Context

Small team, heavy load: 6 designers against 150+ marketing projects a quarter.

The context after the layoffs was rough — morale was low, design had little authority, and the team wasn’t really happy with the work they were doing.

I’d already kicked off a cross-functional Brand-led Growth workstream aimed at brand consistency, evolution, authority, and awareness, since nobody actually owned the brand in the company. The brand refresh became one of its key initiatives.

<aside>

Problems to solve

Brand SoV significantly dropped over several years.
Inconsistent brand across assets.
Visible gap between product maturity and brand expression.
Visual language felt less competitive in the category.
Legacy infrastructure slowed design production and web development. </aside>

My role and solution

I initiated and led the refresh as a cross-functional brand-system initiative — not as a purely visual update. The goal was to close the gap between Wrike’s product maturity and brand expression, rebuild consistency, and create a scalable system the team could keep improving under limited resources.

I aligned the plan with C-level stakeholders, built the project group, defined the roadmap and working rhythm, and led creative and strategic direction across ideation, reviews, prioritisation, approvals, and rollout.

1. Audit and problem framing

Mapped systemic brand gaps across channels, assets, website patterns, templates, and product-adjacent touchpoints. The work helped clarify where the brand was inconsistent, where production was slowed by legacy infrastructure, and where the visual language no longer matched Wrike’s product maturity.

2. Direction and C-level alignment

Defined the refresh direction through style boards, brainstorms, design exploration, and C-level alignment. Instead of a revolutionary change that could harm brand recognition, we focused on a controlled evolution: colour palette, brand elements, layouts, information clarity, and system consistency.

3. Brand system and product-brand coherence

Created the Brand Emotional Navigation framework to balance consistency with flexibility, improve targeting, and help the team make faster decisions across different audiences and touchpoints. I also partnered with the product team to align selected brand updates on the product side, making the customer experience more coherent.

4. Rollout and system enablement

Prioritised brand elements and rollout steps, updated the visual system iteratively across channels, refreshed templates, libraries, and reusable assets, and moved guidelines from static PDFs into a brand portal so the system could scale beyond the core refresh project.

Results

<aside>

Directional SoV improvement

Brand visibility improved in public-signal analysis; the refresh was one likely contributing factor.

</aside>

<aside>

11 months

of core refresh work: direction, 1500+ web pages, 50+ templates, reusable assets, and brand guidelines.

</aside>

Improved brand-product coherence: the refresh helped close the gap between marketing brand experience and product maturity, especially after Wrike Lightspeed.
Made Wrike more legible as an enterprise AI work-management brand, not just a generic work-management platform.
Improved AI and human readability through clearer information structure, stronger contrast, better navigation, and more coherent language.
Updated the brand system for further scalability, including later AI-branding work.
Rebuilt brand consistency and helped the brand speak louder despite limited ToFu budgets.
Improved production speed: the team handled consistently increasing scope with the same resources.
Delivered the core refresh work in less than one year while increasing team authority, ownership, and cross-team collaboration.
Enabled the team to scale the refresh beyond the core project: designers started initiating follow-up improvements across website components, video templates, presentations, and reusable brand assets.