Cloudflare's Creative Corner: Featuring Special Guests From the Ironclad Design Team

All right. Hi everyone. My name is Jess Rosenberg and I lead the creative and brand design team here at Cloudflare. Welcome to the Creative Corner on Cloudflare.TV. This is our first inaugural episode and I'm super excited to have some of our friends from Ironclad joining us today. So welcome fellow designers from Ironclad. Dylan Welter is my co-host and today we will be chatting with our friends at Ironclad about their recent rebrand along with Orc design and how their team is structured and what types of processing they undertake to create all the great work they create on the team. So I'm super excited to have you. Sara, Kristy and Blake, thanks so much for joining us. If you all want to give a short intro and maybe tell us a little bit more about what you do at Ironclad, that would be awesome. Sure, yeah I can start. Hi everyone, I'm Blake Reary. I am the director of design at Ironclad. I've been at the company for about almost two years now actually. I joined in September of 2018. The founders are some friends of mine so I've actually been floating around the company basically since they started. So I've got to see it grow from nothing but now I'm a part of it which is a lot of fun. I'm really happy to be here. Hi guys, I'm Kristy and I'm the brand designer here at Ironclad. I started remotely, very excitingly, around April and I've been with Ironclad ever since. Hi, I'm Sarah Lin. I'm a lead product designer in Ironclad. The way I joined was, so previous to Ironclad I was working for a while for five years, a while in Dropbox and I was really intrigued by working in a product that really have a clear target audience and really built for that target audience. So I was on the front of Blake's for several years and he taught me about Ironclad and what it does for legal users and I was really intrigued. So once after my sabbatical I talked to him and yeah and here I am. I guess funny anecdote is Kristy and I joined on the same day so yeah remote onboarding. Very cool. Yeah well that's awesome. Thank you again so much for taking the time to join with us. So I think we can dive right into one of the first points where we're really stoked to talk with you about and that's around your recent rebrand. So as the creative ops manager here at Cloudflare I actually use Ironclad and so does the rest of Cloudflare quite a bit and you know we love the product and we love what it does and on top of that we also love what you've done with the rebrand and we'd really like to dive in a little bit into your process behind that rebrand and how you kind of approached that, how you got buy-in and then ultimately how you were able to take it across the finish line to where it stands today. Yeah sounds great. I guess I can start from the very beginning which is actually the beginning of Ironclad and not to like go too deep in the history but like I mentioned before the founders of Ironclad are friends of mine. I worked with Kai our CTO at Palantir back in the day and I guess it was in 2015 when Ironclad had just started. They were in my Combinator gearing up for demo day and Kai approached me and he's like Blake we need a logo. We need something to like put up on at the presentation at demo day. We need something and I was actually really busy with a different startup at the time but was just you know kind of interested in doing like a little side project and so developed Ironclad's initial brand from scratch in like five days. It was just very very quick you know turnaround time but you know it just needed something right but it turns out that brand ended up sticking around for I think four years which I'm pretty proud of in that like something I spent five days work on in my free time lasted that long but at the same time it was really never meant to be the brand that scales. It was something to kind of you know get investors excited right and so that's that's kind of where the whole rebrand effort started was that we knew we had something that was that was good but it wasn't going to scale with the company and the company was just beginning to kind of really grow quite a bit. Just to put into perspective when I joined the company was 40 people and like a year later I think we were like 120 something like that so we grew quite a bit this year. So that was that was the impetus for the for the for the rebrand and then from there we just kind of decided exactly what we like what approach we wanted to take. I think in the early days of Ironclad the competitive landscape was a little less clear. Over the years it became more clear who we were up against and also who are you know kind of our buyers were who the personas are that we that we are targeting and so that was really the kind of first step we took was really synthesizing all that knowledge and and like gathering it together and taking a look at where our brand was performing and where it wasn't performing. So from there let's see it's also worth mentioning I had a really great partner in crime with our CMO Joyce Solano. She had just joined she actually has a background in brand agency work so she was pretty well connected into the agency world and and what we did first the two of us was we developed our brand platform. So Ironclad didn't really have a brand platform it was just literally just you know a bunch of people with really great values collected together and a logo and some colors and some random illustrations on a website. So like how do you take that and like make a strategy and so the first thing we did was work with a writer to help us really define like what is our north star what is our message messaging what are the are the pillars that guide us as a brand and so we actually spent the first couple months just doing that working with all the executives at the company and this writer to to really draft the story and the words that describe our brand. It was then that we realized that we weren't going to be