How DocuSign’s teams tie customer value to every single web & product change

How do you deliver value at every stage of the customer journey? 
 
It’s the single most important goal held by almost everyone from marketing to sales to engineering to data teams. 
 
Even with a solid customer journey map, delivering that value -- much less connecting it directly to the everyday work that happens on the ground -- is easier said than done. Unless you’re the team at DocuSign.

DocuSign’s teams (with hundreds of individual contributors) tie customer value to every single change they make across their marketing and product strategies and deliverables. By doing so, they also happen to constantly find ways to deliver the best possible experience to every single one of their customers.

How has the team accomplished what for many feels like a distant dream? They’ve developed a strong culture of experimentation that their teams deploy for every proposed change, and their Marketing, Product, Design, and Engineering teams (to name a few) use Optimizely to bring those experiments to life.

In this post, Anjali Mehra, Senior Director, Analytics & Experimentation, at DocuSign, breaks down how DocuSign built their experimentation program from the ground up.  

Get the inside scoop: How DocuSign structures their experimentation program 

The DocuSign difference isn’t just that DocuSign uses an experiment like A/B testing to endorse every customer-facing change. Here at Optimizely, our team loves experimentation, but we know that, practically speaking, running experiments simply isn’t enough. 

The reason DocuSign has been so successful is their rigorous, holistic approach to experimentation across the company. Here’s the good news: Anjali from DocuSign has told us how they’ve achieved it.

Here are the program highlights: 

• DocuSign’s experimentation program is a whole-company effort: more than 20 customer-impact teams amounting to hundreds of users are on the Optimizely platform. 
• DocuSign Marketing, Product, and Design teams use Optimizely to test both web and product features. Plus, the DocuSign Engineering team uses Optimizely’s feature flag functionality to ship most features they deliver. Everyone can work from the same platform, which meant they can scale their programs and share their learnings easily. 
• Because the whole DocuSign team uses Optimizely to run experiments, they’re generating data from across the customer lifecycle. All this data allows them to truly understand not only their current customers but prospective and lost customers.  

All of this happens because DocuSign has built not just a culture of experimentation but a strong experiment planning culture. All of the teams’ testing is backed by a clear strategy that includes: 

• Planning the test and parameters 
• Developing a clearly refined hypothesis  
• Choosing a North Star KPI 
• Achieving cross-functional stakeholder alignment 
• Running an impact analysis 
• Selecting a decision framework to take action   

Why DocuSign partners with Optimizely for their experimentation program 

Running a program like DocuSign’s starts with a business commitment, but they needed the right partners to bring it to life.

DocuSign began their journey towards their current culture of experimentation over ten years ago. At the time, they were heavily focused on building a website with a ground-breaking conversion rate. They chose Optimizely even back then to test and iterate on their web and commerce flows.

As their company evolved, they decided to grow with Optimizely to onboard more teams for feature optimization and experimentation and even feature flagging. Even better, they’ve reduced the resources otherwise needed for this program because they don’t need in-house engineering resources for experimentation.

The results transform day-to-day work for their teams 

As a B2B SaaS organization, DocuSign is most concerned with three KPIs: conversion, expansion, and retention rates.

But to create velocity and stay at the forefront of their category, they’re just as focused on tying every decision they make to powerful data, which allows all their teams to directly tie their work to business value.

The results across the business speak for themselves and are transformative for work flows.

As individual teams, DocuSign are: 

• Not only hitting KPIs but understanding how they got there & tying it back to individual contributor and team work 
• Creating real velocity to launch and ship faster through a data-driven, experimentation culture 
• Building product and marketing roadmaps & making business decisions based on clear results 

Replicate DocuSign’s experimentation program in 5 steps 

Remember how DocuSign carefully plans every experiment and their underlying experimentation strategy serves as a foundation for every test they run?

Take another step back and there’s another framework they used to get where they are. And it’s the same framework that can help you set up a long-lasting program of your own.

According to Anjali, here’s the framework she used to build their experimentation program: 

1. Get executive sponsorship. 
2. Align with all your cross-functional partners. 
3. Establish program-level goals and OKRs (like velocity, win rate, impact) 
4. Create a test planning strategy and program 
5. Build a test and learn culture 

Will 2024 be the Year you change everything (with data)? 

Check out our new report, The Evolution of Experimentation, to learn more about how Optimizely customers have run over 127k experiments and turned practitioners into champions.