visibility and smart merchandising on the Amazon site. It actually contributed largely to Amazon setting up more categories than media and broadening their supply.
A PM job is great if it’s holistic and you see the strategic impact. It´s bad if it’s too project-driven and just about rolling out feature after feature to the site without really knowing, who is going to use all this.
What PM project did you really enjoy? Why?
I really enjoy the collaboration in our latest product (which is secret J). We are now 4 different people in the PM team with different backgrounds, but very motivated, full of ideas and with open communication. That amount of collaboration is important for good product quality. Too often you don´t have real brainstorming and creativity while creating a product, or Product Managers specify products completely on their own, without feedback from related teams.
What does it need to be a good PM?
You need to be a jack of all trades, and an expert about everything: how the site works, what detail coders need, understand the direction of the business, design etc. Bad PMs are too focused on specific tasks, like the mere technical or user interface part and therefore lose creativity. Some colleagues here are overloaded with tiny little things on a heavily loaded roadmap and can spend little time focusing on the general goal. Let´s take the eBay search and finding projects, it;s tons of features and changes, but sometimes you feel like its not aligned to a general goal, like “how do I find the right item in 3 seconds”.
And a PM needs strong communication skills and understanding of others, as you collect requirements from various parties.
What makes life hard for a PM?
Sometimes it’s a thankless job. You have to be in every meeting, have to deal with too many stakeholders often, who have short or narrow focuses. At eBay you have no business responsibility, that´s why some PMs sometimes lose focus.
If not internet plattforms, what kind of products would you like to manage?
I always wanted to do personal financial planning. Most people don´t understand financial planning and don´t know how to manage their money, even guys with a degree. I´m not thinking about this in the traditional way, like interviewing people about their future wishes and appetite for financial risk. That’s basically sales stuff.
It´s more smart to do this in a way like www.mint.com. There you enter your entire financial details and it tells you, what you spend your money on, what you will have left and how that could become more, if you change some things (like changing insurance carriers, credit cards, phone providers etc.). I would like to create a similar tool, but also connect it with face-to-face interaction, make it less a sales pitch, but a financial consulting solution for everybody. Most people, who really could use financial planning would never go to a personal financial planner at a bank. But it´s so easy to spend a lot of money today, and people should better be aware of that and more goal-oriented while they spend it.
Thanks Barb!
