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Leadership challenge: rebuild practical brand ownership and influence after organisational contraction—without waiting for a new department, mandate, or large team.
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Created an OKR-linked model with roughly 20 participants and about 10 active contributors each quarter.
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Moved refreshed colours, shared iconography, and AI visual language into Product roadmaps and delivery.
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Used the model to refresh 1,500+ web pages and 50+ templates in 11 months with a lean team.
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Several rounds of layoffs reduced Wrike’s broader design organisation from roughly 25 people to seven and moved the remaining team lower in Corporate Marketing. Brand remained visible everywhere but clearly owned nowhere. At the same time, the 2023 Lightspeed product redesign had moved ahead of the marketing expression, old PDF guidelines remained in circulation, and teams were working reactively with too little shared decision-making.
Corporate Marketing was also tracking a fall in Wrike’s competitive share-of-voice ranking from first to fifth. The metric became important enough to inform a formal Marketing key result: position Wrike in the top three for SOV. Brand had become an organisational and business problem, not a request for nicer assets.
I initiated and led Brand-led Growth: a cross-functional workstream that became Wrike’s practical point of brand ownership when no single function formally owned the full problem.
I treated brand as an operating system—shared evidence, decision principles, product alignment, governance, and tools that distributed teams could maintain—not as a standalone identity project.
What began as an informal community matured into a lightweight operating model. It involved experts from Content, Creative Design, Digital Marketing, Product Design, UX Writing, and Corporate Communications: roughly 20 participants, with about 10 active contributors each quarter.
Quarterly planning and reviews were connected to business objectives in Wrike. Initiative owners assembled collaborators, ran working sessions, and brought outcomes back to the group. A private Slack channel supported delivery; a public brand channel made progress visible. The Corporate Marketing Director actively sponsored the work, with the CMO informed and aligned.
The brand refresh became the clearest proof that the group could move work—not merely discuss it. Its plan distributed named key results across Interaction Design, Digital Marketing, Content, and Web Experience, then connected them to design, development, A/B testing, research, and review.
The refresh roadmap translated the coalition into owners, key results, and a delivery sequence.
I established regular collaboration with the Design System team responsible for Wrike’s next UI generation. The team joined Brand-led Growth, while I held biweekly working sessions with its designer to review work in progress and connect decisions across both systems.
This changed shipped and planned work. Product adopted the refreshed colour system into its roadmap; Brand and Product collaborated on iconography and other visual layers; and we later created a shared visual language for Wrike’s major AI features across launch communications and the product itself.
Research gave the collaboration a shared language. Five non-customer B2B SaaS decision-makers assessed colour, graphics, copy, a brand styleboard, and a product styleboard separately using one emotional scale. The wider programme also included 59 customer survey responses and eight internal responses.
The refreshed brand was perceived as modern, positive, and technology-focused, broadly matching the intended direction. The product appeared more conventional and less engaging. This exposed the next strategic problem: not making brand and product identical, but making them feel intentionally related across the customer journey.
