Backstage story of Zefir's rebranding
On our September All-Hands day (where all employees reunite in our offices to spend the day working 🙄 and enjoying each other 's company 🤗) Julien Dias presented the new rebranding of Zefir (affectionately nicknamed 🍆 because of the beautiful color palette). He showed how the rebranding will empower people to make bolder and more confident choices to move forward, and how we should position ourselves as
- always seeking excellence (like executing at lighting speed and having a product with Net Promoter Score 93 after 1 year of our launch wasn't already a sign of that 😜),
- actors of change (we believe the status quo could use a bit of change 😉),
- providers of a sense of belonging (we are talking about the future home of people here), and
- inspirational and trustworthy (this is the largest financial operation of people's lives and they should feel that this is not just another life event but is a step closer for them to achieving their dreams and giving their families a better life — you can ask Julien Dias all about it and his love for Legos 😄)
As usual, we framed the steps needed to rebrand all our assets, such as external presentations, client and partner emails, our website, our internal and external web pages, all our static web assets, and other things that I might have forgotten here… Our goal was to give a big splash and have everything ready to be launched at the same time: needless to say, the biggest effort was in (yeah you guessed right) the product.
Tony Hagnéré and I did not want to have our (pristine) reputation tarnished by being late on our commitments, leaving the whole company hanging dry — after all, we are driven by impact, and this was by far the most impactful project at the time.
Tony and all the product people started to frame the whole of our web pages and design the new mockups in Figma and Zeroheight so everything was ready when engineers started working on it, minimizing the back-and-forth between the product and tech. This was in part a pure design exercise and in part, an opportunity to sit down and improve our design system so it would have more adapted components (which will survive a little longer the proof of time in a company that changes at the speed of light). Needless to say, our engineers participated in the process early on so all our feedback was incorporated into the time estimates.
The redesign of the pages followed three steps and we applied the 80/20 rule ruthlessly to have everything ready for November 15th internally, when we tested everything (we don't believe in dedicated Q&A so all our Buyer-Seller Squad worked on it 💪):
- refactor, and create if necessary, the affected design system components
- refactor all our internal and external web pages (launch hard deadline November 21st 🚀). We had a feature flag in place to change our whole theme using Tailwind (our CSS utility framework), so when we flipped the switch we would have the new design — bam! 💥
- work out possible problems and edge cases that might appear, and improve pages' performance
Our Buyer-Seller squad had only 3–4 weeks to make it happen (with one all-hands and two French Holidays in between — vive la France 🥖) so Bertrand Albinhac, the squad's Engineering Lead, did the only logical thing: he focused the squad's whole energy on it, cut all alignment meetings, halted all technical work, and removed the squad from our support engineering rotation.
They delivered like beasts, with an average of 7 pull requests per engineer per day, an average time to first review of 3 hours, an average merge time after review of 3 hours, and an average cycle time of 19 hours 🏎; to the point that when we looked at their burn-down chart, it was following perfectly the linear estimation our tool gave us. They could be poster children of any Scrum textbook!
During the rebranding period, the only two things that I asked Bertrand Albinhac during our weekly Engineering Leads monitoring were: i. are you confident to deliver everything on time? ii. if 💩 hits the fan, what's your plan B? In the end, we were able to deliver our ambitious rebranding goal and no task delayed the final deadline; Bertrand's plan B wasn't needed, but thinking about it gave us confidence that things would be alright even if random events would derail us.
It was a great coordinated effort and I cannot thank enough not only the people that worked on it but the whole company that coped the best they could by relieving the necessary people of the extra work, and letting them focus. We are all very proud of the accomplishment, made possible largely to our company's Engineering culture of high throughput, communication, and ownership.
