Dr. No: Kill Every Feature That Isn't the Strategy

"He soon discovered that product management was as much about avoiding distractions as producing breakthroughs. “As I took over product in the company,” Sacks remembered, “I kind of became, like, ‘Dr. No.’ Because I’d always have to say no to everyone’s stupid ideas... it was really important that we not squander our precious engineering bandwidth on ideas that didn’t make sense for the long-term strategy of the company.”"

"Sacks’s pursuit of simplicity emerged as a rallying cry for the product team. “You would count the number of fields and the number of characters and, visually, the mind share of only doing what you must do on that page,” Denise Aptekar recalled. “That’s where a lot of my fundamental product instincts were formed.”"

"Giacomo DiGrigoli never forgot David Sacks’s stark response. “David took one look at it and was like, ‘No. It needs to be this simple. Like, a human being is trying to buy something on eBay. And they need to send that person eighty euros. You should have a drop down that says eighty and the number of the currency. And then on the permission screen, you can put all this other bullshit that needs to be here... Make it this simple, please.’"

"That criteria led to a culling of possible expansion targets—as when Sacks rejected one employee’s proposition that Pizza Hut or Amazon were ripe for the taking. For Sacks, offline retailers were “a revolutionary (rather than evolutionary) step from where [PayPal was] today, and it’s also not clear that PayPal adds much over existing options.” He also considered expansion to Amazon and similar sites a nonstarter: The team understood all too well the frustration and friction of burrowing into eBay’s payment process. Established sites, he wrote, “are loathe to outsource their checkout line to PayPal.”"