OfferUp is one of the largest and fastest-growing online marketplaces for local buyers and sellers. In this age of rising e-commerce, the company provides enhanced customer experiences through personalized web and mobile applications, bringing millions of people together under one roof from right where they are. In an exclusive interview with Akhil Kaza, we asked him a few questions to understand his roles and responsibilities and more about his experiences and inspirations.

Earning a Spot in the Digital Marketplace

OfferUp is the largest mobile marketplace for local buyers and sellers in the US. It connects millions of people every day and is committed to the founding mission, which is to build the simplest, and the most trustworthy local marketplace. The company helps bring people together in their communities to exchange values, connect, and prosper. The things the company buys and sells are a part of how they build their community in America. In fact, it has created a marketplace where everyone has something to offer.

Leading a Pack of Hard workers

At OfferUp, Akhil is the Vice President of Engineering who is responsible for the engineering strategy, developer operations, and data science. His team includes a local group at the company's headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, and remote teams spread across multiple regions. Akhil is also a part of the executive team that manages OfferUp's business strategy and volunteers in company initiatives concerning diversity, inclusion, and hiring.

The company's technology stack is comprised of a microservice architecture spanning 120 microservices, a middle tier in GraphQL, a consolidated front end in React for web/mobile, a highly personalized machine learning pipeline, enterprise tooling, and third-party E-Commerce SDK. The services include search, catalog, integrity, chat, notifications, identity, payments, billing, data sciences, data warehouse, data platform, admin, autos, and merchant platforms.

Before OfferUp, Akhil worked across big tech and startups (including founding, advisory, and executive leadership roles), and has focused his career on building durable teams and showcasing the power of technology for consumer and enterprise products on a large-scale basis.

Paving the Road towards Executive Leadership

According to Akhil, getting broad experiences concerning technology, leadership and processes were critical to helping him understand the end-to-end of software development. He spent time in engineering, QA, product building and operations, while handling increasingly complex management roles, eventually leading to this Executive position.

He adds, "Knowing what to avoid is half the job, learning from the misses; the other half and the only way to get that is to always be in the learning mode. A big part of our jobs is working with, for, and along with other people. Understanding what works and what does not for an individual is the key to drive common goals. It becomes easier to put yourself in their shoes if you have been in their shoes."

Akhil spent time building large-scale software for billions of consumers at different layers like Kernel, input/output/application subsystem for what is now Windows 10, platforms like HTML, Silverlight, WPF, consumer services, and infrastructure across multiple clouds using machine learning. He is also one of the founding members of Silverlight (a successful UI technology), was a key voice in the strategic shift at Microsoft to move from their HTML engine to Google Chrome; responsible for rewriting the tech stack for OfferUp and large parts of Windows to drive large scale innovation, reliability, maintainability, and extensibility.

Akhil shares that this change in focus was driven by a need to learn. Working backward from the customer/business need and driving that to solutions, in an iterative fashion is what it is all about.

Challenges that Turn into Experiences

Akhil mentions that a lot of his formative years were spent learning, adapting, and taking on harder problems across the engineering ecosystem. Identifying, confronting, and surmounting challenges were essential for his growth.

His responsibilities grew over the years, he learned how better he can communicate with his teammates, scale up increasingly complicated projects, work through or with other stakeholders and also how to view and think about the big picture. The willingness to fail and know that learning comes from mistakes was a key perspective that took time for him to develop.

At the Core: Embedding Innovation

Thinking about the customer path and experience is always the baseline. One must design the strategy by working backward in the customer journey. Then using that as the basis will be valuable to break the work down into phases. Through iterative development, one can deliver value fast, phase by phase. Learning from the delivery, at the same time is also imperative.

Akhil says, "Being able to A/B test and learn from wide experimentation helps you define the right market fit. Tracking the usage of your products through telemetry is essential to further tune that." Ultimately it comes down to data and analysis of information to drive the right outcomes.

Software development is part art and part science. The art part is about knowing what to do in the absence of data. The science part is about knowing what to do once the data is collected.

Akhil strongly believes that one needs a bit of both to be effective. He draws inferences from Amazon v/s Apple. A lot of Apple products are intuitive out of the gate and have to do with a deep understanding of the customers; a lot of Amazon's work has to do with learning from the customer from real-time systems and iterating. For him, both are great models but it's always about the customer.

Leveraging the Might of Disruptive Technologies

Every 10-15 years, there is a shift in where compute goes. Akhil urges to think back to mainframes going to PCs, going to the internet to mobile phones, and going back to the cloud. Computing is scaling up on both sides (client and server) and that trend will continue. What is particularly fascinating about this round is the company's understanding of data on a global scale. This is where AI and Offerup's ability to build real-time, near real-time and offline systems to draw inferences comes in, especially true with the degree of personalization that is happening.

According to him, the role of the leader is no longer about being just a manager, rather it is about thinking big in this large green space, working backward, learning from misses, and doing it while bringing people along. Unlike traditional autocratic models, there is a need for a leader to be a mentor, a coach, a partner, and at times a decision-maker. Smart people do smart things when empowered; that being said the leader needs to be well versed with the overall landscape to drive effective tie breakers.

"Being able to differentiate between reversible and irreversible doors is the key to being able to act fast, iterate and learn. Failure within reason is a perfectly acceptable outcome as long as there is learning and it is truer for a leader than anyone else", he said.

Towards the Bright Future

According to Akhil, commerce and sustainability are two key factors of the future. 48% of Americans bought something through resale in 2020, and one in five Americans used OfferUp to buy or sell something. Last year accelerated the shift from retail to resale that the company had seen coming for a long time. Americans have discovered that resale frequently is less expensive and better for the environment than traditional retail. So it is Offerup's ability and responsibility to help people connect and prosper through local e-commerce. It is more important than ever before.

In terms of the tech industry, the rate of change and innovation is tremendous, and the biggest trends to watch for soon are the rapid developments of crypto, AI, RPA, and the democratization of data. Decades-old trends in healthcare, insurance, commerce, finance, and legal are going to get disrupted at an unprecedented scale. These changes will amount to a better consumer experience because tech is growing more quickly, as humans crave more and more personalization.

Takeaways to be a Successful Leader

On advising emerging leaders, Akhil said one of the primal qualities that a leader should possess is a risk-taking ability, growing the breadth of experiences is the key to be able to pattern match as the leaders go through their careers. Impactful communication is critical to be able to influence people at all levels, and lastly, being able to stand for what one believes in is imperative.

"Think big, but bring your team along and deliver success in pieces. Do not be afraid to fail. Keep learning, cultivate your network, and help others grow through you. Your career is a marathon, not a race, pace yourself and make quick decisions on reversible choices, and lastly, help good people get better, ultimately you might work for them and that's a great outcome," he asserts.