Branch · 2025 to 2026
Repositioning a company through web and product narrative.
Led the product and experience strategy behind a public B2B SaaS rebrand. A clearer market story. A product-led website. A sharper voice. A digital system the company could grow into. Launched at sales kickoff. Live in market.
Role
Sr. Director, Product Experience
Partner
Staff Product Designer
Duration
Multi-quarter to launch
Status
Live · branch.io
Scope and outcome
$1M
ARR retained at launch
150+
Pages audited
3
Tier triage model
SKO
Full company reveal
The problem
A new look couldn't fix an unclear story.
Branch was entering a new chapter. The product platform had grown to span measurement, attribution, deep linking, and AI-enabled product capabilities. But the market story had narrowed. Customers and prospects still knew Branch for one thing, and the website reinforced it.
The site had also accumulated years of complexity. More than 150 pages. Dozens of content block types. Inconsistent storytelling across products and use cases. A refreshed visual identity was in flight, but a new logo and palette wouldn't fix the problem underneath.
The work wasn't a visual refresh. It was a repositioning.
The reframe
Don't apply the new brand to the site. Use the site to make the new company understandable.
That distinction changed everything downstream. Information architecture stopped being a map of internal teams and became a path through how buyers actually evaluate the product. Voice stopped being a brand asset and started doing real product explanation. The site became the proving ground for the new story.
The work
Four inputs into one market expression.
Input 01
Strategy.
Repositioning around the platform Branch had become, not the product it launched as. AI capabilities, measurement, attribution, and deep linking framed as one connected platform rather than four disconnected pages. The unlock was deciding what story the market should hear first.
Input 02
Narrative.
A homepage narrative built around three product pillars instead of a feature list. Each page rewritten to explain customer value before product mechanics. The story moved from what we built to what customers can do with it.
Input 03
Voice.
Confident enough for enterprise buyers. Human enough to feel current. Specific enough to make complex product value easier to understand. Less enterprise-safe abstraction, more product-aware specificity. A voice that could carry the new brand without sounding like every other martech site.
Input 04
Architecture.
Site structure rebuilt around how buyers evaluate Branch, not how internal teams organize features. Products, Solutions, Pricing, Resources, Company. Clearer separation between product categories and customer entry points. Competitor content moved to resources so the primary experience stayed focused.
The system, in motion
The new brand, applied to product.
A brand earns its credibility when it shows up in product, not just on marketing pages. This is Ivy, the AI product surface, running the new visual system, voice, and motion language end to end. The strategy is on the website. The proof is in the product.
Ivy product demo · Live on branch.io
What landed in market
Every click accounted. Every dollar proven.
Six words doing the work of the old long-form value proposition. Confident without being abstract. Specific without sounding internal. The headline that replaced years of feature lists with a clear customer promise.
Live at branch.io as of brand launch.
The triage
150 pages is not a launch plan.
The site footprint was too large to rewrite end to end. So the work needed a triage model: separate the pages that needed strategic narrative work from the ones that needed light updates from the ones that just needed to move forward. That decision protected the launch timeline and concentrated creative energy where it would matter most.
Tier 01
Full rewrite
Core product, platform, and high-conversion pages. New narrative, new structure, new voice. The pages that had to do strategic work for the launch.
Tier 02
Light refresh
Brand and content updates without structural change. Pages that needed to feel current but didn't need new positioning to land.
Tier 03
Migrate only
Lower-priority and low-traffic pages. Move forward with minimal changes so launch could happen on time without abandoning depth.
The execution decision
Where the work happens matters as much as what it is.
Branch had limited internal design capacity for a website effort at this scale. So I led a formal evaluation across six agencies covering brand, web strategy, B2B SaaS fluency, development, and timeline confidence. The evaluation matrix was the easy part. The harder question was what actually needed to stay internal.
For Phase 1, brand fidelity, product fluency, and decision velocity mattered more than agency scale. Strategic design and narrative work stayed in-house with the team that knew the product, the customers, and the roadmap. External support could handle execution at scale once the strategic spine was set.
"Strategic close, scale wide."
Agencies build great websites. They don't always understand internal stakeholder dynamics, in-flight product decisions, or which executives need which moments at sales kickoff. Internal teams understood the company well enough to make the launch land, not just look good.
The launch
Internal reveal first. External signal second.
The rebrand launched at sales kickoff as a full-company reveal, not a holiday teaser campaign. The CEO presented the new identity. The website demo ran from a pre-recorded walkthrough rather than a live staging environment to reduce launch risk and create a polished executive moment.
Sales kickoff is the moment a company gets to convince itself of its own story before it tries to convince the market. Treating SKO as a change-management moment, not just a reveal, was the difference between belief and rollout.
What changed at launch
- Site live across full product platform narrative
- Information architecture restructured around buyer journey
- Voice and tone applied across all top-tier pages
- Reusable page system in place for future expansion
- Sales team enabled with new positioning before public reveal
- Public reveal coordinated across web, social, and PR
What I learned
Three lessons from leading a public rebrand.
Brand without product is decoration.
A new logo and palette don't change how customers understand a company. Repositioning happens on the pages where customers form opinions, not in the brand book.
Triage protects the launch.
You can't rewrite 150 pages. Naming which ones do strategic work and which ones just move forward is what makes a launch feasible. Without triage, the work stalls in scope.
Internal belief before external launch.
A rebrand needs internal belief before it can become external signal. SKO wasn't a reveal. It was the moment the company got to recognize itself in the new story.
What it earned
The market told us it landed.
The save
$1M.
ARR retained · 3-year renewal
A major enterprise customer was on the edge of churn. They saw the new positioning, the new brand, and the new product surface working together and re-signed for three years.
The website wasn't decoration. It was the proof point that retained the account. Repositioning isn't just a story you tell. It's a story the market has to recognize as the company you actually are.
Sales adoption
Sales picked up the new narrative immediately. Pipeline conversations got sharper. Customers who had known Branch for one capability finally saw the platform.
How it gets measured
Repositioning isn't measured in pageviews. It's measured in whether the market sees the company differently than it did before. By that bar, it landed.
The meta-point
For a B2B SaaS company, the website is the first product experience a buyer has.
If that experience is unclear, the product feels unclear before a user ever logs in.
The visual identity gave Branch a new look. The deeper work was translating product strategy, market positioning, voice, and customer value into a digital experience the market could understand. The save was the proof: when a major enterprise customer saw the new positioning, the new brand, and the new product together, they re-signed for three years. That's the difference between a rebrand that gets noticed and a repositioning that retains revenue.