GoDaddy 2024 Sustainability Report: Responsible Governance & Operations | Innovation

Originally published in GoDaddy's 2024 Sustainability Report

Innovation

We’re focused on evolving to deliver for our customers.

The world is constantly evolving, and so are we. To stay ahead of the curve, we continuously experiment and innovate to improve our products and services. It’s essential to our business and helps us deliver the best solutions to our customers.

Our GoDaddy One System Tech Manifesto guides us with key engineering principles like security, performance, and quality. We embrace both inner- source and open-source communities to support innovation and create cutting-edge solutions. We design, develop, and deploy systems aligned to our Security Principles to protect our systems and customers' data.

To ensure transparency and collaboration across teams, we use Tech Radar, an internal tool to list items that are being used in production and on actively developed GoDaddy products, by category and by lifecycle stage. In 2024, we shared Tech Radar updates in our quarterly Engineering Hangout, a meeting for all employees with engineering roles to share updates related to our work and progress toward our strategic initiatives. To promote learning and spark innovation, new technology and solutions were shared in Tech Radar Tuesday tech talks and Solutions Days, events where engineers share with employees the technical solutions they applied to challenges and details on how to use solutions and apply learnings.

Controlled Experimentation

At GoDaddy, we embrace a culture of experimentation where every employee is encouraged to be an inventor and problem solver to better our products for our customers.

In 2024, we continued to introduce new enhancements to further engage employees and customers alike, driving innovation that delivers impactful solutions. We also hosted 11 Experimentation Showcases for all employees, spotlighting the creativity and ingenuity of our teams. To ensure inclusivity and encourage greater participation, we opened voting for these showcases to all employees in September, leading to a remarkably high level of engagement. These changes underscored our commitment to democratizing innovation and amplifying employee voices.

• In 2024, we conducted more than 2,000 controlled experiments.

Through our dedication to refining our experimentation processes, we introduced notable advancements, including:

• A predictive customer lifetime value metric to prioritize sustainable, long-term customer growth.
   
• A fully in-house experimentation platform, enhancing capabilities for design, configuration, and analysis.
   
• Upgraded tools supporting complex experiments for GoDaddy Guides and post-rollout analysis.
   
• Expanded platform functionality for multi-region experiments and gamified experiment quality assessments, awarding Bronze, Silver, Gold, or Platinum badges.

By leveraging these enhancements, we are fostering innovation and creating customer-centric solutions that address real challenges, ensuring GoDaddy continues to lead with impact and purpose.

Innovation Challenges

Encouraging our employees to think outside the box, we host internal hackathons and innovation challenges, like "bug bashes.” These events promote cross-functional teamwork and push creative boundaries, driving impactful ideas and solutions.

Bug Bashes

In October 2024, our company-wide Security Hackathon Bug Bounty brought together teams to uncover and address potential vulnerabilities. Promoting a culture of learning and innovation, more than 375 employees attended pre-event tech talks on security tooling and threat detection. Eight standout projects emerged from the competition helping to enhance our security posture, tools, and processes. Overall, this was an engaging opportunity for cross-company engineers to get hands on with leveraging our approved Security tools and systems to identify and resolve potential vulnerabilities.

GoDaddy 2024 GenAI Hackathon

Our February Hackathon centered around testing the limits of GenAI. We invited our teams to get creative and they created more than 32 Hackathon projects during the event, with one incredibly successful program rolled into our services, the Personalized GenAI (PGen) program. PGen leverages an in-house, fine-tuned LLM model to offer unparalleled personalization by intelligently adapting to user preferences and interaction history, ensuring tailored content and timely notifications about relevant changes. PGen is context-aware, evolving with user feedback, resulting in optimized offerings for a deeply engaging experience. Following successful A/B testing, we deployed the PGen program to production in July 2024. Since then, it has consistently delivered significant business impact across domain search, integration, and function calling.

Common Development Toolset

In 2024, we continued to prioritize developer efficiency and operational excellence by rolling out the Common Development Toolset. This initiative included a series of in-person and virtual workshops, along with seven virtual bootcamps held across business units, company-wide. These bootcamps emphasized adopting tools to reduce Developer Cycle Time—a critical metric for improving productivity and streamlining workflows. By the end of 2024, nearly 220 production applications were actively utilizing components of the toolset, signaling broad adoption across teams.

The Common Development Toolset also includes numerous powerful internal and third-party tools, like our Developer Experience Portal to facilitate the development process at GoDaddy and the Katana Continuous Delivery platform, which simplifies the development, deployment, and management of applications on Amazon Web Services.

To learn more, read our 2024 Sustainability Report.

About This Report

This GoDaddy 2024 Sustainability Report details our progress toward our corporate sustainability goals, strategies, and initiatives in support of our overarching corporate mission and values. Unless otherwise noted, this report reflects our corporate sustainability performance across our global operations covering the fiscal year period from January 1 to December 31, 2024. To demonstrate our commitment to transparent communication regarding our sustainability progress, we routinely share updates through our website and our annual Sustainability Report. We welcome your questions, comments, and feedback on this report by contacting ESG@GoDaddy.com.

This report references the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards, includes select Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) metrics for the Internet Media and Services sector, and the Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). We also disclose our contributions and progress toward priority UN SDGs. For additional information on how we align with these frameworks and key indicators demonstrating our sustainability performance, please refer to the Frameworks & Metrics section.