Joint Agreements — network effects for Docusign

With the Joint Agreements add-on, a Docusign user can connect their account with another Docusign user outside their business. Once a connection is accepted, both parties share documents, templates, and materials directly through Docusign's network — saving countless hours and making complex two-party workflows simple. It's gaining traction in Financial Services and Insurance, where broker/dealer and carrier/agent arrangements require two businesses to coordinate one agreement.

As lead designer on the Incubation team, I took the product from the inception of the idea, through workshopping and prototyping with customers, to execution and launch. On a team heavily comprised of engineers, I influenced without authority — introducing the discovery frameworks, research synthesis, and evidence that made it lean, iterative, and customer-centered:

01 — the opportunity/solution tree

The team was initially asked to build a solution for one client's request. I pushed us to first talk to more customers in the space and size the market — which revealed there wasn't one problem to solve, there were several. I introduced the opportunity/solution tree (Teresa Torres' framework) to synthesize and prioritize what we found, keeping the team anchored to the most valuable customer needs instead of fixating on a single solution. That's how we gained confidence we were building something customers would actually buy.

02 — rapid prototypes & customer co-creation

Instead of saving customer feedback for the end, I brought customers in when we had only a rough idea of the solution. I built quick prototype wireframes in Axure and ran 20–30 minute sessions with several customers. Leaving things open-ended let customers fill in the blanks — and tell us exactly what the solution needed to be truly valuable.

03 — experimental user tests

Because the product introduced UX patterns Docusign users had never encountered, I knew no single "perfect" design would emerge from intuition. I workshopped three UI concepts with the team, then partnered with a UX researcher on an A/B test across variants. The research led us to combine attributes from multiple variants — and the final product earned a significant System Usability Scale (SUS) rating.

the shipped product: a guided joint agreement

The research converged on a four-step guided flow that walks a business through creating an agreement with a partner on the other side. It starts by picking the custodian — Fidelity or Schwab — which determines the forms and steps that follow, so the interface adapts to the relationship instead of asking the user to.

From there the user adds documents and recipients, sets identity verification and signing order, and — the part I'm proudest of — lets AI-assisted field mapping read an uploaded form and connect each recipient's data to the right place on it. The hardest UX problem, cross-account data entry, becomes a review step instead of a chore.

A final summary makes the whole two-party arrangement legible: which documents each custodian can access, what's complete, and what's ready to send — the network effect made concrete.