Chief Technology Officer, GoDaddy
AWS Executive Insights: Charles Beadnall, CTO - GoDaddy
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Miriam McLemore sits down with Charles Beadnall, CTO of GoDaddy, as we hear his perspective on innovation at scale when it comes to people, culture, and organization. This interview is the latest in the 'Conversations with Leaders' series, on AWS Executive Insights.
About Charles Beadnall
In a 2019 interview, Charles Beadnall, Chief Technology Officer at GoDaddy, described his role as overseeing the company's technical direction, engineering standards, and practices, including the migration of services to AWS and the implementation of machine learning. He stated that GoDaddy focuses on helping small businesses get online through domain names, website hosting, email, and search engine visibility. Beadnall emphasized the importance of diversity and inclusion, saying that a diverse workforce helps the company address the varied needs of its customers and that GoDaddy has been a leader in providing transparency on pay parity and diversity metrics. Beadnall discussed GoDaddy's approach to innovation, which he described as a continuous cycle of data-backed experimentation where teams form hypotheses, measure results, and treat unsuccessful experiments as instructive. He noted that the company uses a "horizon" model to prioritize work across steady-state businesses, up-and-coming ventures, and nascent ideas. Beadnall also said that GoDaddy has shifted its definition of customer success from product purchase to active usage, such as publishing content and generating traffic, and is using machine learning to tailor experiences to individual customer needs.
Transcript (14 segments)
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Interviewer0:11
Charles, could you share a little bit about your role?
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Charles Beadnall0:12
Sure, and thanks for having me. I'm the Chief Technology Officer at GoDaddy, which basically means I'm responsible for the technical direction for the company and also the engineering standards and practices that we use across the company. That includes moving our services to AWS, implementing machine learning, the quality, and other guidelines that we set across the company.
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Interviewer0:39
Very cool role. Could you tell us a little bit about GoDaddy and the transformation journey that GoDaddy is on?
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Charles Beadnall0:42
Yeah, so GoDaddy is really focused on helping small businesses get online. We're probably best known for selling domain names, but obviously we help them with a lot of other areas for building a... We try to focus on making it as easy as possible for them to get online.
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Interviewer1:16
So you and I have had some robust conversations about diversity and inclusion. Could you talk a little bit about what that means at GoDaddy?
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Charles Beadnall1:21
It's a very important aspect for us. Obviously, we think that having a diverse and inclusive environment for employees helps us better address the diverse and unique needs that our customers have. We really want to try to represent that. I think we've been a leader in that field in terms of providing very visible information in terms of pay parity and the diversity numbers. We're one of the first companies to come out with a lot of that information, and we are continuing to experiment with different... Half of it is just making it even easier for us to use the products that we already have. We're obviously the market leader in domain names. Depending on exactly which number you want to look at, we're one of the largest hosting companies in the world, we're the largest WordPress hoster in the world. Essentially, what we want to do is make that customer experience even better.
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Interviewer2:32
We talked a little bit about innovation and experimentation on behalf of your customers. Can you talk some more about how you organize your teams, how you inspire that innovation?
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Charles Beadnall2:40
Yeah, so there are two different aspects of that. I think part of it is basically the spark of creativity, which I think is a little bit harder to actually inspire. I think the other part of it is having the formula to actually build the experiment and then to run it. Basically, it's a continuous cycle of taking an idea, building a data-backed experiment against it, and then capturing the data to determine was it successful, was it not successful. Many times the unsuccessful experiments are just as instructive as the ones where the metric does move in the way you want it to, because ultimately it's a data point that you found that helps you identify what really does and what doesn't resonate with customers. I think that's the part that we've really been focused on today, is building that mechanism in place. I think I've expressed this to many of our teams... It can help show other folks how to follow that process.
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Interviewer4:11
I'd love that. That of course really resonates with us at Amazon because we very much believe in learning from failures. I love that idea. So Charles, as a leader in IT, you of course work with your other functional leaders across your business. When you're trying to prioritize work and these experiments that we've talked about, how do you communicate that to the other business leaders?
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Charles Beadnall4:38
Well, one of the things that we've come up with is what we call horizons. Horizon one being the more steady-state businesses, which we invest in differently than horizon two, which is kind of an up-and-coming type of business, and then horizon three, which is really... It's growing and in the way that we want, and we're going to keep investing at a specified rate. For the more established businesses, there's just a different investment rate. I think that's an important way to lay out the landscape.
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Interviewer5:25
Charles, it seems like there's a lot of parallels between Amazon's approach and what GoDaddy does from a customer obsession and customer focus. Can you talk a little bit more about how you define the customer outcome that you're trying to drive, and how do you then inspire the team to work against that?
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Charles Beadnall5:46
That's a great question. I think we have moved over time from defining success as 'they bought a product' to 'they're actually...' Customer success. As we learn and as we start accomplishing some of the goals that we've set out, 'Okay, they bought it, they connected it, now they're publishing content.' So just moving that bar constantly forward. This is one of the areas where we are using machine learning to basically figure out the uniqueness of the customer. Some customers basically just want to get email accounts and start sending email, some of them want to build sites, ecommerce sites, upload content, sell online, some of it syndicated through Amazon. Ultimately, we're trying to get much better at identifying what each unique customer will find valuable and take them along that step.
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Interviewer6:52
Charles, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing such great insights.
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Charles Beadnall6:54
Thank you.