Brand in Product

As the next phase our Auth0 brand evolution launch, our team set out to extend the new brand into the product experience. By creating a strategy, roadmap, and pitch for product leadership, we were able to gain alignment and resources to form a tiger team across brand and product design to pursue this initiative.

Role: Sr. Manager, Brand Design
Team: Ceci Alvarez (Lead Brand Designer), Fer Carrettoni (Lead Product Designer),
Ankur Chauhan (Sr. Product Designer)

Discovery and identifying opportunity areas

Before we could jump into design, we needed to first understand what the potential opportunities to infuse brand delight within the product experience were. The first step was conducting discovery and taking inventory of all possible touch points and user flows, so we could prioritize what to tackle first based on effort, span, and impact.

After validation and alignment, the team then began creative exploration on areas such as empty states, banners, alerts, feature onboarding, and other high-touch opportunities to explore brand application through ghost ui, iconography, illustration, and more.

Aligning to the product roadmap

In addition to redesigning existing components and layouts, we leveraged the opportunity to align to the product roadmap, and see how we could infuse the new brand into features and updates already slated to launch. This helped us accelerate implementation and ensure new launches would be up-to-date, reducing efforts to need to retroactively apply the brand.

Through this approach, we were able to partner closely with PMM and PMs to support new updates and feature launches from both product and marketing efforts.

Enablement through guidelines and toolkits

After finding success with new brand applications within the dashboard, the next phase was documenting and creating guidelines to enable design and engineering to create cohesive brand experiences moving forward in a systematic way.

The output of this phase was a new set of guidelines in Figma for our dashboard — defining how, where, and when to add brand delight into the dashboard experience.

Where we are today

Brand in Product is now successfully contributing to creating a cohesive user experience, reducing friction, and adding delight. Internally, the initiative also strengthened the bond between our brand and product designers, creating a work stream for ongoing collaboration.

The dashboard guidelines were successfully launched and adopted in Q1 2022, with 100% of new product experiences following the new brand and delight guidance.

This is now an established and resourced initiative among our teams.