able to pull this off in-house completely and it was a good thing that we we decided that pretty early. I think when I joined having done brand work myself before I was like it's like yeah I'm totally down to to kind of like take a stab at this and get a couple people together and work on it but I think just with the growth of the business and all the things we knew we knew we needed to do it became readily apparent that we needed to work with an agency. So from there we kicked off the search for an agency. I think it took about a month and a half to land our agency. We ended up going with a small studio in San Francisco called Century. It's two designers formerly from Otopod I believe I think that's where they're from. And yeah I mean we we talked to lots of different people but really what we kind of landed on was just shared values, shared tastes, and you know kind of like convenience things like the fact that they were about a mile away from our office and versus you know working with an agency that's in New York or Portland or something else that was just like a huge benefit to be able to do these quick turnaround times. Something I should also mention was that we wanted to do this in five or six months so that was the turnaround time for the rebrand. Luckily because the company was relatively young there wasn't a whole lot of surface area to kind of really change up. There was a lot of green field stuff but we focused on the website so we said well what can we reasonably do in five months probably just a very minimal website. So I think but by setting like a really tangible goal that was it like that gave us the confidence to be able to narrow down the process to five months and be able to get what we got done. And did you finish it in five months? It was close to that yeah let's see I think I think we kicked off in April and then launched a very first v1 of the brand in September and then like the full like the fuller version of that a month later. So yeah we were able to stick to it. That is impressive. Yeah it was it was not easy but it was a lot of fun. I think on a personal level it was it was very interesting for me because I was also planning a wedding that just so happened to coincide with the brand launch date by a week. So two major rebrands of my life and making any last decision. What's the first rebrand or your wedding? What's that? What came first the launch of the rebrand or your wedding? My wedding was on was the Saturday before I think the Friday like the next Friday was when we when we pushed out the website the first version of the website. Yeah awesome. It was a time. With such a quick turnaround time that you were you were shooting for you know how how holistic was your approach between just the the brand and also the product behind it? I know you mentioned targeting kind of priority brand elements like the website. What did you do from a planning perspective around you know extrapolating that brand into the product as well? Yeah for sure and and since since y'all are Ironclad users you probably know this pretty well but the product is pretty minimal right. Relatively like kind of just like lots of white space using the system fonts. There isn't a lot of brand expression happening in the product and so really the goal was what can we do to like somewhat align like our our product and our brand. Initially with the expectation over time we would be baking more of the brand into the product and we're still going through that. We're still working on you know introducing some of the new color palette into the product. We're still working on bringing kind of moments of like brand moments like illustrations and little things you know little details into the product. So really the goal was like let's get the foundation in place and over time we can kind of develop the product to match the brand that we had developed. Nice. Let me ask you this. So Ironclad has a very unique visual approach especially with you know the approach you've taken with illustrations and especially in contrast to similar companies in the industry. What was the end goal with your your approach and your strategy and how did you know when you reached it? Yeah so it it kind of goes back to the the brand platform. So we had defined brand pillars right and one of those pillars is community. Something that Ironclad has been really successful at from a marketing perspective and brand perspective is building a community of passionate people in the legal industry specifically what we call legal ops. It's kind of an emerging persona and emerging profession and we early on capitalized on that and so since that's such a core aspect of who we are it became pretty obvious that we needed to highlight our community too and so that means you know taking our customers and like doing illustrated portraits of them. I think that coupled with the fact that we wanted to be differentiated you know at the time we we pasted up on the wall like the websites of our competitors and also like kind of similar companies in tech to us because it's not by the way it's not just a brand for our customers but it's also a talent brand right. So like we looked at what everyone else is doing right now in tech and we wanted to be something that stood out from that and so I think those two things are really what led to a lot of the decisions we made when it came down to use of color, typography and especially the illustration style and it's it's funny because there was a moment where we announced the rebrand to the company like maybe three four weeks or so before we launched it and did like a whole reveal and the illustration style was completely different then so like it was really like at the very last minute we like found that that thing that worked and so yeah you don't really know until you really see it right. It's one of those the messy parts of creativity. We know that experience all too well. Has everyone in the company been asking for a bespoke portrait? Definitely a lot of people