![]() “We are using that model for how we work going forward,” Ferguson said. The product was initially developed by a group that consisted of one product developer, two engineers and two designers. The company launched PayPal Here, a credit card processing service for small merchants that competes with Square, earlier this year. ![]() Hill and I sit in a room and decide to do something and it’s done.” “We brought that all together and can make much swifter decisions. “We had multiple different product teams coming to me with their ideas and requests, which was crazy,” Barrese said. Hill Ferguson, PayPal’s new head of global product, and Chief Technology Officer James Barrese oversee the new, single-product development group. Marcus’ new approach involves giving smaller groups of engineers and designers the freedom to coalesce quickly and release early versions of products that will be tested with a small sub-set of PayPal users and updated quickly, he said. That meant any problems with new products took a long time to update and fix, Marcus said. In the past, it took PayPal six to nine months to develop and launch a product, partly because there was a long application process to assemble the required teams of employees.Īfter products were released, engineers and developers moved on to other projects. “In some cases, we don’t have better products and we have to do something about it.” “It’s important to face the reality of the situation,” Marcus said. Marcus has organized demonstrations of rival services at PayPal headquarters in San Jose, California, and screen shots of competing products line the walls of some corridors. Marcus said he is reorganizing PayPal to help engineers and designers develop new products and services more quickly - to keep up with new rivals. Still, Hartz said PayPal’s new executive team is the right one to overhaul the company’s culture and approach. “We just haven’t seen a lot of innovation that’s needed for them to continue their leadership,” added Hartz, who was an early investor in PayPal and owns a small stake in Square now. “PayPal has been on a very strong growth trajectory, but it’s facing a period of disruption ahead,” said Kevin Hartz, chief executive of ticketing start-up Eventbrite. PayPal needs such talent more than ever because a slew of payments start-ups, including Square, Stripe and Dwolla, are developing rival services and products that are beginning to catch on with merchants and consumers. But in Silicon Valley, PayPal is considered a slow, bureaucratic behemoth - a reputation that has made it difficult for the company to attract and retain smart software engineers and designers. Wall Street considers PayPal the crown jewel of eBay because it is growing fast and profit margins are expanding. “You have a lot of duplication of roles with nine product groups merging into one,” he said. “In a large company, at some point you reach the law of diminishing returns when more people means slower,” said Marcus, who used to run mobile payments start-up Zong, which PayPal acquired last year. PayPal, which started in the late 1990s as a scrappy Silicon Valley start-up, had almost 13,000 employees earlier this year. The company is also cutting about 120 contractors.ĮBay will take a $15 million pretax restructuring charge in the fourth quarter related to the job reductions. PayPal, the online payment pioneer owned by eBay Inc, said on Monday the full-time jobs would be eliminated as it combines nine product-development groups into one. Visitors walk past an Ebay and PayPal banner at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona February 28, 2012.
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