Test Everything
Shafqat Islam is President of Optimizely, the digital experience platform that acquired his company, Welcome. A founder and product leader who had never held a marketing title, he was handed Optimizely's marketing and reset it from a blank slate around one discipline: measure everything, test everything, and treat brand and demand as a single job. He has since taken on product and engineering as well.
Your digital experience is your most important product as a company.
Shafqat Islam is President of Optimizely, the leading digital experience platform provider. An immigrant founder originally from Bangladesh, born in Thailand, raised in Switzerland, and now based in New York, he has spent his career building products for marketers and believes anyone can build a great company regardless of background or location.
Shafqat studied at the University of Pennsylvania before co-founding NewsCred in 2007, one of the first content marketing platforms. He ran the company for over a decade, raising approximately $100 million in venture funding and building it into a Gartner Leader in the content marketing platform category for seven consecutive years. The company rebranded to Welcome during COVID after selling its services business, and in 2021 was acquired by Optimizely. He joined as General Manager, running the Welcome business within Optimizely, before CEO Alex Atzberger asked him to take over marketing despite having never held a marketing title before.
As CMO, Shafqat reset the entire marketing organisation with a single provocative hypothesis: if they stopped doing all their marketing, nothing would change. That provocation freed the team to wipe the slate clean and rebuild around data-driven experimentation. He goaled the entire function on business outcomes rather than marketing KPIs, measuring cost per MQL and cost per opportunity for every single channel, campaign, webinar, and event. The results were transformative: Optimizely reached $400 million in ARR and quadrupled in size over four years. In August 2024, he was promoted to President, overseeing product and engineering in addition to marketing.
His approach blends demand generation rigour with brand investment, arguing the two are inseparable. He championed scrappy, entrepreneurial tactics like buying New York City taxicab advertising through a tech platform and changing creative daily, and shifted webinar strategy from in-house events with 30 attendees to partner channels like Content Marketing Institute where 300 to 500 people showed up. He is a die-hard Tennessee Titans fan, a small-time angel investor, and uses Optimizely's own products aggressively, pushing his product team to solve his pain points as a marketer first and foremost.
Do fewer things better.
I sat all 120 of my marketing team down and said, I have a hunch that if we stopped doing all of our marketing, nothing would change. Some people were stunned or insulted. But for a lot of people, this was a freeing, liberating thought. Let's wipe the slate clean. Nothing is too crazy, but we're going to measure everything.
When Shafqat took over a function he had never run, he opened with a deliberate provocation to 120 marketers: prove the work matters. Some were stung, but the point was permission, to drop the programmes everyone ran out of habit and rebuild from a blank slate. The one condition was measurement. Nothing was off limits as long as its effect could be seen, which turned a reset into a licence to experiment rather than a cut.
Anytime someone came to me and said, hey Shaf, we want to do this event or webinar or campaign. All I said was, sure, let's try it. If you can beat the cost per op target, we'll do it forever and we'll pour money into it. And if you can't, it's not a failure. It's a learning.
Shafqat reduced the whole function to one number. He worked back from the bookings the business needed to a target cost per opportunity, then held every channel, campaign, webinar and event to it. Anyone could try anything; beat the target and it got funded without limit, miss it and it was a lesson rather than a failure. The single shared yardstick gave the team accountability and freedom at once.
Being great at experimentation doesn't just mean you're more data-driven. It actually unlocks creativity because people can come up with new ideas and test them. It unleashes this creativity that I think all marketers have and want and need. That's why people become marketers.
The surprise, Shafqat says, was that rigour released creativity rather than suppressing it. Because any idea could be tested cheaply, people stopped fearing the wrong call and started proposing bolder ones. His team tested not just buttons and landing pages but content itself, even running painted-door tests on headlines before writing a word, so the pieces they did invest in were proven before the effort went in.
AI is not going to replace people or jobs, but if you're a person who doesn't use AI, you may be replaced by a person that knows how to use AI. We use generative AI to generate campaign ideas, taglines, briefs, blog posts, decks, imagery. I say first draft intentionally because we would never put out content generated by AI.
Shafqat treats AI as present tense, not a forecast. His content and SDR teams use it daily for campaign ideas, taglines, briefs and first drafts of posts, decks and imagery. The discipline is the word draft: AI gets work to a starting point and a person carries it the rest of the way, because he will not publish anything the machine wrote alone. His mandate to the team is to keep using it, on the view that the marketers who do will outlast those who do not.
Stay close to the conversation.
New leaders and insights. No noise.
Thanks, you're subscribed.
Look out for the next edition in your inbox.