Why we stopped waiting to switch the whole product to our new brand at once, the order we’re changing it in, and how we’ll tell a rough first week from a change that made things worse.
For most of this year, our product has been waiting on one big switch. The brand changed on our marketing site, and the plan inside the product was to flip everything over at once when the time came: colors, buttons, corners, the works. In a partnership meeting with our creative marketing team this week, I said I don’t think that’s right anymore. I think we need to make incremental changes over time.
Part of my frustration is that some of these changes were never controversial. We could change the color of our primary button overnight, and those were exactly the changes I pushed for as quick wins months ago. They kept falling below the line because they weren’t tied directly to revenue, even though brand work is tied to other things we care about, like whether customers feel confident in us and whether they stay.
So, here’s the order we’re changing it in.
The visual layer goes first. Spot illustrations, iconography and tone of voice can move now, because they change how the product feels without changing how anything works.
Components move one at a time, on purpose. Corner radius, elevation and button styles are where the product’s look and feel really lives, and changing them is a heavy lift. The risk in rushing them is a product with a myriad of button and card styles, or shadows on a few new screens and nowhere else. So we audit first, then decide each component as its own change.
Every color change gets treated as a system change. Thursday’s crit showed why. A designer moved our “What’s New” button to the new brand color, which put it right next to our “New” feature tag in nearly the same color and reopened a choice the team had already made about how those tags look. The room decided that the button can’t ship in its new color until the tag changes with it. Changing the tag is a design system change, so it goes through the system work instead of riding along with one screen.
Every change to the brand inside the product is a design system change, even the ones that look local.
Watch what clinicians do with each change. A marketing leader asked the question I’d want any partner to ask: what stops a button color change from hurting performance? A high-contrast button can recede into the page when it turns pale. I agreed that’s the part we need to get better at, and the answer is to roll a change to a small group first and watch what it does to clicks, to whether people find things, and to accessibility. Where we get in trouble is listening too much to the loudest voices in our community forum asking us to stop changing things. The same leader added a distinction I’m with: some confusion is the temporary cost of any change, and some is a sign the change made things worse. The way to tell them apart is to watch what clinicians do over the weeks after a change, more than what the first day of comments says.
The same thinking applies outside the rebrand. A designer on my team is shipping a small change to how our navigation shows where you are, and the plan is to ship it with a fast way to roll it back if clicks drop or people can’t find something. That’s how I’d like us to hold every one of these changes: committed to it, with the way back already built.
Our marketing site has worn the new brand for months, and clinicians should start seeing it in the product now, one layer at a time, instead of waiting for a day when everything changes at once.