wanted them or their kids or something. Yeah they're beautiful. Yeah yeah it's exciting. Yeah to add to that like the the human touch aspect of it from a brand perspective with some of our illustrations that go into the product as well like Blake was talking about earlier these little branded moments within product. The brand team has really come together and make sure that they're hand drawn and they're hand done and it just brings so much of like a different perspective of life and that human aspect into like such a clean looking product. Yeah very cool. Yeah it's really contrast. We're building very technical tools right. It's a tool to be able to like build automated workflows for legal right and I think if you if you think about that and like look out into the world of what other companies do similar things you see these like kind of very like structured kind of isometric sort of technical styles and we wanted to contrast that with the human element right. The people that we are elevating so that it's not just the technology it's the people using it too. Yeah that style and that approach isn't something that you see every day in tech so that was something that really stood out to me as unique and the art form of it too it kind of ties into the art form of legal ops in a way it's like kind of comes around full circle which is nice. Definitely yeah and also I think something like a nice little detail to kind of highlight is one of our other brand pillars is Illuminate and so if you look at the illustrations but also if you look at other motifs in our brand you'll see little green highlights and that's supposed to be illumination of the legal team, illumination of contracts and so like that's speaking to that brand pillar these like little strokes of what we call illuminated green. So it's something that I just I just love so much because I love those little details that are maybe a little bit hidden until you until you like start to notice them. Yeah those are nice I'm looking at those right now I wonder is there a way we can like share our screen here? Yeah I think it'd be cool to pull it up and just look at some of the work. I can I'll figure out I'll try and figure out how to do that as we can. You Blake you mentioned when you originally started that there was kind of a really quick sprint on getting some baseline branding to Ironclad and then you you recognize that as Ironclad's growing there you're losing that ability to scale and so when you approach this rebrand and this process you know what considerations did you take or did you think about to ensure that the design system and the framework you ultimately built was able to you know grow and scale with you as the company? Yeah that's a really good question I think the things that weren't scaling about the old brand was that there wasn't really any coherence to it meaning there's a logo and some colors but like no and some illustrations like here and there but like no real like documentation or like understanding of like how that should be put together and it was funny because like I designed this original brand and was working somewhere else and three years later joined the company and it was like amazing to see how it kind of evolved and like morphed on its own without any like person kind of uh shepherding it you know being the shepherd of the brand and so like we had a teal color that was like the primary color and that it like ended up everywhere including on the walls in the office and um it's not a bad color but I think it was you know an entire wall would be covered in it and it was just so overwhelming right and so what we wanted to do was create um create the kind of language I suppose um so you know if you imagine the logo and the colors and other elements of like the words like how do you create sentences from that and what is the style of writing and so that's what we tried to do with this rebrand was build um patterns and motifs and like different um ways of constructing um sentences so that they would feel the same um and what that tactically how that kind of manifested was um specifically for the website our entire website is blocks it's design blocks so if you go through different pages you'll see like patterns of and different motifs being reused it's because their thing was built in such a way that those are just the same components being reused um over and over across the site obviously we need to extend them and you know add new ones over time but um that's that's really the approach we took and I think that goes into the product as well as building blocks and reasonable components so that people can construct and be creative with those things but at the end of the day it starts it feels the same it feels cohesive so that was the approach that we took yeah that's great yeah that definitely seems like a very very smart approach you know especially from a emerging perspective between your your brand facing areas and then the product um so yeah I really really like that approach yeah I mean it's funny there's there's another motif that we have we call bracketology um if you look at our logo I think like there's a few different meanings in our icon mark but if you look at it it's it's like an eye right and then there's two brackets inside of it um and that was actually taken from the original logo was two brackets and back to back um and so as part of the rebrand we wanted to kind of keep that sort of um that idea keep that concept um but our our the guys at century did a really good job of extending that into a motif that you'll see across many different um parts of our brand so like we use it for framing photos and like it'll be kind of like hidden behind the page sometimes or even using white space so like you'll see like a bracket kind of forming in the white space and it's a really great concept and I and I love it um but we never really until recently documented like just how it should be used and so like again it kind of like took on a life of its own