A rebranding process taught us we needed an internal change | Alex Antolino, Typeform | OnBrand '17

[Music] so I'm Alexander lino I'm creative director at typeform and so the first thing I want to say this talk is gonna be very casual okay just like me sharing what I've learned during the last half a year while doing a rebranding so here you go so during last five months at typeform we've been in a process of doing a rebranding of our company of our brand and some things happened that let us understand that we needed an internal change because two years ago was like two years ago when I joined the company we were 30 people and right now we're about 200 people so in two years we went like and you know it's hard to grow up so that's why I can like frame the presentation in a very gleich Kanak teenage your teenage kind of like Luke okay so um couple of things about me I've always been super passionate about music I love making electronic music DJing and I also love storytelling I love telling stories right so you're gonna see that my presentation is framed into like three acts okay just to make it useful for you to follow up ok so let's get started every classical story starts with a character okay and as you can see in these pictures there's some kids here ten-year-old kids and this one is me when I was ten years old but if you look closely there's no evidence on this picture that that guy is actually me so I could come here and stand I start over and say this guy is me and that guy is actually me and you know what like you would never know so it's usually in general when they ten years old they're very generic but actually you look to them like if you scratch a little bit and I get ready I mean big warning now like is full of awkward pictures so just bear with me okay there you go that's me when I was 12 years old and if you see this picture you can see that there's more information here right like you see this kid that take cares about it doesn't go to the gym much but take cares about his image and wears black and as this is the cover of a beach a film you can see that he's interested in like filmmaking right where's this picture is like me two weeks like two weeks ago talking about rebranding concepts a type form and for some of you that don't know type form is the company that changed the way people collect data online by adding conversation so you want you need to learn something all your customers you ask them questions right like you do in real life so in a very analytical and rational science and what we did is that we added an emotional layer on top of it by having conversation so people could engage with their customers right so we can I created these balance of rational and emotional kind of communication and people seem to love it right and what we got from people was like I enjoy feeling forms for the first time like this is super exciting I'm like okay and so we started thinking we realized that we created the first conversational data collection tool and that is very important it seems super obvious right now but it hasn't been so obvious to us we we came up with this idea of conversational data collection about eight months ago and it took us four months to nail it like that and it seems obvious but there's evidence of that so those are screenshots that we took in just one day one year ago over all our channels in social media websites and you see how we had no clue on how to talk about the product we had so we would talk about like human interactions we talk about like making forms more human even making things more human but we had no like I mean I joined this company in two years and a half ago and I come from the fashion industry like I was directing commercials I have my own production company I was new to tech and I was like mom I got this new job and she's like oh what do you do and I'm like well so there's this software online and you ask questions to people and you get answers I mean it was fucked up and another evidence it's true and another evidences are branding right so that was that screenshots taken last week of all of our communication right now not just one year ago but right now and as you can see there's a lot of different things right so let's talk about branding a little bit to me brands are like people and I say that because as a human being your point of view in life is the mix of story and values right so you have your story you learn a lot of things in life you have your experience and then you acquire some values when when you grow up right and this creates your point of view in life and keeps like it dictates how you behave right so with this point of view when you when you deal with a problem you create a solution and this solution is unique because your point of view is unique and that's what that's why it's so important to know your point of view your purpose right but we didn't know that at that moment because we grow so fast we were so focused on like figuring our shit out and so we have this product eight months ago we said okay that's conversational data collection so we will we had to go back and like unworked this path to find our purpose and know who we are and what do we stand for and so we partnered with her friends a design studio designer like a branding company London we partnered with them to help us because to be honest we have we're not the most experienced with people like we're all young we're trying to learn and these guys know what they do so we we know ourselves and they have experience who say let's collaborate so we spent some time doing workshops focus groups like half a year basically and something interesting happen here we start doing these interviews with our people from customer success customer success is the tema type from the talk with our customers like hip support educates them and engage them when they're using the product right so we did interviews and we asked them questions like why do you work at iPhone would he feel about typeform like what are the customers saying about typeform and all of them all of them said individually what the customers are saying is that there's this feature that it's been the top requested feature for the