Global Brand Design Crit

A global cross-product rebrand that worked to open up the brand design process to key product stakeholders.

The Challenge 
Help product teams located around the world to feel involved and invested in a global brand update that would redefine the identity of their individual products.​​​​​​​
Change is hard. But it's also a constant for a big technology company like Citrix. The Citrix Mobility Apps portfolio consisted of a number of product brands grown through a mix of acquisitions, mergers and internal product development. Each of these products had a growing user base, and strong brand affinity both with customers and  the internal teams that supported each product. Because of the manner in which the portfolio was built over time and the different markets that each product targeted, individual product brand identities were unique some stronger, some weaker, but with little sense of brand continuity across products. Customers could and did use multiple Citrix products without ever being aware that they did, in fact, come from the same company.  
As part of an overall strategic brand realignment, it was decided to redesign key brand identity elements across products, to develop a common brand language that could be applied to all existing products, but also had the systems-oriented design scalability that would help facilitate the develop of completely new product brands, as well as make it easier to rebrand future product acquisitions in a way that made identity transitions intuitive for existing users, and that helped maintain continuity where possible for existing product brand equities.
But for change to happen on this level, effecting multiple products with revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars, product owners have to be an integral part of any solution. The risk is that powerful product owners unwittingly derail portfolio brand strategy in favor of their individual product strategy. So how to herd a group of vary smart, vary diverse technology product cats? You blow up your typical design process in favor of a very public, radically transparent design process.
The Innovation
Open up the rebrand design process to a global stakeholder audience in real time, helping them understand the complexities of designing integrated identities for a disparate portfolio of products.

Citrix brought in Hybrid Design to do a universal identity update to the entire SaaS product line. To help individual product owners and teams to feel a part of this strategic brand realignment, we broadcast a series of public design discussions at key points in the design process, allowing team members from around the world to join the discussion in real-time. This helped various product teams feel like the rebranding process was happening with them and not just to them, and also helped to make sure that the design team was able to listen to their needs and concerns as the brand design process progressed. 
The Transformation
Product stakeholders didn't just get onboard with the rebrand of their products –
they got excited about it.
Making the design process radically-transparent helped build a common understanding of what was being changed and why, and fostered trust between the Brand Experience team and product stakeholders and product UX, product management and marketing teams. It also engendered a fantastic global conversation around how best to connect an evolving brand and product strategy to a unified Citrix visual brand expression.

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