eBay Doubled Engineering Productivity, But Former Chief Architect Says Culture Held It Back
Former eBay Chief Architect Randy Shoup says an internal overhaul doubled engineering productivity and sharply sped up software releases, but did little to change the planning and management problems he believed were holding the company back.
Shoup worked at eBay twice, first as an individual contributor from 2004 to 2011 and again as Chief Architect and VP of Platform Engineering from 2020 until his departure in 2022.
In a recent LeadDev London presentation, Shoup said he was recruited back to help bring eBay "into the modern world of software" at a time when the company had about 5,000 engineers and 4,500 applications and services running in production.
Many of those applications were deployed only once or twice a month, with an average lead time of about 10 days between a developer committing code and the change actually reaching production. Large initiatives commonly involved 50 or more teams.
Shoup helped launch an internal initiative called Velocity, working with product engineering teams to identify whatever was slowing development down and then trying to remove those bottlenecks.
Some were technical, including slow build and test times, unreliable staging environments and deployment processes that still required people to manually click through different stages. Others were organizational, with teams waiting for code reviews and approvals from other teams.
The basic pitch from Shoup's platform team was simple: "Your impediments are my backlog."
Shoup says the effort doubled engineering productivity, allowing the same teams to produce about twice as many features and bug fixes. Lead time fell from 10 days to two, deployment frequency increased substantially and eBay moved from roughly the 35th percentile to the 75th percentile under industry-standard DORA software delivery metrics.
CEO Jamie Iannone regularly highlighted Velocity at company all-hands meetings, calling it one of eBay's most important projects and pushing the team to go faster. Shoup and his product engineering partner also presented the work to eBay's Board of Directors.
The initiative continued after Shoup left, eventually expanding across eBay. The company also moved its iOS and Android apps from monthly releases to weekly releases, a change Shoup says his own mobile release manager had initially told him could not be done.
By 2025, Shoup said 98% to 99% of eBay applications had fully automated test and deployment pipelines and the Velocity program was still being used across the company, though he says the project never delivered everything he had hoped.
Shoup says eBay's long-fractured relationship with its seller community posed a particular challenge he dubbed the "seller straitjacket." Years of relatively flat marketplace growth had produced a highly risk-averse organization, while almost every user-facing change risked disrupting sellers who had built their businesses around the way eBay already worked.
He points to his earlier work on eBay search as an example. Fixing misspellings made search better for most users, but sellers had already built arbitrage strategies around finding poorly titled listings, buying them cheaply and relisting them with the correct spelling.
That doesn't necessarily mean the sellers were wrong to complain. The marketplace had created the rules they were operating under and changes could have real financial consequences for businesses that had adapted to them.
But from inside eBay, Shoup says repeated seller revolts over user-facing changes added another reason for employees to become cautious about making them.
Shoup describes a centralized annual process involving hundreds of people and months of planning, with major initiatives effectively set for the next 12 to 18 months.
Smaller projects could struggle to get attention because work had to be approved by the executive team, but only projects large enough to make the executive initiative list could get in front of the executive team in the first place.
"So smaller projects can only survive in this ecosystem by tacking themselves on" to bigger initiatives, Shoup said, adding that by small he meant projects that did not require hundreds of people. Those large initiatives could take quarters or years and involve 50 or more teams.
At that scale, Shoup says eBay rewarded executives for delivering features and milestones promised in advance, creating what engineers referred to internally as a "feature factory." At the same time, some of the technical problems he inherited were being fixed, including the major project to overhaul eBay's View Item page.
In the 2025 presentation, Shoup said Velocity was not intended to rearchitect the entire marketplace, but two areas clearly needed major work: eBay's mobile apps and View Item, the listing page at the center of almost every transaction on the site.
eBay later provided its own account of that project in a 2023 engineering retrospective, "How eBay Modernized the Most Important Page on Our Platform."
Apr 7, 2023 By: Lakshimi Duraivenkatesh, Ben Vesco and Saral Sukumar Jeyaseelan
The company said View Item was receiving more than 250 million views a day and had gone about a decade without an intentional rewrite, leaving a legacy system that required work to be duplicated across desktop, mobile web, iOS and Android.
Rather than attempt a complete rewrite, the team migrated the page module by module while it remained live. eBay said the project ultimately produced a 200% increase in development velocity and cut the effort needed for new product improvements by 50%.
