Fraud Dial vs. Usability Dial: Tension as Architecture

“Sacks relented. But his resistance spoke to what would become a perennial balancing act at PayPal between the website’s security, its usability, and its coffers. “Peter called it ‘the dials,’ ” Sacks remembered. “It’s easy to stop fraud if you’re willing to kill usability. What’s hard is maintaining a sufficient level of usability without letting fraud get out of control. So Max controlled the fraud dial. I controlled the usability dial. And we’d come together to agree on a compromise.””

“Sacks observed that PayPal’s culture of tension was also a culture of truth. “It was ‘truth-seeking’... there was a lot of friction. We all respected each other and that’s why it worked. There was a lot of yelling, and we just cared about getting to the right answer,” he said.”