Pros
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 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 and care about the people they work with and want to make things better. 1. 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. 2. 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. 3. 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.
Cons
They run out of Diet Coke's 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 VP's, and we have solid Managers and Directors, but we need more of those strong organizational leaders who can lead mid to large size teams though technical transitions. It's hard to find and hire truely 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 and 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 7-10 year old code base will enable us leverage greater technical innovation. Stock price can be volatile but we're in it to win it and not focused on the short term.
