Role: Director of Service Design at Docusign
Business :: Innovation and Impact
Introducing: Intelligent Agreement Management
Creating and Selling the Vision for an Integrated Platform
Timeframe: 1 month
Status: in-market and continuous delivery
Scale
Service Design: I was asked to build a team in November 2022. I recruited five and hired one of the highest-level, most tenured ICs in our product design practice
Product Design: 70 designers broken into 6 larger teams; designers assigned to features or flows
Product Experience: ~125 design, research, content, IA & ops
Product, Design and Engineering: 2,700 employees
Docusign: Public company with 7,500 employees and 1.7M customers globally
Challenge:
Docusign was at an inflection point.
The stock price had tumbled from a high of $310 in September 2021 to $38 in November 2022.
By May of 2022 The CEO had been fired and a complete leadership turnaround happened shortly after that. Layoffs ensued, and people started leaving in droves.
For years, a rotating cast of senior leaders tried to shift the company from a single eSign product to a suite of services the market was demanding. Acquisitions were made to accelerate the effort. Internal resistance and technology inertia sabotaged it every time, mostly by the entrenched eSign team.
But all the new leadership and the cratered stock price lowered the threshold. Things had to change,
Hypothesis:
If we can use our deep knowledge of the full product suite and multiple vision projects to successfully show what Docusign’s future should be to the CEO, we could invest in both the work and the organizational shift needed to power the change.
Highlights
Business Transformation & Innovation
Design strategy
Design leadership & facilitation
End-to-end product integration
The Context
“I love Docusign!”
When I told people I worked at Docusign that’s what they said. I knew what they were talking about: the signing experience.
That experience was first introduced about 25 years ago solving an enormous problem — reliable, secure, legally sound electronic signatures.
When the pandemic began, the world didn’t entirely stop in the US, even though it seemed to. People were getting married, buying houses, cashing out retirement plans, getting new jobs, and all of it needed eSignature.
With a higher market cap and a rising stock price came ambitions to expand the footprint.
Acquisitions followed.
The idea was to accelerate with built products that we would integrate into our ecosystem.
All those companies kept operating as independent entities. The technology was not integrated — at best, it was bolted on. Experiences overlapped.
Designers were unaware that they compounded the problem with every duplicative shipped feature.
The Problem
“This is not a Docusign product.”
Customers of the “other” products regularly walked away from renewal, telling us we sold them on an experience we did not deliver.
They weren't wrong.They expected everything to be as simple and lovable as the signing moment.
Leadership circled this problem, coming up with strategy after strategy to compel teams to build towards each other instead of away.
I could see a clear path to those integrations and kept hammering at the problems. It was the ultimate agile, de-siloing, collaborative challenge.
But the eSign team, in particular, dug in. They were not going to integrate a single new thing into a teetering, crumbling tech stack. Every time I needed cooperation from the eSign team, it was stiff-armed or begrudgingly given.
Even design leaders said “but do we really need this? we’re an eSignature company.”
C-suite leaders seemed both blissfully unaware and monumentally frustrated. They asked design to come up with versions and visions and designs that showed where we were headed.
Designers were jaded, burning out, and started resisting vision work in any form.
The Stakes
“eSign simply isn’t enough.”
The future of Docusign was up for grabs. eSign’s resistance to change and leaving tech debt in place had not paid off.
Our new CEO tried to sell to Microsoft, Google and Bain, who all walked away.
What would happen next? Liquidation of product lines, massive layoffs, and a contraction down to a size that made us a more appealing acquisition.
That is, unless we moved fast to build out a real, sellable platform that met customer needs and expectations.
We knew what customers wanted. Now it was time to stop resisting and start doing.
The Ask
Our first Chief Product Officer asked our new VP of Product Experience to create a feasible vision of what a “unified” Docusign could be.
He, in turn, came to me to ask my team to take this on. My team hailed from every product line and knew everything, “where all the bodies are buried,” a morbid metaphor we use in companies to signal we have a LOT of experience and tech debt.
We needed to pull together every major product line plus the vision for how AI would integrate so that the CPO could take it to the CEO to get the work funded.
I was pumped! The VP had come to the right team, and my colleagues had pointed him in our direction.
We would be part of setting the new direction. Being attached to this work should protect us from layoffs.
My team was … not.
The Oh No
My team wanted no part of it.
Vision work done in isolation, only to be shelved as quickly as the previous vision work? Not validated with customers?
No thank you.
Wait, what?
I saw their point — but they were misreading the situation. Also, they were acting just like the eSign team! The behavior they’d been complaining to me about for a year.
I knew we were in burnout. I didn’t know it was so bad they would refuse work from the CPO —knowing that layoffs were always lurking in the background.
How would I turn this ship around?
I considered saying look, you don’t have a choice and simply using my authority, but I am not a command and control leaders.
Instead, I asked them what they would need to put their energy into the work.
The Aha
What did I do? I wrote a really good brief.
Honestly, I didn’t think it would work.
My team wanted to know exactly what was needed and what it would be used for, which is what I delivered.
I also worked with my research partner to plan on how we could use her brand new customer pane for prototyping, co-designing, and validation.
My team got to work. And wow, did they understand the assignment. Our early work amazed the CPO. We only needed one iteration. Even other design teams were buying in, slowly.
We finished, he presented, and the CEO funded the change.
