Intended impact: Update our brand voice and tone to better align with Abstract’s new direction and empower cross-functional teams. 

Additional impact: This is newly launched, but already I’ve worked with several different cross-functional teams on important customer communications.

A new chapter at Abstract

When I first joined in March of 2019, the previous Director of Brand and Communications had just created and introduced the Abstract brand voice and tone. I played a large part in helping with team adoption by being an ambassador for the voice and tone. I led office hours so anyone could come discuss it or workshop ideas and was available for editing help in a dedicated Slack channel.

Early in 2020, a new CEO joined Abstract and we realigned our mission, vision, and values. We then began building Notebooks — a platform to help teams gather requirements, review designs, and continuously measure what works. Over time we added new people to the team and the ways in which we talk to current and potential customers needed to evolve. 

In March of this year, I ran two workshops with Anna Pickard, the creator of Slack’s voice and tone. I invited folks from across the company which included team members from product, customer success, marketing, PeopleOps, and executives. Bringing all these perspectives together helped us to figure out what we’d like to keep from the current voice and tone and what areas needed updating.

There were 3 big themes that came out of the workshops:

• We want to take our customers with us on the journey

• Our product voice and company voice need to be aligned

• We want our communications to be bolder

From there I did smaller workshop sessions with teams to talk about specific examples and updated our documentation. After completing the documentation, I used Abstract Notebooks to conduct a formal review for our executive stakeholders where they could give feedback and/or approve the documentation. Once it was approved, I made it accessible in  “How we work at Abstract” documentation in both Confluence and Notebooks. To inform the team and help drive adoption, I presented the process and guidelines in our weekly all-hands meeting. 

A voice that’s values-driven

In our workshops we talked about the divide people were feeling between the company voice and the product voice. We decided that this was an opportunity to let our values guide us. 

Here are two examples on how we used the values to inform the voice:

Value: Service  

We tell the story that people need to hear in the way that meets them where they are, rather than making sweeping declarations and expecting people to catch up. We center the needs of the customer or user rather than the company when telling any story.

First principle: When we ship, we ship together  

We celebrate when our customers reach moments of understanding, success, or when we know that they are engaged and on board. 

As with any type of change, progress doesn’t happen overnight. In the near term, I continue to act as the ambassador for the voice and tone at Abstract. I am available to read through documents for other teams and provide feedback and suggestions. In the future, my hope is to empower more folks on the team to be ambassadors for the voice and tone.