last two years and we never build it and I'm like what do you mean it's like no no so there's this feature for a ranking field that it's been the top recruits a feature for last two years and product never build enough how is that possible like if we know this how is the possible that we never build it and I realize they were like what product you know they have their own roadmap and I'm like what it was super weird and then I was like okay so if we don't listen to each other because I understand like it's been a super hard period of time we were like so focused on growing up so if we don't listen to each other how are we going to deliver good value to our customers yeah the product is good people like people liked it but how we were gonna like express ourselves and instead explain why do we do what we do so we started analyzing our teams and that's what I got so we had a product team and then customer success team marketing team very classical like how many of you guys have this organization more or less okay several cool and I realized my team which at that moment was eight people and even inside my team I had a division right so four people were the design and three people were the media core like doing films and stuff and I was like okay so we're very isolated I see by disciplines so designers with designers marketers marketers which is good when you're trying to learn because you have other people to collaborate with but communication okay and so I was not the only one that saw this problem so on the Left we have Sancha director of marketing he was supposed to come here but couldn't make it at the end and they beat Apple VP of customer success and both of them were coming to me like an Tony you know we have a problem like communications not flowing I'm like I'm and I know and so what can we do and Apple was like I need more designers I need more resources and Sancho was like I want to make the marketing bigger and like I want everyone to be in marketing I was like okay okay okay I'm just gonna have a copying thing about it and so what I realized is that we're all like we were growing up and we're trying to achieve the same purpose we had the same goals but we were pulling in completely different directions and so I realized that if we really wanted to deliver the value to our customers externally we had to get ready internally first and so now they're here we have the problem we mean we move to act - so I was thinking what is that is bringing us together what do we have in common now like marketing team customer success creative team what do we have in common and the answer was purpose we have to say some of some of us like someone designers of my team had the same purpose as some agents from customer success growth others had retention right and so because I my creative director I started analyzing the content that we create and this is a very common framework and this is they're all the content that your company should produce right and so the pyramid expresses the amount of content and this is our Google framework and they use these words hero hub help and I yell at mine so he hero is kinda like the top of the pyramid and it's like very expensive odds that you do maybe combined Accords or something like that to attract and engage customers very inspirational then hub content is more regular content it's like stuff that you should produce like regularly to engage with your customers and then we have the help the help content which is this massive amount of low low fire content like tutorials questions webinars these kind of things that you produce like every week so that's the content the problem we had is like the creative team had to choose like okay I get this campaign but then I get these web series or again these other thing and we had to prioritize stuff there was different nature so it was a fucking mess so we after thinking we created what we call the user centered communications team and that was key for us so user Center communication team is basically a cross-functional communication team organized around the customer journey and what does that mean we took into consideration two things so basically purpose and we took the customer journey and we have discovery cyclop as an event adoption and then pay and then growth and what we did is created cross-functional teams with people from different departments that had the same purpose and so we created this little like workgroups that we call colonies and for example the awareness colony has the purpose of attracting as much people as possible and the acquisition colony for example has a purpose turn sign up customers to paying customers and so everyone was super happy and that's the first picture we took like when they're sitting together for the first time and they were like yeah you know that is actually a really cool picture because we have Petra the designer on the left and then we have valerie customer success agent and marketing and people were like yeah I understand what I'm here for cool so then alignment was also super important for us because now we have all these groups and they're creating content is like how are we going make these people create content in like separately but it's content that is aligned and like provides like a solid image of her brand and so we took these colonies imagine these bars are like colonies and we take a look at the at the process that we're following to achieve like to create projects and they were all following to say like we established that they would follow the same process so it's basically planning producing distribution and then analyzing results and so the guys were working on the blue section and people who are working on the on the pink section we said we're gonna make these two groups and so we merge them like that and so we created what we call the color and sorry the collective's which is basically group of strategies and another collective for creatives which is like designers copywriters writers for ever and it looks like this so strategies on the Left get together once a week and they share theirs their ideas and their plans to get feedback and aligned with what others are doing so we need