Charles Beadnall is the chief technology officer at GoDaddy, a leading web hosting and domain registration company. As the CTO, overseeing the company’s global platform and infrastructure organization, Beadnall is responsible for ensuring GoDaddy’s engineering delivers a more powerful, integrated experience to customers through the adoption of key technologies.
A primary focus as CTO is to drive customer-centric innovation through an empowering, data-driven and collaborative work environment. According to the tech executive, GoDaddy goes beyond traditional product-centric thinking and instead focuses on understanding customer pain points, desires and expectations.
This involves cultivating a robust “culture of experimentation” that encourages employees to think creatively and put the customer first.
Culture Of Experimentation
To enable innovation, GoDaddy has institutionalized and developed a structured approach to experimentation with its own internal platform—Hivemind. The company empowers teams to form hypotheses, measure data, build experiments and iterate on the results. This data-backed process helps identify what resonates with customers and informs the development of better products and services.
Experimentation is woven into the fabric of the organization’s product development and marketing.
“Any engineer, any product leader at the company can come forward with an idea and we can run an experiment on it,” said Beadnall in a Zoom video call. “We do really focus on how we experiment into new technology. A lot of folks will just say, ‘Here’s a new technology. Here’s the product roadmap and we’re just going to go off and do it.’ We, in some ways, acknowledge that we don’t know the future, and so we are going to experiment our way into that.”
Organizations often make the mistake of following a product roadmap before realizing, deep into it, that they were on the wrong path, wasting resources, time, effort and money.
“[Experimentation] forces you to look at the data that you have about customer usage, purchase paths and things of that nature and put together hypotheses. In doing that, you really start to form the kernel of inverting that whole product roadmap to basically a series of experiments that you can do iteratively over time.” Beadnall added, “You can learn very quickly, ‘Oh wow, I was totally wrong. There’s something else that is happening here,’ and ultimately, it forces you to figure that out at an earlier stage,” rather than before it’s too late.
Additionally, experimentation more tightly integrates the product and engineering teams together, in the service of the customer. It helps stem conflicts between co-workers, as the data will speak for itself, more so than if this culture didn’t exist.
According to the tech leader, “If you look at a more traditional product roadmap, everybody’s got an opinion, whether it be an engineer or product leader. Ultimately, it’s kind of a battle of the wills. Somebody’s going to win, but it’s based on the narrative, based on the level of influence or who can shout the loudest.” He continued, “Whereas I think when you focus on running the experiment and having the focus be on the data, it’s a great leveler because this is the data and the output we all agreed upon in the experiment. The data will speak and it will say, ‘This is what the customers want and this is what the customers don’t want.’ So, there’s far fewer disagreements.”
Beadnall said that for engineers, experimentation can feel like “crack,” as the data provides immediate feedback and reinforces that the service they’ve built is valuable.
“Ultimately, as an engineer building a product, you just want to know that people are actually going to use it,” he stated.
Internally, GoDaddy conducts an experimentation showcase, where the company highlights the top 10 experiments that get voted on. “Some of them are successes. Some of them are failures. Some of them are draws, but we celebrate the failures just as much as the successes because there’s learnings involved in those failures,” Beadnall acknowledged.
To generate and foster the free-flow exchange of innovative ideas, the CTO also emphasized the importance of a diverse and inclusive work environment to better understand, address and represent the unique requirements of GoDaddy’s disparate customer base.
He believes cross-functional collaboration is critical, allowing teams from different departments to work together and develop customer-centric solutions.
Source: Forbes
