John Maeda—famed designer, computer scientist and past president of RISD—joined eBay one year ago as the Chair of the new eBay Inc. Design Advisory Board. (Maeda is also Design Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.)
Maeda started at eBay in Jan. 2014. By April, he had several hundred employees meeting at a conference to talk about design. At the June VP meeting, Maeda had all 180 VPs partner with designers for one huge design session.
eBay president and CEO John Donahoe came up with the idea of making a design playbook for the entire company and Maeda eagerly embarked upon creating it. Soliciting stories, ideas and concepts from across the company, Maeda and Team eBay are evolving how they can most effectively deliver great experiences to customers.
Amazing to see such quick cultural transformation at a large scale! Kudos to Donahoe and Maeda for clearly placing design at the center of eBay’s product strategy.
I’ll post an exploration soon of exactly how that playbook transformation is coming along. Inspiring stuff!
