TECH TITANS: The Key to Standing Out in the Workplace with Mazen Rawashdeh, Senior Vice President and CTO at eBay

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) For the next two episodes, we're doing something very special. We're taking the best leadership episodes from the most popular past guests and distilling them down to ten-minute segments to turbocharge your leadership. If you want even more ten-minute condensed leadership episodes, you can subscribe to Joel Beasley, Tech Titans, in your podcast app. Mazin from eBay joins us in this episode to share his best advice on how to stand out in the workplace. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Tech Titans.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) Where did you learn discipline in your life?

(Mazin at 00:00:35) I don't think it's a switch. It's your experience. You're learning and watching other people and learning from mistakes you made. I think it's just part of your DNA as you grow up around the environment where you are and how you commit to certain things. People say work ethics. I say your ethics, because it doesn't matter. Your work ethics is coming from your personal ethics. And you learn the discipline by really making mistakes and learning. And then you figure out, I need to get better in doing this. For example, when they say self-regulate, I remember early in my career, when my kids used to be pretty little, they couldn't say anything to me, but I used to be sitting at the dinner table on my phone or checking work.

(Mazin at 00:01:22) As they grow up a little bit, I start realizing I need to be present for them. So then you start learning by mistakes you make without realizing I made those mistakes. And then over time, it becomes part of your DNA. And you start realizing, I need to do these things because they are better for me in the long term.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:45) Fully agree. I had a similar realization. I've got a five-year-old daughter, a three-and-a-half-year-old son, and then another son that'll be here within, by the nineteenth. So within the next two or three weeks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:57) Wow. Congrats. Yeah. And when I started the business, I started it basically the same month my first child was born, so five years ago. My wife and I, we made this agreement. We had no clue what we were agreeing to. We made this agreement that I was just going to work like crazy, because I could either go and continue being a software developer and continue building enterprise systems and doing that, or I could go off on this adventure and risk savings and do all of this other stuff. And so, let's try that. I can always go back to software, right? So we made this agreement that I'm going to have to work incredibly hard, nights, weekends, all of this stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:31) Well, little did we know what we were actually agreeing to, because you can agree to something, and then in reality, in practice, it ruined the relationship. For two years, we had a really rough time. And then I had this big wake-up call when I was listening to my daughter in the background while I was on speakerphone with somebody in the family, and somebody asked her where Daddy is or something, and she said something along the lines of, "Oh, Daddy doesn't spend time with us. He's always at work." And that was the moment. I immediately stopped working nights and weekends. I completely changed everything. We started going camping and spending time together because I'm a very productive person. So if I'm not at work doing something, I have to be with the family doing something. So that was about almost two, two and a half years ago, maybe. And wow, has my entire family life changed. That aspect of my life changing has even made me better at work because now I've got this great thing going on at home and this great thing going on at work.

(Mazin at 00:03:28) Yeah. No, listen, I completely agree with you. I think being disciplined in how you use your time and how you are present—you know, most of the time, people have so much going on, and they have a hard time figuring out where you draw the line. You could be extremely successful at work, very productive, but you also can be present with your family, with your loved ones. I always call it—I have a philosophy. I call it "shattered moments." There are certain things you have to be disciplined to do. For example, your kids, if you have kids, they're only going to graduate once from high school. They're only going to graduate once, or if they go to higher education, multiple times. But there's always that first time, or their first birthday. So to me, I look at those, I call them "shattered moments" where you have to do everything within your power to make sure you are present. And then once you do that, actually, you have more satisfaction to be more productive when you go back to work. So it's a discipline. It's a learning. We all have our different ways of doing it. I encourage people to always figure out what it is for you and make sure you have that discipline to draw the line.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:40) I mean, it sounds cool that you're the CTO at eBay. That's just—I mean, that sounds cool, right?

(Mazin at 00:04:44) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:44) But I want to know, where did you start and how did you get there?

(Mazin at 00:04:47) You know, I came to the States back in 1988 to go to school, study computer science. I had no interest to continue living in the States. My point was, I want to get my education, get my computer science, and go back. I came from Jordan. And, you know, as I start living in the States and meet my wife a couple years after I graduated, sometimes it's very hard. You don't plan things. Just opportunity pops in front of you, and you take advantage of those opportunities. And as I continued my education and figured out, wow, there's so much opportunity being in the States, being in Silicon Valley. I've been, you know, the last thirty years, spent my time in Silicon Valley. And my career started in software engineering and computer-related roles I played.