and so like there's like sales decks sitting you know in our google drive that just like having crazy uses like brackets everywhere different colors overlapping people nightmares it's but it like it makes me happy because like people are like are trying they're being creative with it and so like to go back to the systems question like how do you create a system of things that people can use and reuse and be creative with while also keeping it consistent and maintaining that um that that like theme I suppose so it's been really fun to watch it kind of evolve and then we have to go on rain again a little bit I always love listening to uh Blake talking about the whole rebrand experience it always amazes me how far the original logo has come to what it is today and like turning it to from a single logo and like being hands-off to like a whole a whole brand system today and it it just it's so like it makes me so happy but also like one of the things that uh Blake and I were talking about when when he was interviewing me was like oh how did you hear about ironclad and I said oh well actually I remember in my college days walking down the streets in San Francisco and distinctly see like a giant like a ironclad logo and how it just stayed in my head I never looked it up I never looked up what ironclad did or never really you know knew I what what what it was about I mean I myself wasn't sure if I was going to be a designer at the time but just how that memory carried me like stayed with me until like a couple months ago before I joined I got a call from ironclad just like hey have you heard of ironclad I was like why does that sound so familiar and then I I looked it up saw the rebrand I was like oh wow that's insane yeah brand recognition at its best right there I know yeah I find that also speaks to the talent brand um I think there are a lot of software that could actually could be a really great software but because they're focusing on a piece of technology that can feel kind of remote and alien to those who are not working in those industries but I think for ironclad by just like really highlighting on the impact this software has made to the people as a designer I kind of feel like the impact is made more tangible and approachable absolutely yeah can you tell us a little bit about you know you completed the rebrand in the sense that the design was locked in you were ready to start implementing it what did that implementation look like how did you get your house in order you know how did you kind of go about actually implementing the work once it was finished yeah I mean I think I think we did have the luxury of like I mentioned before being a relatively young company and not having too too much out there to to have to go back and change I think before we even locked in the new brand we we did a few audits of just like what is there on the world that we need to like you know put on a checklist to update and it wasn't a crazy amount of things but I think you know let's see it was around this time last year that we that we locked in I think the new brand or maybe even later in August it was it was pretty close and then we we were already building the so so like we we started building kind of the design blocks as we were designing them and we were working with a development agency there too and so they're used they're used to working this way which was really helpful but as we began getting closer and closer and closer that was when we could actually commit to you know putting in the effort to do illustrations or putting the effort to kind of refine things but there really it wasn't it wasn't kind of a handoff it was it was all integrated you know like we started building the things we needed to build before the design was completely locked in and then from a product perspective like I mentioned like we're still we're still working on that and I think it just comes down to like what's what the priorities right like what are the things that are are most important to make look and feel like ironclad and like be able to tell a cohesive story across a journey and so yeah we're still working through that that list of things. How how are you kind of carving out your time between what I would imagine is you know in a perpetual role of day-to-day design tasks for just the company as a whole and then also you know building these illustrations converting these these assets over you know what how did that work from like a prioritization standpoint? Specifically for the website launch or do you mean like just for the full for the full implementation? Yeah that's a good question I think we had we had a very specific launch date we also had PR going up that day and so we structured it so that there were clear check-ins for for each kind of like phase of the project and then once we got into the last step of implementing everything it was just a matter of making sure that we were covering I guess all the all the different different components of the list of tasks if that makes sense. So for me specifically I was let's see I was spending probably 30 percent maybe 40 percent of my time on the brand and a lot of that honestly was just kind of getting you know there there was like some last minute like executive buy-in things we needed to do so I spent time like kind of aligning people around that and then we had a brand designer named Pamelia who who did all the illustrations and she she spent a lot of time working directly with our agency kind of developing different styles developing like kind of the the different or like making the different decisions that needed to be made on like on a very like low altitude level and then I think most of her time was spent on the rebrand if not maybe maybe like 90 percent or possibly more. I remember currently yeah. Awesome I think just I think you successfully got the screen share up. Yeah I think we got some visuals. All right but only took about 13 minutes but we got cool. Okay I see what you're saying with the the green