Run the Right Experiments

Are you building the things your customers desire? It all starts by building a system of experimentation, says GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani.

- JASON FEIFER

When Aman Bhutani became CEO of GoDaddy in 2019, he saw a problem: The company had a good culture of experimentation, where individual departments were running many experiments, but it didn't have a good system of experimentation. As a result, the team's experiments weren't driving as much innovation as they could. “Experimentation is about mindset,” Bhutani says. “It's not something that people who are not aware of can suddenly discover. You have to coach people through it."

So that's what he set about doing-drawing from his experience as senior vice president at JPMorgan Chase and then as president of Brand Expedia Group, which has an experiment-driven culture. As a result, since Bhutani took over, GoDaddy has released a slew of new products-including improvements to the results when customers search for domain names, a product to help people sell their domain names on the secondary market, and more-all of which have driven millions in increased sales. Here, Bhutani explains how to build a culture of experimentation, and just how impactful it can be.

When you arrived at GoDaddy, you put a large emphasis on experimentation. Why?

There are a couple things about experimentation that I think everyone needs to understand. The first is that experimentation is truly about doing things that you don't already know how to do. It's about trying something. It's about measuring the results and then taking the next step. And that puts the customer in the driver's seat. What you have is a hypothesis, and the customer is telling you how engaged they are.

The second thing is that it's not "what you do." You are not trying to do experimentation. What you're trying to do is have a better experience for the customer. Experimentation is how you do it.

So what did you see going wrong at GoDaddy?