to launch a new product okay so on my colony we're gonna do that what you guys gonna do and so like communication flows and same thing on the Rye like here we see like last week the whole creative team talking about a campaign that we're gonna release very soon right and so these didn't just achieve alignment but also focus because they knew what they were doing and when you know what you were doing when what's your purpose you have more ownership and you're responsible for were you trying to do so after we implemented this and after a month everything is flowing like everyone is engaged and we're all like yay we're ready to like kick ass next year right and so what I realize is that not just branding but also like internal organization is about purpose and defining why do you do what we do and when you come to work it's like why why am as a designer coming and work here and we documented this whole process during the last months and we're gonna launch we want to release a documentary series very early next year about all this process and the good and the ugly and the bad but I just couldn't help bringing like sneak peek so please don't judge this is very rough but at least you can get an idea of the process first it starts you're happy and you're small and everyone is like excited because you don't have much money but you have impact and you're happy dad's everything you do you're gonna see out soon you know you have some users but you want more users like there's so much things to do and you don't have money so you just have to work with what you what you have so then we got money the first lot of investment and we were worried too like how this is gonna impact culture I think me and Robert have a certain way that we behave around people and that you know in those early days when we were just 10 people a company that was the culture right was very laid-back Thomas curricula collaboration he relaxed para guitarist/vocalist our theater into trabajo our assessing gradient along with class corn in everything feel organic a film conan project okay no salary no salary no cellar Tantus available generative available to Dallas Ostia under sterile aha que pasa No [Music] Catherine embarrasses the bonus room project maintainer atheon to our muchos mercilessness a little America Maryellen organifi thing just mother Rondo graphene is over how much as in everything here's the only worried that I I have is we are not there yet we there we have so much to do so we're trying to do with this is basically be able to share what we've learned and not show just a beautiful face but like the problems we overcome so maybe people in other companies are struggling with growth can maybe so use some solutions or like finding new ways of doing stuff so we're coming to the end of this story and I just want to recap what what I learned during these months so basically when you get a round of investment and you get big money you you're excited and yeah you're like yes fucking finally like we're gonna grow when you start crying like crazy and you're like yeah yeah yeah I want to do more you're having vision and you're excited and that's a very good thing but also like there's chaos that comes with it like when you hire 30 people a month I mean that's super hard and like so growth is inevitable but growing up is a choice and so I to me that is the choice that we made by starting like a dinner search trying to find our purpose as a company and defining who we are to be able to stand for something and also the choice of like you know the way we organize is not actually really good we need to do something about it so creates the VP of design a type for him told me one day you know I feel like type form with all this movement feels like a teenager right and I'm I I heard what he said and I was listening I was thinking I was like mmm I'm not actually sure that we were a teenager yeah like I feel more weak working like this puber you know like when you're 12 you're 11 12 years old you start getting pubs on your dick and you're like everything is awkward like you don't want to talk to anyone you don't want to listen to what others are saying you're like so focus on like what's going on in here that everything is a mess and at some point like you didn't like my joke yeah and so at some point you're like you realize that you need to grow up and you got to do something and sort your shit out type 1 was more like this kid that it was very generic he looks very generic it still until we launched a rebranding next year but things are changing and if you scratch the surface a little bit you're gonna find that this generic it has depth inside and has aspirations and stuff and so that's how I see my job my job as a creative director is about like surfacing the essence trying to find what is there that it's hidden for others but that we can bring up to the surface and let everyone enjoy and that's that's why excites me about my job and that's what's been amazing about this process during the last half a year like trying to find what is it in Saipan why do we have this amazing culture like what do we do this supposed to be super boring product but at the end it's like yay and so basically helping brands or like ideas to transition from these puber like really what the fuck is going on thing into like a teenager like this shining teenager that is like a living statement and like he's bald and he's like expresses heat him or herself and like when I for example remember when I was 16 years old and like I started my rock band my first rock bond and I jumped on stages I was like yeah and I had the best time of my life or for example when I asked when I was 18 I asked the bank for a loan to be able to study filmmaking and those moments were like very important in my life and I remember them very like with a lot of like good pipes and so or like right now when I'm just standing here in front of you trying to share what I've learned in a very casual way during the last half a year a type worm about finding purpose and defining who you are so at least is useful for some of you and you can do something with it so hope it was useful and thanks for coming [Applause] [Music]