eBay
As senior vice president of product, development, and architecture at eBay, Lynn Reedy oversees the entire product development process. Her more than 700-person organization is responsible for all of the initiatives that pertain to the company's work in software development, product specification, user interface design, usability testing, and release management.
Lynn joined eBay in 1999 as vice president of product development. That year, she and her team developed the processes and architecture that increased eBay's output fourfold.
Prior to joining eBay, Lynn was senior vice president and chief information officer of Miller Freeman, Inc., a leading media company and the largest trade show producer in the world. At Miller Freeman, she implemented strategic business systems and developed the company's Internet strategy for more than 200 Web sites. Previously, Lynn spent nine years at Amdahl Corporation and seven years at Accenture (then Andersen Consulting) in a variety of management roles.
Lynn has a Bachelor of Science in mathematics and computer science from the University of Illinois and a Master of Business Administration from Santa Clara University.
Related Links: pages.ebay.com
Last Updated: Fri, May 19, 2006
Reedy explains that another principle instilled in the people at eBay is to develop and execute the right strategy at the right time. If you execute the wrong strategy at the wrong time, you will not have success, she adds.
Reedy talks about eBay's global presence in over 27 countries. eBay has partial ownership in some companies, she says. Eighteen countries were running an eBay platform in 1998, for example, when eBay was only operating in the US.
Reedy explains that eBay has 670 million page views a day, 120 million searches, and 4 billion database calls. She talks about how eBay uses a special platform to handle this large volume.
Reedy talks about the importance of being flexible. In a high growth company, like eBay, opportunities arise everyday and if a company is not flexible it will miss these opportunities, she says. Similarly, as issues arise, eBay is flexible and willing to tackle these issues, she adds.
Reedy talks about the importance of rapid execution with integrity and confidence: executing with a vengeance. Another important principle, she says, is to keep the community front and center in the decision making. The founder understood the power of the community and till this day the community is at the center of everything that eBay does, she adds.
Tilenius talks about how eBay has the technology for wireless integration but the demand for wireless notices is not high enough. In Germany they have a wireless provider who sends users messages if they have been outbid, she says. Besides Korea and Germany, other countries do not have high penetration for wireless trading, she adds.
Reedy tells the story of the brand name eBay. The founder,Pierre Omidyar, wanted to call the website "echobay" but it was taken, so he went with eBay.
Reedy talks about the three key factors in eBay's success: 
Lynn Reedy, senior vice president of product, development and architecture at eBay, sets the stage for the talk about eBay, its history, leadership and how to be successful at a high growth company.
Reedy talks about a key principle that the CEO instilled in the management of the company: the right people at the right job at the right time with the right behavior. A company should have the flexibility to change people as it grows and needs people with different skills, she says. Managers should mentor their employees and focus on career development, she adds.
Tilenius talks about eBay's late launch into Japan when Yahoo! was already Number One in Japan with 500,000 listings. This made it difficult for eBay and they made the decision to exit. We believe that you have to be number one in the market or it isn't worth investing in, she says.
Reedy talks about how eBay uses the community and their feedback for every new feature they develop. eBay is not a product but a platform, she says.
Reedy explains how a company goes from 3 billion to 30 billion. eBay has less that 1% of the retail market in most cases. Management believes that eBay should do more of the stuff that they are already doing. eBay will expand to new countries and work at categories like business and industrial. The company plans to achieve this goals of 30 billion using its platform and by learning from the buyers and sellers, she adds.
Reedy shares a commercial that is going to air later in the week. She talks about eBay's vision - providing a global online trading platform - and the value proposition - making inefficient markets efficient by bring back the fun and the passion.
Reedy talks about how eBay continuously improves. She gives examples from within eBay to illustrate how they execute improvement.
Reedy talks about eBay's site statistics - on an average day a vehicle is sold every 2 minutes, a car part or accessory sold every 3 seconds, diamond jewelry sold every 83 seconds, and timberland shoes sold every 10 minutes. eBay brings buyers and sellers together, she says. The company has 83 million registered users with net revenue pf $531M in Q3 2003.
Tilenius talks about the long term plan of eBay, which is to have a language translator so that there is one platform and one user ID to trade across borders. eBay has not found the technology to do this yet, she says.
Reedy talks about what the success in the engineering organization of a high growth company is. The business has two levers: the website, which is the product, and the product enhancements that eBay does as well as the marketing. The engineering group is pragmatic and focuses on value. Time to market is very important. The technology is made for the business and for the future, she says,and is flexible and continuously improves.
eBay is in 28 countries and the company is looking into cost effective ways to enter new markets, says Reedy. PayPal will attack Europe next year. Typically, eBay, being global, can enter new countries easily; in the case of PayPal it will take more effort. When making an acquisition eBay lets the business strategy define the process or platform. Over time they look for ways to move the country onto the platform as long as it does not put the country or the business model at risk.
Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, had a sense of community, says Tilenius. He constructed a process of feedback to make it easier for two strangers to buy and sell. Having been an entrepreneur before eBay, Omidyar was thinking creatively about how to get profitability. The feedback system was his way of getting out of the middle. At every stage he found ways of letting the community run itself so that the company could become profitable from the beginning.