The lead author was Lakshimi Duraivenkatesh, who had served as VP of Buyer Experience Engineering during the project. The technical overhaul was separate from the user-facing View Item redesign eBay was testing around the same time, though the two initially overlapped before negative A/B results led the company to separate them.
That redesign also drew seller pushback. eBay initially promised to move item specifics and descriptions above competing items and ads, but Promoted Listings remained above descriptions during testing and the first phase of the final redesign rolled out in December 2023 without the promised change.
Liz Morton
View Item also figures into Shoup's account of why he left eBay. He says his departure from eBay followed repeated clashes with an unnamed longtime VP who controlled an organization of roughly 700 employees and contractors responsible for "more or less" building the product page.
In the newer LeadDev talk, Shoup says the executive's boss asked him why a rearchitecture project was taking so long. He says he answered that it was because the project was being run as waterfall rather than agile development and believed identifying that problem would give him an opportunity to help fix it.
Instead, he says the criticism contributed to his own exit. "The fact that we saw that it was waterfall meant, great, now I can help," Shoup recalled. "But again, in this pathological culture, calling somebody out is bad."
According to Shoup, the unnamed executive was gone about six months later. He has not named the executive, and VAR has not independently established who he was referring to.
But the 2025 version included more detail, with Shoup describing the organization as a "culture of terror" and alleging the VP threatened high-performing employees with poor reviews if they tried to transfer to other teams, leading some to leave eBay and others to move elsewhere inside the company.
He also claimed the VP personally approved every deployment made by the roughly 700-person organization for an entire year and said there was "a lot of maneuvering behind the scenes" before he was replaced as Chief Architect in 2022.
Shoup says the problem went beyond one executive. He describes eBay as what organizational researcher Ron Westrum calls a “pathological” culture driven by fear, blame and internal politics rather than cooperation.
He says senior leadership could operate like a zero-sum "Game of Thrones," with executives competing for people and scope, while employees learned that acknowledging problems could make them targets instead of creating opportunities to fix the underlying issue.
Shoup isn't the first person to raise concerns about fear, retaliation and dysfunction inside eBay.
The most extreme example remains the 2019 stalking and harassment campaign against EcommerceBytes publishers Ina and David Steiner, which grew out of senior eBay executives’ anger over the site’s coverage of the company and efforts to identify an anonymous source, Fidomaster/unsuckEBAY.
Seven former employees and contractors pleaded guilty to criminal charges, while eBay itself was charged with six felony offenses in 2024 and admitted to the underlying conduct under a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department. The Steiners’ civil case ended this year with a $55.7 million settlement involving eBay and several former executives.
Liz Morton
The campaign occurred under former CEO Devin Wenig, before Shoup returned to eBay, but not everyone in eBay’s leadership and oversight structure from that period is gone. Three directors from 2019 remain on the board today, including current Chair Paul Pressler.
Aaron Johnson, then VP of IP Litigation and the primary recipient of Steve Wymer’s “Whatever. It. Takes.” email, was not accused of participating in the stalking campaign and remains at eBay, where he is now Chief Ethics Officer, serving as an escalation point for employee ethics complaints and reporting to the board’s Corporate Governance and Nominating Committee on ethics, compliance, tone and culture.
Liz Morton
Retaliation allegations have continued under Iannone's tenure. Former Senior Technical Product Manager Amanda Bartolotta sued eBay alleging she was harassed and discriminated against by her manager, then faced retaliation and was eventually terminated after reporting her concerns through Employee Relations and Ethics.
Her complaint alleged that after she raised concerns, a senior manager told her Human Resources would not believe her and that her options were to leave the team, leave eBay or accept that her manager would be "leaning hard" on her. eBay disputes the allegations and is seeking to move the claims to private arbitration.
Former employee Paige Williams filed another retaliation and whistleblower suit this year, alleging years of problems involving leave administration, discrimination and internal complaints, along with separate claims that she raised concerns about Promoted Listings metrics to company leadership and later provided information to the SEC.
eBay says Williams was terminated as part of a reduction in force and is also seeking to move most of these claims to private arbitration.
Liz Morton
Shoup closed by saying he would handle the resistance differently today, trying to “route around” it instead of confronting it directly. He currently works at a company with about 100 employees.
"Kind of hard to transform a 5,000 person organization," he told the LeadDev audience.
