Universal Render & Header Platform at eBay: Drives Engagement, Streamlines Navigation & Accelerates product agility

Challenge:
Damodaran solved 3 major challenges faced by eBay:
1. How to render, deliver targeted UX modules that could be served on any eBay screen or page, device agnostic, fully de-coupled from the distributed apps and pages?
2. How to unify the Search, Header and Navigation experience dependably with fewer machines, in a micro-services and micro-frontends environment?
3. How can the current timeline of launching site wide UX (few months across pages, screens & devices) be improved?

Solution:
- #1 was solved by the Universal Render platform and #2 by the Header & Navigation platform. Both are eBay’s firsts in terms of a horizontal UX platform as a service.
- #1 powers business targeted use-case specific UX, coupons, ads and marketing campaigns.
- #2 powers the search, navigation, cart, watchlist, notifications and >10 headless modules like co-browse, tracking, experimentation, site wide scripts.

Result:
Collectively these platforms:
- Serve 700+ production applications powering over 100 pages, mobile apps with 50% less hardware.
- Drive >500M in traffic reliably, while handling varying view frameworks, templating engines, render modes, with <50ms response time. 
- Have onboarded >30 eBay partner teams with 150+ module use-cases for delivering visual and non-visual modules across eBay

Impact on eBay:
- Drives engagement by enhancing existing experiences, funnels user traffic to the right experience, and simplifies search and navigational experience.
- A 5% lift to module customer satisfaction scores, funneled experiences saw +10% in traffic, 4% to conversion and a +20% in module engagement traffic. 
- Site-wide UX are launched in weeks, instead of a few months, greatly improving product velocity.

Innovations that made it possible:
-Streaming HTML templating for in and out of order UX paint.
-Rendering techniques like critical, lazy, edge, server, client.
-Decoupled delivery & code rollouts through code streaming of separate production apps.
-Asset optimization pipeline for 25% CPU reduction.
-Reduced data payloads for edge caching.
-Predictable State management with Finite State Machines.
-Autogenerated tests for maintenance through model based tests.
-Governance for >30 partner teams.
-Micro-services and micro-frontends for runtimes sharing.
-Bundler innovations for micro bundles