eBay doubled the output of its engineering teams and cut the wait between a code commit and production to two days from 10 under an internal program called Velocity, though how work gets planned and approved never changed, according to former chief architect Randy Shoup at LeadDev London. Shoup blames what he calls the seller straitjacket for the user-facing side, since flat marketplace growth had left eBay risk-averse and nearly any change threatened sellers who had built businesses on the way the site already worked. Cleaning up search misspellings helped buyers and killed the arbitrage sellers ran on badly titled listings. Shoup says his 2022 exit followed clashes with a VP who ran the 700-person organization behind the product page and personally approved its deployments for a year.
