DocuSign Admin pain points

Background

DocuSign Admin has been up and running since around 2017. It is a platform that centralizes management of users, accounts and single sign-on (SSO). It allows users to protect and manage corporate assets with the security of SSO, domain level controls and the administration of all corporate users from a single user interface. This includes being able to search for a user across all accounts and domains, then manage that user's permissions centrally. Its capabilities encompass:

  • View all accounts from a centralized location

  • Self-service set up and management of organization for identity and access management

  • Administer just-in-time provisioning configurations

  • Manage users from a centralized location

  • Manage organization’s administrative team

Problem statement

While DocuSign Admin helped customers better centralize their assets, it had limitations. Customers have requested several enhancements over the years especially related to better representing complex enterprise structures with multiple levels of departments and business units, delegating certain functions, and providing informative guidance in the product.

Project details

In order to get a clear vision of DocuSign Admin limitations, I knew I had to immerse myself in the world of our users.

I started with data. I leveraged my data counterparts and platforms such as Mixpanel, Snowflake, and our internal monitoring tool, to learn about DocuSign Admin adoption and usage. I could answer questions such as “how many customers pay for DocuSign Admin?”, “how many customers are extensively benefiting from it?”, “which features are not being used?”, etc.

Then, I moved to 1-hour interviews with internal stakeholders from the Customer Success organization. I interviewed 10 people who worked with customers on a daily basis to implement DocuSign in their departments, and were very familiar with their pain points. I started a Miro board to document my findings and to also start structuring the data I was getting from each interview. This Miro board would mostly contain pain points, but also user flows, suggestions and candidate solutions, subjects’ statements, and open questions that I should clarify in a later moment.

Finally, I came up with a roadmap that originated a series of projects that were tackled in the coming quarters by multiple folks in my team. My rationale for the roadmap was as follows:

  • The MVP should include features that would resolve the #1 pain point - why did we have so many customers with duplicate organizations? Merging duplicate organizations was a manual and time-consuming task, so we needed to stop the bleeding by preventing duplicate organizations from being created immediately.

  • The v1 should be about driving adoption, our next biggest pain point - why do we have customers entitled to use DocuSign Admin but not using it? During the interviews, we learned that customers had no guidance in the product, and many of them - especially the ones who did not pay for dedicated support - would not even get past the configuration phase. We had to improve our onboarding process. This version would include features to provide awareness in the product in the various steps of creating and setting up an organizations.

  • The v2 would take DocuSign Admin to the next level, and provide features to remove duplicate organizations, merge organizations to support Mergers and Acquisitions scenarios, and split organizations to support Divestitures scenarios.

  • The v3 should be about empowering the Customer Success organization by providing them with better internal support tools, and improve their productivity.

Final considerations

  • The roadmap was presented and received with great enthusiasm by the Senior Director of Product Management, who was responsible for the broader domain I was involved in.

  • Some of the projects mentioned above will be detailed in other places of this portfolio. Others never got prioritized due to company strategy.