undertones here. That's nice. So awesome the these are the portraits of the customers you were mentioning. It looks like it's uh I don't know if it's stuck on your end it looks a little stuck on my end. Are you scrolling around on it? Yeah um can you not see it scrolling or is it looks like it just froze on my end too. Oh it says your screen sharing is paused. Resume share. You see it now? Ah there you go. Yeah there we go. Yeah I think these are so cool. Yeah me too. When we launched we only really focused on three pages by the way. So it was like the core most important pages I think at the time were the home page, the product page, and our community site. And then everything else we just used blocks to kind of like throw together. So I think by scoping it down that way it really helped us you know focus on what was what was important. And now we're adding more things we're updating things and building out new templates all that sort of thing. Nice and do you guys use a CMS for your website? Yeah yeah we're on WordPress. We did a lot of we like went through actually really thorough evaluation of different solutions and we had previously been on Webflow and I actually love Webflow. It's a really really great tool but at the time some of the things we were planning to do like kind of really integrated and customized content and like some of these like more emerging technologies like a demand base and like different things that like kind of focus on personalizing content just wasn't going to work for what we were trying to do. So we ultimately went with WordPress. But you know it's a proven tool. It works pretty well. Yeah yeah cool. Yeah we use Consentful. Yeah yeah we wanted to I think just at the time we didn't we couldn't make like the development investment. Yeah. Awesome. And as you're scrolling you can see all the hidden brackets. Yeah the brackets are beautiful. Can you see this new browser tab that I just opened? Yeah. I recently came across this and loved it. Specifically you know we're working through a brand refresh right now and as part of the rollout plan thinking of how to display our new design system when I saw this it definitely resonated. Was this something that was custom built with a development agency that you hired? No this was all our beloved Lindsay who is an incredible brand designer slash web developer slash everything. And she she just did this really quickly by like I think the week before we were going to launch just by hand. She's like we need we should have a website. We should we should have a design or a brand website. She was also she was previously at Gusto and had done a similar thing for the rebrand and so yes she's just a rock star and was able to put this together really fast. And also she I think was able to get it linked. I think we got featured in brand new for our rebrand and this was linked to by that which was really exciting and so awesome fun stuff. I've got a quick question here for for Christy and Sarah. Since both of you on boarded I think you said on the same day at Ironclad you started at the same time and you know the two of you are kind of coming into this as it's you know at the stage where it's been implemented. How have you enjoyed working with this this new system this new framework this new these new components? How has that been going from you know your viewpoint? You know especially Christy you and I worked at Zenefits together where we were working towards that goal so you know coming in and having that in place. How has that affected your ability to you know turn around design projects efficiently? Oh for sure. I mean there's there's still a lot of a lot of new areas to explore a lot of new templates and new avenues to go down but just having like say the bracketology and and the illustration style you know already sets a really strong foundation for going forward and I think the position I'm in is is really great that I can have I can take these and I can just take on a creative route with it and you know kind of just either let it grow or you know kind of mold it to where I would like to ideally grow and so and and working working with a team has been just so flexible and incredibly supportive in in some of my creative decisions and we recently launched our our first impact report that has to do with COVID-19 and how Ironclad has come to help a lot of legal teams and that was a first for Ironclad you know like coming up with a back at Zenefits we did a lot of ebooks and resource books but for Ironclad it was like a first ever impact report so it's how do we lay that out and so with the foundation I had and and taking all those motifs that were already laid laid down like it was just easy to kind of expand on and and so it has its challenges but I would say like it's it's really flexible to work with and just with like I think being able to speak to the brand you have to kind of like live and breathe the brand sometimes a little bit and it just comes so naturally when you have like a strong foundation laid down. That's fantastic. So I work on the product side and as Blake has mentioned like our product side right now is more it's a bit simpler and we're still working to integrate some of the brand element but I think the most important thing is that this new brand just gives the even the product a really clear sense of identity so that as I design new kind of features even if the current design I have with the current you know components are still more you know subdued I can imagine what it could be as we are involving kind of the product kind of design components forward so I think it provides us a sense of a vision to strive towards but I mean more tactically we have like brand colors that we're using very intentionally illuminate a green that's before or using our intentionally to highlight specific things throughout the product but also like you know very minimally as well to increase this kind of power. Oh that's fantastic that's really great to hear. Would you ever