Docusign

DocuSign is a company with a self-improvement culture. We're always asking, "How can we take things to the next level?" For example, in the last couple of years, we've advanced from being a primarily one-product company to a cloud suite of offerings. Engineering is focused on learning from every incident, making sure it doesn't happen again, and actively educating on best practices. We're looking for people who care about our customers, care about the people they work with, and want to make things better.

• The people. We hire people who are smart, good communicators, skilled, experienced, and have good, strong fits for their positions; and also friendly, collaborative, and pleasant.

• The product. DocuSign builds its own infrastructure to the standards of banks and governments. Our Document Transaction Management service is extremely flexible and customizable. The breadth of our integrations provides a rich pipeline of capabilities. DocuSign's technology is so visionary that it becomes a system of systems, able to integrate across multiple dimensions.

• The leadership. Dan Springer and his leadership team bring talent and experience, but also a best-in-class mindset that shows in our strategy and initiatives. Last year's acquisition of SpringCM was brilliant and is such a strong fit for our vision. DocuSign's leadership really gets it. At every All Hands, we talk about how to make DocuSign the place where you do the work of your life.

They run out of Diet Coke on my floor all the time.

One challenge in Engineering is that we don't have enough Senior Directors – that is, upper-middle hands-on technical leadership. We have solid VPs, and we have solid Managers and Directors, but we need more of those strong organizational leaders who can lead mid- to large-size teams through technical transitions. It's hard to find and hire truly excellent upper-middle leaders because that role is so competitive.

I'd say that our technology stack is not as agile as we'd like to modernize, decouple, and adopt new technologies and platforms. Our ultrahigh reliability bar has a downside in that any change to the system must go through so many checks and balances that code velocity is a little disappointing. The flip side of playing in so many regulated markets is that the compliance demands make change difficult. Basically, even stronger leadership through technical evolution of a 7- to 10-year-old codebase will enable us to leverage greater technical innovation.

Stock price can be volatile, but we're in it to win it and not focused on the short term.

Dan Springer is great and wonderful.

He has surrounded himself with very strong and capable staff that are doing great things. He doesn't tolerate average leadership and sets very high expectations.

He is doing amazing things for this company and always thinking ahead. For example, the work that the leadership team is doing around anticipating disruption is very forward-looking.

Lots of praise for Springer, such as visiting our site regularly and speaking to us, as well as personally reading every piece of employee feedback. Another thing I like: in the last review cycle, he personally read a fraction of reviews, and for poorly written managerial reviews without good feedback, Dan personally called them into a training session with him!

Advice:

• I like the corporate functioning.
• The good acquisitions and partnerships.
• The initiatives inside and outside.
• The leverage of the company to the Agreement Cloud is super critical for our growth and perception.
• The high expectations.
• The great place to work.
• The focus on the people.

One thing that is coming is a wave of retirement as the early employees cash out. We need to focus on transition planning and knowledge transfer, and ensure that not all the key technology founders leave us at once.

We're working on new manager training and better review writing, but I think we can continue to do more about career development and career paths – making us more mature and forward-looking on our people growth and development. We should ensure that we have plenty of clear opportunities for advancement and have managers that enable their employees to grow. We want our people to be able to stay here and grow their careers without having to switch around in order to be promoted.

Keep up the high bar for hiring; and keep bringing in the amazing excellent hires to date. Focus on excellent hiring.