At Dropbox, marketing was effectively locked out of the website. The platform ran on homegrown infrastructure — every campaign required engineering support, and engineering had a backlog twelve months deep. Marketing was furious. Growth was stalling. The business needed to bring products to market, and the website couldn't keep up.
I was the one holding the problem.
What I learned there — and would relearn at 1Password — is that the website problem is almost never a website problem. It's a prioritization problem. When there's no shared framework for deciding what gets built, tested, and deprioritized, the loudest voice in the room wins. And the loudest voice is rarely the one closest to the data.
The conflict was between Sales and Product. One side wanted self-serve trial sign-ups. The other wanted lead generation. Both had executive sponsorship. Both had conviction. Neither had a clear answer for what was right for the customer.
I was in the middle of it — which is exactly where a digital PM sits, and it's not a comfortable place to be.
The way out wasn't to pick a side. It was to build a framework that both sides could agree to operate inside. We mapped personalized journeys for each audience segment, validated them with both teams, and turned what had been an ideological standoff into a testable hypothesis. We deployed a CMS and experimentation tool that reduced reliance on the Product team's resources, integrated third-party audience data, and launched our first personalization A/B test within two months.
The experiment didn't just generate results. It generated alignment. Design, engineering, product, and marketing started building a shared backlog of ideas. The debate about self-serve vs. sales CTAs effectively ended — not because someone won, but because the user and the data were now in the driver's seat.
That's what a prioritization framework does. It doesn't give you the answer. It gives you a shared language for finding it.
Today I'm launching Lela Deslauriers Consulting LLC — a fractional web growth advisory practice for B2B SaaS and B2C eCommerce companies that are serious about building a systematic approach to conversion.
The practice is built on a simple belief: most growth programs stall not because teams lack ambition or skill, but because they lack a defensible system for deciding what to do next. Without that system, every sprint is a negotiation. Every roadmap is a political document. And the website never quite becomes the growth engine it should be.
What I deliver — through discovery sprints, experimentation roadmaps, and ongoing fractional leadership — is the diagnostic clarity and prioritization rigor that turns a reactive website into a compounding growth program. The same approach I developed at Dropbox, 1Password, and Apple, now available to the teams that need it most.
If you're a VP of Marketing at a growth-stage SaaS company and the question "why isn't our website converting?" lands in your lap before you have a clear answer — let's talk.
