Why C-Suite buy-in is make-or-break for experience optimisation

Why do some organisations achieve 20x ROI from experience optimisation while others struggle to justify the budget?

Teams across UX, content, and CRO spend months building optimisation programmes that deliver impressive wins within their own departments (a 15% uplift here, a streamlined journey there), but when you zoom out to look at business impact, it's disappointingly modest.

The difference between organisations seeing transformational results and those struggling comes down to where the programme sits in the organisational hierarchy.

The Pattern That Keeps Repeating

Marketing runs personalisation tests, Product builds new features based on user research, and Customer service gathers feedback, but each team operates in isolation, optimising for its own metrics and reporting to different executives.

So what does the alternative look like?

When Booking.com embedded experimentation into their culture from day one (giving every employee freedom to test ideas, no red tape, no silos), they were acknowledging that optimisation can't be a side project owned by a single department. It needs to be a strategic imperative that flows from the top down and across every function.

Today, they run thousands of tests at once, constantly refining content, journeys, and product experiences. Not because they have unlimited resources, but because optimisation has become part of their organisational DNA, championed by leadership as a competitive advantage.

Why Executive Sponsorship Changes Everything

Experience Optimisation delivers stronger ROI when championed at the executive level. Organisations where optimisation is embedded from the top see up to 20x ROI compared to those treating it as a tactical marketing initiative.

When the C-suite champions experience optimisation, several things change. Decision-making accelerates as teams move from insight to experiment to scaled implementation in days instead of waiting weeks for approval to test a hypothesis. Real-time experimentation gives leadership confidence to pivot based on evidence rather than lengthy business cases built on assumptions, while failed tests become valuable data rather than wasted budget, making teams braver about testing bigger ideas and challenging conventional wisdom.

The moment brand, product, content, and technology teams start reporting optimisation metrics to the same executive audience, silos begin to dissolve and everyone works toward shared outcomes rather than departmental KPIs that may actually conflict with each other.

Making It Work in Practice

C-suite sponsorship creates the conditions for success, but it needs to translate into structural changes. The most successful programmes decentralise authority, pushing decision-making closer to the teams doing the work and trusting them to act on data and insight without waiting for layers of approval on every test and variation.

This requires deliberate choices about governance, about who holds decision rights, about how teams coordinate across functions. When organisations make these structural changes, the benefits compound in ways that tactical optimisation programmes never achieve.

As Lorna Foott, MSQ DX's Director of Partnerships, puts it: "One of the biggest changes we see is when EO becomes a strategic priority, not just a project owned by marketing. We have seen up to 20x ROI when optimisation is embedded from the top. That's not from testing button colours. It's from transforming how decisions are made, how teams collaborate, and how customer value is delivered."

Where to Start

For senior leaders recognising these symptoms, the path forward is clearer than you might think.

Start by asking this question. Are we measuring the right things? If different departments optimise for conflicting metrics, you don't have an experience optimisation programme. You have competing initiatives that accidentally undermine each other.

Then ask this. Who owns the customer experience in its entirety? If the answer is "no one" or "everyone," that's the structural problem that no amount of testing tools or UX talent can overcome.

Once you've answered these questions honestly, you'll likely see that experience optimisation isn't another initiative to add to the roadmap. It's a fundamental shift in how organisations operate, learn, and deliver value. And that shift starts (and only succeeds) when the C-suite makes it a non-negotiable strategic priority.

Want to understand where your organisation sits on the EO maturity curve? Download our full Experience Optimisation whitepaper for frameworks, case studies, and practical guidance on building the foundations that deliver measurable commercial impact.