potentially like combine your illustration style with aspects of the product like NC State or other opportunities like that? Oh definitely. Oh yes we are apparently actually doing that. Oh awesome yeah. Yeah slowly kind of like bringing in some of that that flavor into the product and we call them brand moments right like a moment that you can connect with Ironclad as the brand not just the product you know you complete a task and you get something done and maybe move on but like is it a is it something that like we can capitalize on so that you actually connect with Ironclad the company and the brand and so we've been identifying those different moments and then trying to either use illustration or any of the kind of elements that we have in our toolkit to be able to make that connection happen. Yeah one of the biggest values I've learned as a designer on the brand team is intent and putting intentions behind where we want to use these illustrations where we want to use a certain texture or how do we want a certain component to be placed in the product so it's really shaped my my vision my perspective of intent. And I think like as we are kind of moving incorporating more of the brand moments into the product we're also kind of adding more nuances to expand our visual vocabulary. For example Lindsay and Christine they were kind of showing that we can definitely incorporate illustration but most of our larger brand illustrations have a very pronounced perspective usually it is drawn at an angle but when you're showing smaller illustrations spot illustrations for say empty states they're creating a slight variation where maybe the perspective is more kind of one -dimensional but it's clearly understood you know in a smaller space. Right so being very intentional and specific about where you're using what and what type of brand moment you kind of want your your end user interacting with and when. Yeah exactly yeah cool well I'd love to pivot towards the org and process portion of the conversation if that's okay with everyone. I know we have a good amount to cover there and I'm really interested in hearing you know how your design org is structured. I know obviously you have brand designers, you have product designers love to hear a little bit about what your org looks like and how designers work together on the team. Yeah for sure maybe I'll answer what the what the team looks like and maybe have like Sarah or Christy speak to how the team works together because I think you live it every day so we're a lean and mean team so it's the seven of us. There's four product designers, two brand designers and myself. We technically sit under product and report into product but obviously brand designers support marketing but also you know we have a large customer success organization that needs design help and our sales team you know many many parts of the company require design support so really I look at us as like a team that that enables design to happen across the company. But yeah we'd love to hear from from Christy or Sarah about how the designers work together. I guess I can start. Yeah so I really love that working in this small team whether it's brand designer or other product designer we're very have a lot of exposure to everyone's work. So just in terms of processes we actually meet quite frequently like we have a design crit every Tuesday and Wednesday where we sign up for projects that we want to share and we also describe what project is it and what kind of feedback is it a silent critique is it a brainstorm session that we want to involve everyone in and we have this Friday maker time that I think is very special. So we have I think that is an hour and a half where we have basically work design workshop that any one of us can kind of bring up and organize. For example in I think one maker time Lindsay our brand designer kind of asked us to kind of brainstorm different ways we can apply Bricketology across our brand assets and Christy also hosted a typography session with all of us as well. So I think it's just a really amazing moment for us to all work together on something that is work related but also extremely creative. And did you say that happens every Friday? Yeah. Oh very nice. Yeah that's awesome. I like it's like a wind down it's it's it's meant to be fun and creative and like do something maybe a little bit different than your normal day-to-day work. But it can be work related and last Friday we did we're working on this monthly newsletter we sent out the whole company just highlighting what what the design team is doing and and of course we want it to be designed right. So we on our make time on Friday this last Friday we all just got into a figma file and we're just like like riffing off of each other like working on like different ideas of like what the cover could look like for this month's design journal. So yeah that's one of my favorite moments of the week this is the make time. Awesome love the name. Yeah it's something blast. Direct and simple and easy to understand. You know exactly what you're doing. It's also so I find it so valuable like during my during my make time we went into it knowing that it was going to be some sort of like artistic sketch session not sure what we're gonna do. But that week I was working on a lettering project and and some some other folks on the team asked me what what my biggest struggle was that week and it was lettering. And so we just decided to to watch a lettering tutorial together take on a project together and I think you know having one cohesive team also ensures like a consistent branding not just in product but also on the brand and and what's great about that is like both both groups of designers are providing such like great creative inspiration all the time and and I just I love that it's it's such like a creative and supportive team and in my past experience it's always been like product is all the way over here brand is all the way over here whereas here you know like especially