Company: eBay Inc., Draper, UT
Company Description: eBay Inc., is the world's largest marketplaces where buyers and sellers meet to create transactions that touch life
Nomination Category: New Product & Service Categories - Business Technology
Nomination Sub Category: Platform as a Service
 Nomination Title: Universal Render & Header Platform at eBay (UX PaaS) by Damodaran CS
- Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes in length about the nominated new or new-version product or service, OR written answers to the questions for this category? (Choose one):
Written answers to the questions
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the nominated video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video.
- If you are providing written answers for your submission, you must provide an answer to this first question: If this is a brand-new product, state the date on which it was released. If this is a new version of an existing product, state the date on which the update was released:
Launch date: 2023 January
Name of the product / service / solution:
Universal Render & Header Platform at eBay (UX cloud PaaS): Drives engagement, Streamlines navigation, Accelerates product agility, Enhances personalization and product discovery
Background:
Prior to these solutions, delivering site wide and reusable targeted UX (render UX into specific targets based on the use case) wasn't seamless. Every page had its technology stack. Integrating with each was a herculean effort that usually took months.
Next, the impact of the header and navigation failing was costly as users wouldn't be able to sign-in, search and navigate, access the shopping cart or view notifications. These platforms solve the aforementioned issues, while enhancing product discoverability, agility and delivering seamless cohesive UX..
These platforms produced innovations in:
- Templating techniques via streaming HTML, asynchronous out-of-order rendering & flushing, but in-order paint on the page.
- Rendering techniques like - critical, inline, edge, on-demand, client-side, server-side, lazy for various usecases like Single Page apps, multi-page apps.
- Decoupled delivery & code rollouts with separate production applications while the aforementioned apps are rendered as remote apps and the HTML or view transcluded at runtime into host app.
- No impact to core web vitals via the novel asset optimization pipeline that achieves reduced asset sizes, code splitting, asset bundle intersections, tree-shaking & compile time builds that resulted in 25% reduction to CPU usage of production machines.
- Edge caching innovations in reduction of hydration data & tracking data payloads, to cache server rendered HTML at the edge.
- State management & design session innovations through the use of Finite state machines for development of UX modules.
- Autogeneration of tests to avoid test suite maintenance via model based testing through finite state machines.
- Guardrails, processes and governance in-place for onboarding and maintaining modules that are co-developed by >30 partner teams (150+ modules) accross 700+ production pools within eBay.
- Full on micro-services and micro-frontends for sharing of framework runtimes
- Static fragments served for eBay scale of traffic with 50% lesser hardware.
Collectively these platforms,
- Achieve decoupled releases without dependencies on partners pages (like Search, Item).
- Have 95th percentile response time of <50ms.
- Serve 700+ production applications powering over 100 pages, mobile apps.
- Have onboarded >30 eBay partner teams with 150+ use-cases for delivering visual and non-visual modules across eBay
With this, eBay now:
- Delivers & rapidly iterates targeted UX anywhere, across pages —search, payments etc., based on a wide gamut of business rules, priorities, rendering modes with experimentation, tracking.
- Unifies Search & navigation, across pages. Funnels users to right experiences without impacting performance.
- Operate through a declarative approach, that lets partner team engineers build impactful UX in weeks instead of months, accelerating product agility, reducing hundreds of man hours that can be reused for better initiatives.
- A 5% lift to module customer satisfaction scores, funneled experiences saw 10% lift in traffic, 4% to conversion and a lift of 20% in module engagement traffic.
Brief background of the individual responsible for this:
Damodaran is a staff software engineer & a presentation platforms architect at eBay. He is known for architecting and building the aforementioned eBay's Horizontal apps - Header & Navigation platform and the Universal Widget Render platform (UX PaaS). Collectively these platforms serve over 1billion calls in traffic, at scale. The nominations are for these platforms. He is also a recipient of eBay's Critical Talent Award for these successful initiatives that have helped eBay strategically.
Supporting documentation backing this nomination is attached, including Critical Talent Award from CEO of eBay [REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION] conference talks and research paper submitted for this are also included. Financial & product metrics related information are proprietary and cannot be shared.
- If you are providing written answers for your submission, you must provide an answer to this second question: Describe the features, functions, and benefits of the nominated product or service (up to 350 words):
Total 350 words used.
Background: eBay is an e-commerce marketplaces world leader with over 2 billion listings, in over 190 markets world wide, connecting millions of buyers and sellers, through the use of technology
Through this product / service, Damodaran solved 3 major challenges faced by eBay:
- How to render, deliver targeted UX (surfaced at specific points during a customer's journey) which could be served on any eBay screen or page, device agnostic, fully decoupled from the product pages code and its releases?
- How to unify the Search, Header and Navigation experience dependablywith lesser hardware, in a micro-services and micro-frontends environment?
