As Docusign geared up to launch its new category, Intelligent Agreement Management, it brought us in to examine how its naming system could better support clarity throughout its portfolio.

We modeled a number of frameworks for naming with leadership, landing on one that allows distinctive names for offerings that act as high-visibility proof of the Docusign vision for Intelligent Agreement Management.

For everything else, we developed guardrails for developing grounded, descriptive names.

To make sure the system would work, we aligned it with Docusign's internal product lifecycle and skipped the guidelines deck in favor of developing guidance tailored to work within Docusign’s internal knowledge systems.

Within that guidance, we also codified previously undefined parts of the naming process, like project names, proper use of the Docusign name, and how to manage localizing names in non-English-speaking markets.

Wrangling a complex portfolio that had grown largely by acquisition, and facing a range of ambitious new technologies on its horizon, Illumina asked us to help them organize their portfolio and create a clearer story through how they named.

We workshopped a range of hypotheses with a cross-functional leadership team, experimenting with different roles for its existing brands and identifying where new ones would be developed.

Ultimately, we landed on a structure that divided its platforms under tiered subbrand names that were intuitive to their respective buyers, and prioritized Illumina as the primary brand across the rest of the portfolio. This meant sunsetting a range of subbrand names that distracted from Illumina as the source brand, and offering specific guidance around how “un-named” offerings should be labeled and referred to.

While not a traditional naming project, Payoneer’s CEO asked for our help to “name the actions we take in service of our customers.”

With that framing, we were in.

We worked with leaders to create a hypothesis: What would inspire great work, connect employees to their customers around the world, foster experimentation, and break down the silos that can stand in the way of the best-possible answer?

With a set of actions in mind, we conducted 10 co-creation sessions with Payoneer employees around the world, learning from them what made great work possible, what stood in the way of it, and what they wished they could introduce into the company’s shared ways of working.

With global, cross-functional, multi-tenure input, we finalized a set of principles for ways of working at Payoneer that will set the stage for its next decade of success, and supported the brand team in developing a launch plan, and internal education campaign, and a program for grassroots “champions” to advocate for great work in collaboration with the CEO’s office.

A beloved baby-products brand, Fridababy needed to rethink its brand architecture and naming as its offerings matured.

We helped them align on a source brand name, Frida, which created the freedom to both stand alone and to grow into standing for the whole family.

We’ve supported their brand name development and copy direction since 2017, helping to name and launch Frida Mom and Frida Fertility.