Scaling DocuSign: CIO Shanthi Iyer Talks AI, Automation, and a Data-Driven Future | Technovation 789

Thank you very much, Peter.

Sure, happy to. So DocuSign's value proposition is we provide smarter, easier, and trusted agreements. I'd almost say that we are probably the only company in the world that actually connects the agreement process end to end for every customer. Even though we started our premise from signature and we were primarily starting, I think our business was primarily catered towards commercial and SMB kind of business, but over a period of time, this is literally the 20th year of DocuSign, we celebrated our 20th year birthday. I think we have expanded our capabilities to actually understand and modulate the agreement process. There is a lot of work that happens before the actual digital signature in drafting the agreement, the negotiation, etc., and then there are a lot of things that happen after the agreement is signed, which is managing and maintaining the agreements, obligation management, etc. So we do all of that. Even though we are known for our signature, I just want to say that coming in and learning about that entire agreement lifecycle process has been a great journey for me, and I'm looking forward to what's to come. I think exciting times.

As with any traditional CIO, I run and manage the company's infrastructure, desktop services, end user management, device management, of course buildings, wireless, etc., right? But that is not necessarily the part that is exciting. Where we have taken our journey is more around application transformation. DocuSign grew too fast, and during COVID we had a really great revenue growth, and we also solved that kind of scale problem by throwing bodies at the problem. So I would say the past year has been really transforming our business processes. It has been about upgrading all our technology platforms and bringing it to a modern infrastructure state. But what is coming now in front of us is really removing friction across, so it's not just our internal employees' systems but also customer facing systems. Anything from go to market to commerce to customer success to support, we are looking at a customer's lifecycle journey and where we touch the customer, and literally looking at the systems that power those journeys and removing friction from that. And that is easier said than done because a lot of times it involves changing our business process, really looking at what systems power that, and going and building the new pipes. It's been quite an interesting journey. The other area that we have taken off a bit more aggressively is data. Considering that I come from a data background, I saw that as an area of opportunity at DocuSign. We did not have mature practices around data, data management, treating the data as a big asset for us, and that's an area of focus right now for me and my team.

One of the things that I did early on when I got to DocuSign, Peter, is I restructured my group to play roles like they were product owners. You could call it product management. So if someone's managing our core ERP, if someone's managing our core go to market set of tools, then we call them either a service owner or a product owner for that set of tools. What that helps do is create an ongoing consistent engagement with that business. The reason I put emphasis on that was we did not want to be order takers. We didn't want the business to go figure out what they want to do and then come and tell me, 'Okay, now go solve it in Salesforce' or 'Now go solve it in Oracle.' We wanted to be part of that journey in identifying where the problems were, and we wanted to help co-design it with them, with the business. So we created a structure where we have product owners and product development or product engineering. That helped understand deeply where the pain points were in terms of friction. That's the first order of battle. The second order of battle was really prioritizing with the business because once you engage that closely and deeply with the business, they think you can solve world hunger, so they dump everything on you and then they tell you, 'Okay, fix it now.' So my goal was to really prioritize the order in which we would go after solving some of these pain points. We created what we called a transformation office. You could call it a portfolio prioritization and program office. That is kind of the bottom line what they did. So they bring all these requests from various product owners together, and then we would drill it down to really which initiatives have the biggest bang for the buck in terms of dependencies and prioritization, what goes first, how soon can we deliver that, and understanding the effort required from my teams, and then going and telling the company, 'Okay, we are going to deliver this roadmap for us.' And really establishing that integrated roadmap so that everybody in the company knows that some of them require three or four teams in the business to participate. We can't have sign off from one and not sign off from the other. So how do we really march right foot forward, left foot forward in unison? And that helps build speed in the delivery, I felt. So the transformation office and this product management structure helped in driving that conversation with the business, and I think that's working very well right now.

I think the first thing we did was to start from the customer's experience primarily because what the employees do internally are also at some point catered towards the customer from their role and their persona. So if it's a seller, at the end of the day they are also servicing a customer. So the first and foremost task we did was we created what we called an architecture blueprint, which was a process footprint of a customer's lifecycle journey. So if the customer comes to our website, and then they try a product, and then they move towards buying a product, and then they move towards using the product, each of that is serviced internally by some team at DocuSign. So we started first with really drawing that blueprint of a customer's journey. Then we mapped it to an employee's footprint. So if you're in sales, what do you do? If you're in customer success, what do you do? And where are those interactions or the touch points between us and the customer? Those actually became, I would say, that digital architecture footprint became our blueprint for how we went after priority. And we kind of would see a heat map in some areas. If it is very red in terms of customers' interaction with us because it's very manual, and if for example the internal tools in that area are very outdated, then that kind of created a heat map for me and said, 'Okay, focus on this. This is where the biggest bang for the buck is.' It was helping in putting a spotlight with the business and also forcing a prioritization conversation with them.