DocuSign Spotlight: Jerome Levadoux
We sat down with Jerome Levadoux, senior vice president of electronic signature products, to learn about his team and why now is a good time to join DocuSign engineering.
DocuSign is known for eSignature. How are you innovating within this core offering?
We’re innovating to create delightful customer experiences and to make the product more powerful so that every type of agreement can be digitized. To this end, we are moving beyond the old document (paper) analogy to a digital-first, mobile friendly experience. Now the signer can complete an entire workflow—identity verification, data entry, signature, etc. —in one compelling, intuitive, step-by-step experience. We’re also pursuing new use cases such as eWitnessing, remote online notary and digital mortgage closing to digitize even more paper-driven processes and industries. Finally, we’re bringing AI into eSignature to help customers get real-time insights into signer behavior.
What excites you most about the work you and your team do?
We build great products that help everybody, from consumers to small businesses and large enterprises, and our customers love our product. Our customers are conveniently preparing, signing, managing and acting on a high volume of agreements—every month, if not every day. But what’s really tremendous to see is the beneficial impact we’re having on the world. We enable people to work remotely with greater ease and help preserve the environment in the process by saving paper, travel and shipping costs. And, we get to do this while solving very interesting technical problems at scale, which from an engineering point of view, is really fun.
Why is working on your team a great opportunity for engineers?
This is a fast-growing environment with lots of opportunities for engineers to innovate, learn and make a difference. Engineers on my team get to solve problems at scale for mission-critical applications, which is both intellectually challenging and enriching. They get to cross the boundary between a consumer product and a business application on a daily basis. And, they get to learn from some of the best, most passionate and dedicated people in technology.
How would you describe the culture of your team to prospective job candidates?
We’re very passionate about what we do, the problems we solve and the needs of customers. As a team, we’re a very friendly group, willing to help others when they need support. There is not a lot of posturing – we work things out amongst each other openly. That said, people also are not afraid to challenge each other. If somebody thinks we are doing something wrong, they will speak up and often prepare data to support their thinking. Additionally, while we all work hard, we’re also mindful of work-life balance. To do great work, you have to get away from it.
When it comes to leading people, what are your guiding principles?
I like to empower people to make decisions and own what they are responsible for, so they can move fast and feel autonomous. It’s ok for people to take measured risks and fail as long as we learn from our mistakes. People on our team equip themselves with facts and data, not just opinions. And, as a leader, I am here to help the team get unstuck, receive coaching or advice. It’s actually one of the most satisfying parts of my job—helping my team be successful. Finally, it’s very important for us to create an environment that fosters diversity—whether it’s racial or gender diversity or just diversity of opinions. We believe that mixing people from different backgrounds and points of view brings out the best in us and fuels innovation.
What sets engineering at DocuSign apart from other companies?
We are a very unique company in that our product is both a consumer and a business application. Very few companies have managed to build products that serve both markets successfully. This translates into our unique engineering know-how—as we must build complex, enterprise-ready products—with a specific focus on ease-of-use, trust, scale and reliability. That combination of product capabilities and standards make DocuSign unique and exciting for an engineer.
What is one question we didn’t ask that you think engineers would want to know about DocuSign or your team?
A question that often comes up is about how people grow their careers at DocuSign. We put a lot of effort into creating career opportunities and making sure that everyone on our team has a clear learning path and career development plans. There are many opportunities to move across teams to learn new skills or take a stretch assignment. And we really try to promote people internally rather than just hiring talent from the outside. A number of people in my team have been at DocuSign a decade or more and grown their careers and skills over that time.
Interested in doing the work of your life at DocuSign? Check out our openings. We’d love to talk more.