[Guide] How running a brand sprint helped our team align & gain clarity

Just over one month ago, I joined Paperless as a late co-founder, heading up our product led growth strategy. And while a branding exercise wasn’t part of my initial 90-day plan, I noticed early on that our team had little clarity on where we wanted the Paperless brand to go.

In fact, I noticed that most of us had our own idea of what Paperless stands for and where the product is heading. However, we never really talked about this as a group. So how could we all align on the same goals without wasting time on another useless meeting with no actionable results?

Let me introduce you to the wonderful world of Brand Sprints.

What the heck is a brand sprint?

Note: I didn’t come up with this by the way. It’s a Google thing and I first learned about it from Claire Suellentrop over at Forget the Funnel, an awesome community for SaaS marketers if you have never heard of it.

A brand sprint is a 3-hour working session that brings 4-7 people of your leadership team together to hash out the what, how, why and more of their business. Typically, brand sprints are done before creating your brand and visual identity. However, we used it as an exercise to align ourselves in terms of vision, values & roadmap.

We adopted our version of the brand sprint from the original Google Ventures brand sprint which you can read more about here.

But wait...

Paperless is an early stage SaaS startup, shouldn’t you focus on “growth” stuff?

In principle you’re right, but hear me out:

Paperless is currently in the early access stage and although we have a fully functional product that can be used today, we haven’t fully reached product-market fit. In addition, we’re still trying to figure out our ideal customer profile, what features to build, and most importantly what directions we should take as a company and as a product.

To give you additional context: We built Paperless scratching our own itch over at Mankido, without the intent of ever turning it into a SaaS. Hence, we kind of missed the important opportunity of customer development. We were our first customer.

Today, we’re doing everything we can to learn more about our users and trying to tie together any loose ends to help us with our Go-to-market.

Further, without aligning the team on the same vision, we can’t really figure out our positioning and without positioning we can’t figure out our messaging.

Dave Gerhardt, Chief Brand Officer over at Drift, recently wrote something similar on his LinkedIn:

It’s tough to have good positioning unless there’s a clear company strategy & vision. Don’t be so hard on product marketing. There must be a strategy that everyone believes in.

And Dave's right. You need to get the foundations right before you can grow. And in my opinion, a brand sprint is the perfect combination of efficiency and results.

Will the product change? Yes, it probably will.

Will the company evolve? Yes, hopefully.

Will the focus be a different one? Yes, potentially.

But until then, we need to allocate our resources wisely and push in the same direction. The DNA of a brand or startup will not change significantly. And that’s why a brand sprint is an incredibly effective use of your time.

Talking about time...

How long does it take to run a brand sprint?

It’s called a sprint for a reason.

For the workshop itself, everyone invests around 1 hour for the preparation and 3 hours for the workshop itself. The facilitator spends an additional 2-3 hours for the preparation of the briefing documents, sending out emails etc.

If you’re hosting a workshop with 5 people including you, the facilitator, that’s a 23 hours time commitment from everyone. In the grand scheme of things, people often end up wasting their time in meetings or unproductive coffee chats, right?

Spending 23 hours in total is a good investment of time.

Again, one of the upsides of hosting a brand sprint is clarity.

Clarity gives you alignment.

Alignment gives you focus.

Focus leads to growth.

But wait...before you get overly excited about running a brand sprint you need a plan.

Here goes.

How to prepare a brand sprint within 3-4 weeks (or less)?

I tend to use the 5Ps: “Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance.”

While I had only one week to prepare, I’d recommend at least 3 - 4 weeks as you need to get the buy-in from your C-level team, especially if you work in bigger startups.

Step 1: Get C-Level Buy In

(3-4 weeks before the workshop)

Getting the buy-in, especially in larger organisations is crucial to run your brand sprint. You need to explain why you’re doing it, what you’ll be doing and what the benefits are.

Tie your reasoning always to the overall business objectives and explain why you’re thinking a brand sprint may be a useful exercise to align your team.

Next, tell your leadership team what you’ll be doing exactly, ie. mention that 4-6 people will participate in a 3-hour workshop, naming the people who will take place and mentioning what you’ll deliver in the end.

