The Client: eBay

eBay is a global commerce leader connecting millions of buyers and sellers in over 190 markets. As one of the original online marketplaces, eBay continues to evolve its seller and brand experience to meet modern expectations for trust, visibility, and engagement. Its innovation team was seeking clarity on how to support brands in a seller-centric ecosystem better.

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The Mission: Interim Product Manager for Brand Experience

While eBay is best known as a marketplace for individual and business sellers, established brands also maintain a presence - either directly or through authorized partners - to offer buyers trusted, brand-backed products. The Brand Hub team was in an exploratory phase when Product People joined. Initially set up to test new ideas for brand engagement, the team had been experimenting with multiple initiatives but hadn’t yet converged on a clear strategic direction. Our role was to drive focus and unlock value for brands on eBay — an audience historically underserved by the platform’s core tooling — and to help evolve the team’s mission into one aligned with long-term, scalable impact.

Key expectations from the mission included:

• Identifying high-impact opportunities to support brands
• Evaluating existing tools and their adoption challenges
• Reorganizing and aligning team workflows for clarity and focus
• Driving strategy and execution on key brand-facing initiatives

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Our Main Quest: Making eBay More Valuable for Brands

At the heart of our mission was a clear question: how might eBay become more valuable for brands, in a way that builds trust, increases visibility, and drives repeat engagement?

While the Brand Hub team had already explored a range of ideas, what was needed next was a unifying strategic direction — one that connected brand needs with eBay’s marketplace strengths and long-term goals. We worked with stakeholders across product, marketing, analytics, and engineering to define a north star that could guide both short-term priorities and future planning.

This shift wasn't about reinventing the team, but about sharpening focus, turning exploratory momentum into a roadmap grounded in value creation for both brands and the broader eBay ecosystem.

Launch: Onboarded Fast and Built Credibility Early

Product People were brought in by the Senior Manager of Product Innovations to help shape a strategy that could unlock untapped value for brands on the platform.

Despite the complex stakeholder landscape and limited initial documentation, we ramped up quickly. Within the first few weeks, we had:

• Established strong relationships across cross-functional teams
• Gained a working understanding of eBay’s internal tools and data systems
• Began facilitating conversations that clarified the team’s strategic focus, shifting from early-stage experimentation to initiatives with measurable impact for brands.

Our ability to onboard fast and earn trust early helped shift perceptions about interim PMs — from temporary stopgaps to strategic partners.

Explore: Reframing the Team’s Mission Around Brand Value

Problem:

The Brand Content Manager (BCM) was a legacy initiative with very low adoption. It aimed to give brands more control over their content on eBay, but required complex integrations with limited return. Supporting it further would have demanded significant investment, unjustifiable given the narrow use case and lack of traction.

What We Did:

• Organized stakeholder workshops to map brand needs, pain points, and areas of opportunity adjacent to BCM
• Collaborated with tech leads to conduct a high-level sizing exercise, assessing the feasibility and cost of scaling BCM
• Aligned the team and leadership around a new direction: shifting focus to Listing Quality — a higher-leverage opportunity aligned with existing brand workflows and platform capabilities

🎯 Outcome: We refocused the team from a stagnating initiative to one with broader business impact, laying the foundation for faster value delivery.

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Initiative 1 – Building a Brand-Focused Listing Quality MVP

Problem:

Brands on eBay lacked visibility into the quality of their listings and had no clear guidance on how to improve them. Existing tools were fragmented, internally focused, or designed for general sellers, not for the specific needs of brand managers.

What We Did:

• Researched internal tools (like Seller Hub and ads team dashboards) to identify underused but valuable listing quality signals
• Validated which metrics mattered most to brands, such as number of items sold and aggregated revenue, and identified which breakdowns could be implemented (e.g. , totals across all sellers, only authorized, or only direct sellers), based on the data already available in our pipeline.
• Led the design and delivery of a lightweight MVP during a one-week dev sprint (Hackathon-style) — tailored to brand needs but built using existing internal tooling and infrastructure

🎯 Outcome: We shipped a working MVP in days, not months — demonstrating how interim PMs can quickly turn strategy into execution.  We iterated based on indirect feedback gathered through internal brand-facing stakeholders.

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Initiative 2 – Redesigning Sales Insights to Unify Brand Reporting Across eBay

Problem:

Sales Insights, one of the Brand Hub’s core features, was still in beta and relied on a different data source than the one used by internal brand-facing teams. As a result, brand managers were often presented with conflicting numbers. This inconsistency created confusion and made it harder to build trust in the Sales Insights data — both internally and with external stakeholders.

What We Did:

• Led the transition to a unified data source for brand performance — ensuring alignment with what Category Managers were already using
• Standardized the logic for identifying brands (e.g., what qualifies as a brand, how branded listings are flagged, etc.) across systems
• Redesigned the Sales Insights experience to provide clearer, more actionable views for brand users — while improving internal maintainability
• Worked with analytics, data, and UX stakeholders to ensure the tool met both brand and internal partner needs

🎯 Outcome: Sales Insights moved out of beta into a reliable, scalable feature — creating consistency across eBay and helping brands trust the data they were shown.

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Discovery Mini-Missions: Our Side Quests

In parallel with the major initiatives, we tackled critical enablers of long-term product success:

• Team Structure & Governance
  • Introduced PM prioritization meetings and pre-grooming rituals
  • Helped streamline decision-making across a shared development team by aligning on priorities before weekly planning, ensuring more efficient sprint execution.
  • Rotated agile coach duties across team members for shared ownership
  • Encouraged shared ownership of team processes by rotating facilitation and retrospectives, building a more resilient and self-managed team culture.
• Analytics Foundation
  • Implemented Amplitude tracking across key features
  • Closed critical data gaps by introducing structured product analytics, enabling the team to track engagement and iterate based on user behavior.
  • Enabled strategic GTM planning with actionable insights
  • Partnered with the Head of the Brand Advertising Program to define metrics that supported go-to-market efforts. The new visibility helped shape how brand tools were positioned and measured in strategic campaigns.
• Strategy & Planning
  • Facilitated the 2025 planning offsite and OKR workshops
  • Co-led structured sessions to align on objectives, define key outcomes, and set a shared direction across PMs, designers, and developers for the year ahead.
  • Conducted competitive research to benchmark eBay’s Brand Hub
  • Analyzed offerings from Amazon, Walmart, and other brand offerings to identify differentiation opportunities and guide strategic decisions around eBay’s brand tools.

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Mission Achievements: Delivered Outcomes

💡 Strategic refocus from feature delivery to marketplace impact, leading to clearer brand value propositions.

💡 Created alignment across teams and tools, enabling reliable brand sales reporting across eBay.

💡 Enabled outcome-oriented ways of working through planning rituals, agile coaching, and team governance.