- How can the current timeline of launching site wide and targeted UX (few months across pages, screens & devices) be improved?
Solution:
- #1 was solved by the Universal Render platform and #2 by the Header & Navigation platform. Both are eBay’s firsts in terms of a horizontal UX platform as a service.
- #1 powers site wide and targeted UX such as promotional coupons and social widget sign-in, ads, marketing campaigns, informational messages, guidance banners, educative tooltips, to name some.
- #2 powers the search and navigation experience, the shopping cart, item watchlist, user notifications and >10 headless modules like co-browse, tracking, experimentation, site wide scripts (non-visual but required for essential functioning).
Prior to these, delivering site wide targeted UX wasn't seamless. Every page had its technology stack. Interfacing with each was a herculean effort and took months of effort. Next, the impact of the header and navigation failing was costly as users wouldn't be able to sign-in, search and navigate, access the shopping cart or view notifications.
Both achieve decoupled releases without dependencies on partners pages (like Search, Item pages). They have 95th percentile response time of <50ms.
With this, eBay now
- Delivers targeted UX anywhere, across pages —search, payments etc., based on a wide gamut of business rules, priorities, rendering modes with experimentation, tracking.
- Unifies Search & navigation, across pages. Funnels users to right experiences without impacting performance.
- Delivers site wide UX in weeks instead of months, allowing for rapid iteration and saving hundreds of individual man hours that can be deployed usefully elsewhere.
- If you are providing written answers for your submission, you must provide an answer to this third question: Outline the market performance, critical reception, and customer satisfaction with the product or service to date. State monetary or unit sales figures to date, if possible, and how they compare to expectations or past performance. Provide links to laudatory product or service reviews. Include some customer testimonials, if applicable (up to 350 words):
Total 347 words used.
These platforms aim to enhance product discoverability and agility, developer productivity while delivering seamless and cohesive UX site wide. eBay users aren't aware of such a platform nor is it communicated externally. So, traditional sales figures do not apply. Financials and metrics data are proprietary. However, their contributions are quantifiable.
Performance metrics:
- Ship site wide targeted UX (injection at specific points on a view), anywhere (both at run-time and compile-time), to 700+ production applications internally, powering over 100 eBay pages, mobile app views with 50% less hardware.
- Rapidly Iterate UX based on a wide gamut of business rules, priorities, eligibilities, devices, screen sizes, render modes.
- Drive >500M in traffic individually, while handling varying view frameworks, templating engines, render modes (critical inline, edge, string, DOM renders), page types (server vs client), application types (Single page and multi-page apps) with <50ms response time.
- Implements the island architecture, to achieve a near zero hydration for instant interactivity.
- Have onboarded >30 eBay partner teams with 150+ module use-cases for delivering visual and non-visual modules across eBay. (Non-visual are headless modules such as device profiling, security scripts, tracking, co-browse and experimentation scripts that require to be delivered across all pages and views)
- Operate through a declarative approach, that lets partner team engineers build impactful UX in less than a week, instead of the earlier timeline of a few months across different codebases and frameworks.
- A p95 (95th percentile response time) of less than 50ms.
- Backed by tracking and experimentation, enabling product managers to make data driven decisions
Impact on eBay & customers:
- Funnels user traffic to the right experience. Optimizes and streamlines the search and navigational experience.
- A 5% lift to module customer satisfaction scores, funneled experiences saw 10% lift in traffic, 4% to conversion and a lift of 20% in module engagement traffic.
- Site-wide and targeted UX are launched in weeks (fully decoupled releases from partner product pages like Search / Item pages etc.,), instead of a few months, greatly improving product agility, reducing manhours.
Critical reception:
[REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION] internal awards letter from CEO.
- You have the option to answer this final question: Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):
Total 249 words used.
To substantiate the claims made, a variety of supporting materials is included:
[REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION]
[REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION]
Critical Talent Award: from eBay's CEO recognizes the contributions and strategic value of these platforms, highlighting their importance to eBay's success.
Conference Talk: from the "Software Architecture Live" offers insights into the architectural decisions and benefits of the systems.
Research Paper: published in the IEEE Computer Society journal provides a peer-reviewed account of the platforms' innovations, lending academic credibility.
Collage: of various targeted UX modules in production illustrates the diverse applications, real-world use.
"Detailed Features": document outlines the comprehensive features of the platforms, detailing the technical solutions that address eBay's challenges.
"Technical Innovations": document describes the novel techniques, optimizations implemented, supporting our claims of innovation and efficiency.
"Market Performance": document discusses the performance and impact on eBay's operations.
"Background": document provides context about the product and the key individual behind it
[REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION]
[REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION]
Attachments are curated to demonstrate the effectiveness, innovation, and strategic value of the Universal Render and Header & Navigation platforms at eBay.
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