How Speero Scaled Cisco’s Experimentation Program With Speero’s Maturity Audit

Cisco, a worldwide brand with 71,000 employees, wanted to scale its global experimentation efforts. When you’re that huge, thinking about where to start is like searching for a needle in a haystack.

That’s when they partnered with Speero to help scale their global program and build internal alignment for it across all departments.

Sandip Amlani knows his way around global optimization. Behind a friendly smile is a guy with a two-decade track record of building high-traffic, multi-lingual websites for companies of all sizes, from start-ups to FTSE 100 organizations. In January 2017, he starts working as a Regional Digital Lead for the EMEAR region of Cisco. False starts and other delays slow down the start of their optimization.

Jum to summer 2018 — Sandip launches the first Centre of Excellence (CoE) for Cisco in the EMEAR region. Their fortunes change, as they jump from 3 to running 38 experiments in just 9 months. The executives are so pleased with CoE capabilities, they send an internal directive: “Improve how Cisco does optimization worldwide”.

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...there was a drive to improve how we did experimentation globally across Cisco. I led the “People” track of this project and set about discovering how optimization was done in other regions, identifying gaps, and proposing a structure that allowed us to scale our testing efforts.

Sandip Amlani

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Here’s the kicker: Cisco is a $51 billion company with 71,000 employees across 96 locations worldwide. To say that establishing experimentation across a complex enterprise such as Cisco would be a challenge is a really optimistic opinion:

1. People naturally don’t like change or risk, especially in large companies. Risk takers are all outside the big organizations, starting and running their own businesses.
2. The coordination and alignment issues are scaled proportionally to the number of people and teams. 
3. People are paid for their opinions. Lawyers need to get paid too. So when you have so many people, the opinions and 'need to be considered' gets in the way of actually shipping.

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“With our new global directive for optimization, we set out our goals:
1) Double the number of tests we ran per year
2) Establish an experimentation process.”

Sandip Amlani

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Sandip ran internal workshops with different global and regional teams to build consensus on using a global, federated CoE structure. Then they all workshopped some more to identify all the areas, skills, and expertise they’ll need to set up to run a CoE.

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“I created presentation decks to help set the scene for what this could look like—who the players were, what they might be doing at a high level, and what the ideal CRO process could look like.”

Sandip Amlani

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Now Cisco team knew where they wanted to go with global optimization. But this wasn’t enough. They also needed a sharp, precise method to determine their current capabilities and experimentation maturity. Not to mention an effective roadmap for reaching their optimization goals cheaply and quickly.

This is where Speero comes onto the stage.

Sandip brought Speero to access Cisco’s maturity with our Experimentation Maturity Audit. The audit helps us uncover all the rakes in the grass, bottlenecks, and ted tape you can experience during scaling.

Speero interviewed stakeholders across multiple departments for a precise assessment. Then we collated that data from interviews in order to:

• Benchmark the current experimentation capabilities at Cisco.
• Compare individual scores we then used to identify stakeholders’ ‘battlegrounds’.
• Discuss these ‘battlegrounds’ to build shared understanding, consensus, and alignment.
• Identify gaps, rakes in the grass, and weaknesses across all four maturity pillars.
• Set up priorities and planned activities.

Ultimately, we built a scaling roadmap for Cisco that will let them focus on the areas with the most impact on their global optimization.