Last November, eBay added a feature to its home page that tips off shoppers to one- day deals on certain products. The company has deen ftissing over it ever since. The "daily deal" widget at-tracted so many clicks that product managers decided to spot -light four items instead of one. Engineers saw a need for real - time updates on new deals, so they ginned up automatic Internet alerts. Customers asked for a simple way to remind themselves and friends of bargain details, so eBay added an "e-mail-a-friend" button next to each item. The try-and-retry approach to software development may be typical atrnmany Web sites today, but it's abreak from eBay's usual model, one notorious for subjecting every new product or site tweak to months of internal scrutiny. "Now we're actually going to put something out before we've got all the answers," says Mark Carges, the company's chief technology officer.rnSince Chief Executive John Donahoe hired him last September, Carges has been charged with recapturing the innovation that drew millions of users to the auction site more than a decade ago. In the early days of the Web, eBay poured resources into building a sophisticated auction system and infrastructure that could sustain huge amounts of traffic. "We were writing the rule book and experiencing growth no one had witnessed before," says Marty Cagan, a technology executive who left the company in 2002.
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