eBay In Person: Vikram Subramaniam

Vikram Subramaniam and his watch collection

Vikram is a Senior Director of Product Management, at eBay. Vikram has been with eBay for more than three years. His teams are responsible for designing features in several areas of the site, such as Trust and Safety, Community, and Billing.

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When did you start at eBay and what did you do before?
I started at eBay in April 2002. I have a Bachelor's and Master's in Computer Science, and before joining eBay, I worked for KPMG Consulting (now known as Bearing Point) as a business and technology consultant. My focus was on e-commerce and customer care.

What are your responsibilities at eBay?
My teams are responsible for designing site features in the areas of Trust and Safety, Help, Customer Support, Billing, and Community. For us in Product Management, “design” means figuring out how a feature should work best for our members.

For instance, consider a feature like Item Not Received. After a member opens an Item Not Received dispute, how should the subsequent steps in the process unfold? How should members be able to access the process? My team makes decisions like these, working closely with our Trust and Safety colleagues.

Can you describe some key Product Management initiatives that you worked on/currently in development?
You probably know about the changes to the feedback system that Bill Cobb, President of eBay North America announced earlier this year at eBay Live! We're working to implement these changes. The first phase—removing all feedback from users who are indefinitely suspended within 90 days of registration—is now live (read the announcement). Our belief is that members who are indefinitely suspended within 90 days of their registration were never truly members of the Community. Therefore, their feedback should not count.

One of the most important things we're always working on is improving our fraud detection tools on the site that enable us to catch the bad guys as early as possible, and provide a safe trading environment for our Community.

Describe some of the challenges involved in developing eBay products/features, and making them easier for eBay members.
One of the biggest challenges is recognizing the fact that, while a feature may be great in terms of design, it may still diminish a seller's productivity in some ways – for instance, by slightly increasing the time that the seller currently needs to do a task. The challenge is to help improve members' experience on the site, yet at the same time not overburden them.

A case in point is the design of dispute resolution processes like Unpaid Item and Item Not Received. We believe that these processes add a whole new dimension to improving buyer and seller satisfaction on eBay, by guiding members to a place to go if something goes wrong with a transaction. But we're constantly looking at ways to streamline this. Out of this thinking came the idea of letting members access these processes through My eBay, via the Dispute Console.

The sheer scale of eBay always brings interesting technological challenges. For example, eBay's feedback system contains over 3 billion feedback comments left by members over the years. Whenever we consider a change to the feedback system that could benefit the Community, we have to take into account the cost involved in managing such vast amounts of data. One of the ways we tackle this is to experiment with an idea in one of our smaller markets, such as eBay UK or eBay Australia. These smaller-scale projects help us understand how well our ideas will work without causing a huge impact on our sellers' businesses.

What do you like about working at eBay? What's the most rewarding part of working at eBay?
One of the things I like best about working here is the fact that I'm deeply involved in designing products that directly impact a large number of buyers and sellers. This leads to having a feeling of humility and responsibility towards our Community. I also consider myself fortunate to be working in an environment full of extraordinarily passionate, bright, and committed people.

What skills have you found yourself utilizing most in your career at eBay?
I'd say the most important skill I've learned is the ability to listen to the Community at every stage. One of the convictions that I live by is that our Community is incredibly innovative and uses the eBay platform in ways we sometimes could never imagine. My goal is to see how members use the features we've placed in front of them, and use that as inspiration to make our features better. And, working at eBay helps me keep up to date with technology. I'm always researching new products and technology and analyzing how our members could benefit from them.

What do you buy or sell on eBay?
I've been an avid collector of mechanical wrist watches for over ten years, and some of my best finds have been on eBay. I'm also interested in cartography, and love collecting maps from the era known as "the Great Game," the period of rivalry in the late 19th century between Britain and Russia.

In terms of selling, my wife is an artist, and I try to sell her art on the site.

What's the most memorable item that you've bought or sold on eBay?
A few years ago, I bought a wristwatch that, in addition to telling time, also indicates the times of sunrises and sunsets. What's amazing about the watch is that it has to be calibrated for the precise location (latitude and longitude) of the location where you live.

I also found a map on the site that I'd been looking for a long time, about 15 years! It was published by the British Royal Geographic Society in 1874, and charts the route taken by Nain Singh, a pioneering Indian explorer, from India to Lhasa in Tibet.

What do you like to do for fun?
I like to play tennis and spend time with my wife and adorable four year old daughter.