My best tip to really communicate the value the brand sprint delivers. For example, you can mention that a brand sprint:

• Allows you to hear perspectives from each other that haven't’ been discussed as a group
• Helps you gain a better shared understanding of some fundamental company building blocks, like what your company stands for, what makes your company a more compelling choice that competitors (beyond any features)
• Provides shared language to talk about when making decisions moving forward

Tell your leadership team what the deliverable or outcome will be. Your team will love tangible results rather than fluffy stuff. I promised and delivered a high level brand guideline that can help our team in a number of ways: i.e. positioning, messaging, customer development and even hiring.

Pro Tip: How you communicate is most important, but also think about the channel. At Paperless, we’re a small team so we just arranged and coordinated via Slack. If you’re part of a larger organisation, you may want to use email or your preferred method of communication.

Step 2: Arrange a date & time

Next, you need to align on a date and time. We ran our workshop on a Friday afternoon. I figured it would give everyone enough time to prepare for the workshop and also use the weekend to digest everything we’ve talked about. But you can also host the sprint on any other day of the week. Just make sure people are fully focused on the task ahead and have enough time to prepare.

Pro Tip: When I did the brand sprint, I only had a week to prepare. I’d suggest you plan yours at least 14 days in the future. Give people enough time to prepare and communicate, but don’t wait too long so people will lose urgency and focus.

Step 3: Give your team the assignment to complete the brand sprint exercises prior to the workshop

Forgot what the brand sprint exercises are? Have a look here

The original brand sprint suggests doing the exercises during the meeting, but I felt that this would take way too long. Remember, each brand sprint exercise, there are six in total, only lasting between 15 and 30 minutes.

So what I did in preparation is to hand out a workbook (a simple Google Doc) with instructions and guidelines on our brand sprint workshop. I’d share the document with you but it’s all in German.

The workbook should include:

• The reasons why we’re doing a brand sprint in the first place
• General housekeeping and instructions (ie. Don’t be late, come prepared)
• The six homework assignments and explanations

Pro Tip: In the lead up to your workshop, I’d check in with members of the team reminding everyone to complete the document on time and be prepared. It really helped.

Apologies this is in German by the way 🇩🇪

Step 5: Run the workshop

We ran our workshop remotely via Zoom which works perfectly fine. We used Google Slides for capturing the information and had two facilitators to run the workshop: for the facilitation you need one person who’s good and fast at typing who’s capturing each response adding it to the slide deck and one person who acts as a moderator.

The format of most of the exercises is as follows:

1. Everyone reads their answers aloud and facilitator writes them into Google slides
2. No arguments or discussion at this point
3. Everyone reads the answers of everyone else and has a short period of time to vote for the best answers
4. You go around again and everyone presents their vote (facilitator captures this)
5. You have a 5 minute discussion & argumentation

The decider chooses his or her favourite answer in each category

When you read the official brand sprint instructions, you’ll notice that it’s very important to have one decider who makes the ultimate final decision. This way, you don’t end up arguing or leaving things in the air.

At the end of the brand sprint, you should have something like this:

Step 6: Turn the insights into a high level brand guide & share

Next comes the fun part.

The deliverable of the brand sprint can be a high level brand guidelines that you can use as your guidance when faced with a big decision. A decision about your identity, your marketing, customers, partners, new features or even your hiring policy.

The guideline will help new and existing team members to understand what your brand is all about, provide everyone a shared language and understanding of your core beliefs and concepts.

Together with my team at Design Buffs, I put the results of the workshop into a nice looking brand guide. Here are a couple of slides I’m allowed to share 😄

Next, you need to share this guide with your company and make sure it’s also being used.

For example, if you ever need to work with a freelancer or agency (and I’m sure you will), give this person or agency the guide as part of their onboarding. It will help them get up to speed with your brand in no time.

Last, what are the Do’s and Don’ts?

Pitfalls to avoid when running a brand sprint

1. Don’t just run a brand sprint for the sake of running a brand sprint. Use the sprint as an opportunity when you’re confronted with challenges (like misalignment in the team) or when facing a rebranding.

2. Don’t just save it in your Gdrive and never look at it again. Use it as part of your hiring & onboarding process or when faced with a big decision.

3. Use the three hours effectively: No phones, no distractions, no other work on the side

4. Involve the CEO and leadership team - get their buy-in early on

Wrapping up

A brand sprint is very efficient. The potential upside of having alignment as a team or a foundation for your brand is high, the risks and the investment is low. To me, running a brand sprint as part of a larger growth initiative or customer-led strategy is a no-brainer, but keen to hear what your thoughts are.

Leave a comment below. Hope you found this useful and insightful. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me here on Indie Hackers, LinkedIn or Twitter.