Chinese Version
08-12-2021，Wednesday，very hot(95°F)
This morning I went to the airport at 6:30 am to pick up someone, and I took a good nap after coming home, which made me feel good.

Recently, my brother and I often chatted about e-commerce opportunities. I commented that the concept of some e-commerce products I developed more than 10 years ago in eBay is still little known to the world.

For example, in 2002, I felt the management of product development in eBay changed a lot. The new products that I worked on were no longer given by Jim, my boss, to his team members. Instead, I started to develop new products via inter-team cooperation. I worked with mostly young men, such as “Cross Merchandising”. I was the development leader, and worked with Darren, from the user interface team, and Andrey from the customer service team.

At that time, the product managers for most of the large products of eBay were Harvard graduates. I remembered Ha, the product manager of eBay Storefront launched in 2001, who was a Vietnamese girl who had graduated from Harvard.

The product manager of Cross Merchandising is Ben F. When introducing himself at the first product meeting, Ben said, “I’m not from Harvard. I’m a neighbor of Harvard.”

I had no idea of Boston and didn’t understand the joke, so I seriously asked, “Where are you from?”

Ben probably didn’t expect to meet such an ignorant and inquisitive person. He looked at me in surprise and said, “Most of eBay’s big product managers are from Harvard, but I’m not. I’m from MIT.” He stopped and laughed, “So ‘Cross Merchandising’ will be a very technical product.”

“Cross Merchandising” attempted to recommend 3 to 5 relevant goods associated a order to the buyer on the order confirm page, so as to automatically and intelligently help the merchant to sell more goods.

“Cross Merchandising” was a highly technically-oriented product. After several discussions, we found that the current situation of eBay’s database could not support Ben’s functional requirements for the new product. The company allocated special funds to expand our data storage capacity for “Cross Merchandising”. Hubert, one of the database architect of eBay at that time, who later worked as CTO on dangdang.com, designed and introduced the “IO cache (write fast and read fast)“ into eBay’s huge seller database.

This product was originally planned as a new feature for the eBay buyer system. After introducing “write fast and read fast” into eBay’s huge seller database, I had to update the SYI system to adopt the “write fast” approach, resulting in a new and unplanned workload. This product took several months to complete. Because the project dragged on for a long time, David S, the then development director, came to ask me, “Are you sure it’s safe to launch this product at the end of the year?”

I said confidently, “The biggest change for this product is how to interact with the new database. Andrey is responsible for testing all the conditions of the database interface, and I think he did well. If the database interface is safe then the product will be fine.”

At the end of 2002, we successfully launched the new product of “Cross Merchandising” to the eBay site.

In January 2003, Ben, the product manager, sent a thank-you email to the whole product team, saying that the data analysis showed that this new product was very popular with eBay sellers, and thanked everyone for their efforts to successfully fulfill this new product concept with its high technology requirement. The day I received the email happened to be my birthday. I was so pleased and stayed happy with myself for such a long time, so I remembered this product deeply.

Little Episodes

1. 08-12-2021, Although today’s amazon.com applies the Cross Merchandising concept so well, searching the Internet for “Cross Merchandising” shows that the references were dated to 2015, 12 years later than the “Cross Merchandising” e-commerce function we developed on eBay in 2002. At the forefront of technology application to real business, it seems still a long way from practice to theory into textbooks, which may be one of the reasons why the company always wants to recruit people with work experience.

2. The distance between Harvard and MIT is about 2 miles.

3. My two partners in this product
Darren and I went to Kijiji later, and he became my boss in Kijiji. Darren nicknamed himself “square head” because his head is a little square.

Andrey volunteered to work in a branch in Europe for a year when he was on eBay. In 2009, he went to a company that developed medical and health management system. He also asked me if I wanted to join his company, because the development of health management systems were very popular in 2009.

4. 2006, Kijiji technology division (from 2006 Kijiji Calendar)

In 2006, I transferred from eBay’s global website development team to eBay’s Kijiji regional website development team.

In the newly established Kijiji Development division, I was the only developer who was most familiar with the functions of eBay’s e-commerce. Therefore, I sometimes chatted with the technical or product manager about the e-commerce products I developed on eBay because they were very interested. Once, I talked to a technical manager about the “Cross Merchandising” I developed in 2002. The manager couldn’t understand the operating principle and technical implementation of the product. At that time, I realized that in the rapid growth of eBay from 2001 to 2003, my boss constantly gave me opportunities to develop brand new e-commerce products, which may be related to my unconventional and careful way of thinking, because when I received the “Cross Merchandising”, I didn’t think this new product was incomprehensible, although it really was a product with novel ideas.