(Mazin at 00:05:35) It's funny when I tell people about my story. Actually, my first job ever in computer science was at Sacramento Bee newspaper, because I went to school in the Sacramento area. And then from there, just, you know, I had a lot of ambition and I have a lot of interest to grow and learn. Fast forward, the rest is history, where, you know, I look at where is the opportunity for me, and I moved around multiple companies, multiple startups. And ended up, I would say in 2003, joining eBay. eBay was a rocket ship at the time and spent around eight years within eBay. Then from eBay, I went and spent five years at Twitter. Then I thought, by that time, okay, five years at Twitter, it was amazing. It's a rocket ship, amazing growth personally and impact across the world. And I decided, okay, maybe I slow down.

(Mazin at 00:06:26) My wife told me you are a workaholic. There's no way you're going to slow down. Actually, nine months into it, I was extremely bored. And then I started looking back. I said, I want to get back into the field. And I had the opportunity to go to different companies, and I decided to rejoin eBay. And I'm glad I did. It's been an amazing journey in my second stint at eBay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:48) What's the culture like there? What do you value?

(Mazin at 00:06:50) You know, it's funny. People ask me, "Why back to eBay? You had opportunities. You could have gone in many other places." One of the aspects that drew me back to eBay is the culture. I would summarize the culture of eBay, in its core, it's extremely healthy, and it's centered around our customers. When you talk to anyone at eBay, the first thing you almost hear is the purpose of the company, and that's actually what drives the culture of eBay. It's centered around customers. We push for a culture of transparency. We are proud of a culture of learning where people can join the company and learn and move around. So if I would summarize, it's a culture that's centered around customer value, centered around the customers, centered around learning, culture of transparency.

(Mazin at 00:07:33) You know, of course, like any other company, we have challenges and we have areas we have to deal with. It's a big company. But in its core, it's an extremely healthy culture. And it was one of actually the reasons what tipped me between other companies I was going to join versus eBay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:51) What type of traits do you value? And I'll give you some context here. People ask all the time, how can I stand out? How can I grow in my career? A lot of the people that listen to this show, they're, you know, I'm going to go listen to the CTO of eBay and get tips and advice from them on how to stand out. And so what type of behaviors do you see, specifically in your direct reports or skip-level, that they're doing, and you see that, and you're like, "That's good. I like that. There's opportunity there. I can invest some time into that person."

(Mazin at 00:08:20) Culture is something extremely important for me personally. And it's the foundation. It's the foundation of anything you do. Many, many CTOs I talk to and many technical folks I talk to, sometimes they're tackling technical challenges through technology. My philosophy is you build the right culture, a lot of good things will follow. There's four areas I always pay a lot of attention to. One, customer. Customer is the center of gravity of everything we do. And as a CTO, my customer could be internal customers or external customers. So to me, make the customer your center of gravity. It will help you make all the right decisions for the company. So you always optimize for the customer. The other one is transparency. I always call it—if you create a culture of transparency, as a byproduct of that, there will be a lot of trust across teams and organizations and membership. And it will eradicate a lot of bad behavior or politics across the organization.

(Mazin at 00:09:23) The third one, ownership. Ownership and pride of what you do. It doesn't matter if you are a software engineer, if you are a network engineer, if you are a security engineer. Have a pride and be the best at what you do. And then the fourth one, it's execution and outcome. I think it's important to be able to deliver the right outcome for whatever organization you are in. So usually, I look at these four areas. To me, these are the four areas I look at as we look at the culture we are building. Transparency is one of the most important ones.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:59) Have you written at all about this?

(Mazin at 00:10:03) Not necessarily, but I talk about it all the time. Here's the important thing about those areas. They are not things you put on the wall. They are not things you just talk about. You have to practice that. So I think your team is going to emulate your behavior, and your team is going to take those and try to play them in their own way deeper in the organization. And that's how you build the culture. I always say, you know you built the right culture when people do the right thing when you are not watching.