during our critique sessions like everyone's in a room together everyone's brainstorming everyone's critiquing brand is critiquing on on product product is helping critiquing on brand and it's yeah it brings a lot of consistency. Another process process I want to really highlight is so every morning we have like 15 minutes that's scheduled for all of us of design to have a coffee chat every morning and for someone who joined entirely you know remotely in my first couple weeks I definitely felt a sense of like am I going to I'm like really going to be friends with these people but just through those coffee chats and usually it goes over that 15 minute usually it goes to like the rest of the hour and we usually talk about sometimes work but most of the time just you know our personal lives funny shows we have watched it really builds a sense of camaraderie just friendship and I think that especially during this very you know special time COVID and for me it really gave me a sense of like belonging that I wasn't sure if I would have. Yeah that's great yeah we do something similar in our team too we have some coffee meetings a couple couple times a week in the morning it's a great way to just connect especially during these very unique times getting that face time is important. And I think they're really important in building that kind of trust because now in our Slack channel when we talk about some you know controversial design topic like font weight is it going to be 500, 600, 700 very important issue right we would have a lot of this very you know spirited debates and going through the product I think you have to have that kind of trust and honesty to to really dive into hard subjects. Yeah yeah I agree. To go back to the the creativity topic for a second I think since you originally asked about org design I think this structure that we have is very intentional that it's one team specifically because I think despite brand design and product design maybe having some deliverables ultimately I believe the method there's a lot of overlap or maybe even the same right essentially there's a huge huge creative component to it obviously there's the skill there's expertise and the knowledge that you need to kind of do the work but ultimately it comes down to like how many ideas can you generate and and can you talk about them and and ration like rationalize and articulate why you made those those decisions and and I think it's the same skill across brand design and product design and that's been my my kind of hypothesis for most of my career and I was like what if what if you know that like what would what would it look like if one team kind of centered around this same sort of method even though they were producing different things and so that's that's kind of like the the goal of of our our team structure is to be able to do that. Cool yeah I imagine it's helpful too and in creating a cohesive brand experience from you know your marketing website all the way through the product having one team of designers can really ensure that that happens. Yeah yeah with an integrated team like that which I think is fantastic by the way that sounds like for you know ironclad that's working exceptionally well as you approach you know quarterly planning or or just road mapping for design initiatives what considerations do you take to ensure that you know you're doing so with you know real design velocity in mind and you aren't just kind of taking you know ad hoc or tire spinning type requests? Yeah I think that's probably one of the most challenging parts of it really is is is making sure that the team not only has what it needs but it's also like the business has what it needs right and and so a lot of it is is alignment with company priorities and goals and ironclad is pretty unique in that like I think for the level that we're like the this place of maturity that we're at we have a lot of really strong foundations in place to be able to know what our company plan is and know like what are we essentially have like a model that's similar to OKRs and so every team has their set of responsibilities to help meet those company goals and what it comes down to is making sure that you know marketing is going to get the design support that they need to hit their goals for this quarter or this half or year and so it just requires a lot of like advanced foresight and and planning to make sure that you know design's goals are aligned with both marketing and sales and product and really every other part of the company but it's challenging because you know not everyone always gets it or kind of like understands the impacts and a lot of the times impacts of design are indirect right they're harder to measure and so I think that's one of the biggest challenges in doing this type of alignment is being able to measure the impact and then make the case for you know adding budget or headcount or allocating you know design time for one thing versus the other thing but the fact that we do have a pretty strong system in place helps us from like having to spin our wheels on like the kind of like randomization projects that come through and so really the goal is to as much as possible enable other teams to be able to self-serve while also maintaining a high bar for output so that we can focus on these like you know kind of metrics moving initiatives from the team. Yeah and do you have what are some ways that that you and the team do that is it with like a digital asset management platform that's something that we're exploring right now but what are some ways that you kind of implemented a self-serve approach? Yeah my philosophy has mostly been to like kind of meet meet the people where they already are as much as possible so we've built out some pretty robust like slide templates in Google Slides for example like you know a year ago the like kind of the presentations that were out in the wild are pretty pretty wild and then we invested time in building like a really great slide