Better after Breakups

Can you give an example of a situation where you were worried about whether taking a risk would end in failure and how did you overcome that fear?

So, when I was at PayPal again we separated from eBay. So, PayPal had been a subsidiary of eBay Inc. And the board made a decision to separate into two separate companies. And I led the separation on the PayPal side. And we had had a design principle that essentially said everything that exists today, that services both pay PayPal and eBay is going to go to eBay. So PayPal, you have to build everything new, every system literally thousands of systems. We were in this situation.

What a daunting task.

Incredibly daunting, and really high risk because we were trying to do it in a way that was -- we needed to do it quickly. We needed to do it without disruption to our customers. We needed to do it with as minimal disruption to our employees as we possibly could.

And you better not have any service outages.

There's no outages in this center or even service interruptions. This is not okay. So, in order to mitigate the risk, we built a very large cross-functional team that in expertise from across the organization and we broke everything down, it was a mammoth task.

What would you say is the biggest take away from that process that you would share along to other leaders? Is it the importance of just looking at strategically a breaking it down into bites that you can handle a little bit at a time?

That is definitely a big part of it. The other part of it is making sure it always comes down to people, right? It always comes down to the human factor. So, getting a team that truly is the knowledge base, the historians, particularly with something like that, you have to bring all the institutional knowledge that brought to bear. And you have to bring those individuals who have the skillset around just in the moment crisis problem solving. I love working with engineers. And the reason I love working with engineers is inherently, the one thing that engineers are, is problem solvers. And so, giving them the freedom to solve the really hairy problems that invariably show up they'll be able to do it. So, really but making sure you've got the right individuals that are going to be able to help you along the way.