Case Studies - Experimentation

• Zoho. Founded in 1996, this Indian platform company currently boasts more than 60 million satisfied customers. Zoho led the charge in enabling a swift corporate response to the pandemic and the subsequent work-from-home revolution, testing several options and eventually offering free subscriptions to its millions of SMB and enterprise clients.

• Atlassian. This Australian software titan is a complete project-management, bug-tracking, and all-around IT-management platform. Its Confluence team-management platform has a built-in template for experiments to be planned, executed, and tracked. Atlassian is already used by more than 160,000 organizations, including companies as diverse as Carfax and Domino’s Pizza. 

• Hootsuite. Founded in 2008, Canada’s Hootsuite offers an all-in-one Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that empowers customers to strategically grow their brands, businesses, and customer relationships with social media. Hootsuite’s platform enables customers to manage all their social media channels from one place, allowing them to create and schedule posts to multiple networks simultaneously, monitor posts, manage and respond to incoming messages from customers, track and manage brand mentions and market activity, easily create and manage advertising campaigns, and measure and analyze users’ performance on social media.

Zoom. Eric Yuan was one of the first 20 employees of WebEx, eventually becoming vice president of engineering. In 2007, WebEx was acquired by Cisco, and Yuan became Cisco’s corporate VP of engineering. Yuan soon realized that Cisco had a problem: the WebEx product. “I knew WebEx customers were not happy, and I understood why,” Yuan says. “The solution was very old, the architecture was very old, and it didn’t support video very well … I tried to convince others [at WebEx] to build a new solution and to start over, but nobody listened.” When Cisco wouldn’t let Yuan experiment on a new product, he did it himself. He founded his own company, Zoom, building iteration and Experimentation deep into the culture. Zoom had a strong start: by 2019, 10 million people participated in its meetings each day, generating enough revenue for the company to go public. And then came the global COVID lockdown. By April 2020, Zoom’s daily meeting participants had jumped to 300 million. Zoom became a key feature of global business life—all because Eric Yuan decided to experiment at precisely the right moment in history.