library in Google Slides and like made it a template that you can just click you know click one click open it up and be able to get going and so that's been a huge boon for us and then we use Figma for quite a bit of things. I think one particular thing that's really interesting is like any type of like digital advertising or like display ads that we need to make we have a file with a bunch of components and we've taught you know folks on the marketing team how to how to copy and change the text export and so for the most part they can just go in and you know like change the copy six times if they want to and like not have to bother anyone. So it's things like that just trying to meet people where they are or build like a relatively intuitive system and something like Figma. Giving somebody access to Figma like that bold move. Have you encountered any monsters in the wild? Some rogue experiments. Definitely rogue experiments happen but I think for the most part like I just firmly believe if you give people like a really easy to use tool and like you know some constrained creativity then they'll do some pretty amazing stuff but of course we do see brackets kind of in random places every now and then. Yeah I imagine people get wild with those brackets. Yeah that's for sure. We need like a cloudology for us. I love this bracketology. Oh yeah cloudology. Can you imagine the use of clouds everywhere? Yeah I wanted to touch on what you mentioned a little earlier on the ROI and kind of the impact of the design work that you do. How do you go about measuring that on your team and at the company? Do you have a specific way or approach or method that you take that works best? Yeah you know I feel like I've been trying to like decode that for quite a while. I haven't found the like the one thing that makes it fit. I think Google has like the dream framework or something like that. I can't remember exactly what it's called. It's a dream. Is that what it is? I think so. And that I think that works for certain companies but for us for example we actually have a pretty large and amazing customer success team and they measure their success off of a few things but NTS is one of them. Now I can say that you know design has a huge impact on NTS and actually we do get signal on that here and there when someone submits an NTS survey and they say like why didn't you know why did you give us a score and it's like intuitive UI or like such and such. But it's really hard to kind of like break that apart and know exactly what is influencing that score. And so I just look to things like NTS as just a loose signal for how we're doing. But I haven't really like cracked the code on exactly like one particular metric that measures the success of design other than the other metrics that are being enabled like product team delivering on a feature or on a use case or the sales being able to close a deal or those sorts of things are impacted by design but haven't found like why right way to extract out what the number is there. Yeah it's kind of a gray area I think for many design teams we're still figuring it out too. Yeah for sure. Yeah. Kind of on that oh sorry Jess. No go for it. I just wanted to on that topic I know some folks in our team were curious on how user research is approached on your team. Specifically I mean I guess it pertains to both brand and product but I'd be curious to hear what kind of user research practices you use on the team and how it influences your work. Sarah do you want to talk about that? Sure yeah I think as I mentioned that we usually none of us were previously lawyers so it's really important for us to really understand the legal team, business user, different type of users that use our product, what are the problems they have, what are the other solutions, and you know what does their life look like. And I think there are different ways to look at what user research means across the life cycle of a project. For example in the beginning when we are kind of tackling a bigger project with a high level of ambiguity and uncertainty we would usually do a series of customer interviews. I think before COVID we would actually walk to some customer's office talk to them but you know now it's mostly zoom calls. So then what we do is a problem interview where we ask them kind of how they use Ironclad today but also explore different problem areas around kind of the project we're actually interested in just to understand for a specific task they do, what are the different problems they have, how do they think about it, how what are the current workarounds or processes they are adopting today. And then from that we can understand you know out of this entire problem space that we can map what are the things we really should address and we're capable of addressing across time. Another I mean this this can take quite a bit. I can talk on and on about research actually but I think a lot of it is understanding customer but also understanding our own internal perspective. So internal stakeholder interview across our different teams whether it is sales support but also say product marketing and marketing in general and our executive teams. But that's like the beginning part there's obviously in the end there's usability study, there's feedback after something is launched, in the middle there's concept testing, when we have early design directions that we can share with customers. But I would have to say that my personal experience is you really need to understand the problem and get inside the user's head. If we misinterpret that then it doesn't matter if you create the best solution if it is to the wrong problem. Awesome. Cool. So I hate to cut this topic short but I think we only have a little bit of time left and so I wanted to wrap up and thank the Ironclad team for joining us today. It was really great hearing from you and learning more about your rebrand and how you work together and thank you for joining us. Yeah Sarah, Christy, Blake thank you so much.