Hi! I’m Kira Klaas, and in this newsletter, I’m exploring how we can apply SaaS-favorite project management methodologies like Agile to brand building. I’m also sharing my own 5-phase framework for approaching the brand development process.
As one of 800 early subscribers, you’re getting access to tactical frameworks, practical advice, and Notion templates drawn from my experience working with founders and some of the top brand teams in tech.
If someone sent you this post and you’re not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬
Today, I’m exploring how we can apply SaaS-favorite project management methodologies like Agile to brand building. Product development gets their own methodology—why don’t we have one? 😤 With that, I’m sharing my own framework: the five phases I use to break brand development into manageable pieces (sprints)!
Closing the brand/product gap
One reason I think brand is misunderstood or underinvested in, compared to “growth” or product, is that many of the popular brand methods and models focus on crafting brand identity. These are models (Keller’s, Aaker’s, etc.) developed by agency strategists or consultancies who can bow out of alignment, implementation, and iteration phases that happen before and after their engagement with a brand.
These phases, however, are everything for in-house brand operators, whose job is to navigate the day-to-day challenges of founder-led or product-first environments. Crafting the brand identity is just one phase of brand building.
One way I’m attempting to close the gap between brand and product is to demystify brand-building processes and demonstrate how they’re crucial parts of concepts that the tech world is intimately familiar with, like product-market fit and product-led growth.
Meanwhile, brand operators have been underserved by these models that stop short at brand identity. They don’t outline much of a framework for all those phases that have to come before and after, which also makes it hard to know where to start.
Applying project management methodologies to brand
Agile methodology emerged out of a need for a more iterative, less linear approach to work than typical product development or waterfall methodologies.
Agile methodology is a project management framework that breaks projects down into several dynamic phases, commonly known as sprints (usually 1-4 weeks long).
The Agile framework is an iterative methodology. After every sprint, teams reflect and look back to see if there was anything that could be improved so they can adjust their strategy for the next sprint.
Thanks, Asana 😘
Brand-building is rarely a linear process.
Maybe in a dream world you’d get to do brand-building step by step, with ample time allocated for research and planning and creative iteration before moving into campaign execution. In reality (remember her? 💅) you’re expected to ship new work at the same time as developing the brand’s core strategy and thinking on a long-term, strategic level. Easy!!
Shared themes with Agile
Most core principles of Agile methodology are relevant to brand-building—here are a few standouts:
Working software over comprehensive documentation: The software that Agile teams develop should work. Additional work, like documentation, is not as important as developing good software.
In brand terms, we prioritize effective brand experiences over extensive brand guidelines. (Documentation, like governance, has a time and a place, but it’s not everything.)
Continuous excellence enhances agility. If the team develops excellent code in one sprint, they can continue to build off of it the next. Continually creating great work allows teams to move faster in the future.
If you have strong alignment, you’ll have an easier time securing brand resourcing. Aligning on opportunities and resourcing upfront lets teams build momentum and move faster toward shipping.
Simplicity is essential. Sometimes the simplest solution is the best solution. Agile aims to not overcomplicate things and find simple answers to complex problems.
The best branding is obvious—it immediately resonates or makes you feel something. It’s not cluttered by product value props or feature descriptions.
“Agile for brand building”
What follows is my take on a project management methodology specifically for brand operators. While traditional models tell you what your brand should be (archetypes, personalities, etc.), this framework shows you how to get the alignment you need to build it and to iterate on it over time. It’s also useful for setting expectations with stakeholders who might be skeptical about the brand development process overall.
It’s essentially “Agile for brand building,” with alignment, execution, and measurement as parts of a cyclical, iterative approach to brand development and campaigns.
While Agile breaks projects into sprints (usually 1-4 weeks long), my framework divides the brand-building process into five interconnected phases.
Instead of Agile’s Plan > Design > Develop > Test > Deploy > Review, it’s Opportunities > Alignment > Resourcing > Activities > Insights.
If you’re a brand operator, you’re somewhere in the process right now—most likely in an ongoing “activities” sprint that seems to have no end. Inflection points give you a chance to get out of the weeds and reset the process: either when facing a new opportunity (e.g. launching a new product or a new audience, joining a new company, onboarding a new leader) or when planning for the future (e.g. during annual and quarterly planning cycles, game-planning when resources are cut, navigating a sudden leadership departure).
Here’s essentially what you’re doing at each phase (in Agile, too):
Figure out what the problem is.
Align on how you’re going to solve the problem.
Secure the resources to solve the problem.
Solve the problem.
See how well you solved the problem (and what problem you should tackle next. Look at that, you’re back at step one!)
Below I define each phase and what a team might typically be doing in each phase (depending on a company’s maturity and resourcing).
In real life, there often isn’t clear delineation or handoff between phases. It’s messy and you’re learning on the fly or dealing with changes outside your control that affect your approach.
How long each phase should take varies and depends on your org structure, goals, and how many times you’ve gone through this process…because this isn’t a one-time, linear thing—it’s a rinse-and-repeat cycle that helps you develop your brand over time and over these 5 phases (sprints? I like how iterative that sounds! 🏎️).
Brand building in 5 sprints
This is the outline I used to structure my 4-week course on Maven—5 modules that go deep into each of these phases and how they build on each other. Enrollment for the next cohort, which starts September 2, is open now.
Are you working on the right thing? Start out by identifying and prioritizing potential opportunities for brand development. What’s working? What’s not working? Ideally you’re starting with a comprehensive analysis of the brand’s current position, strengths, weaknesses, and potential areas for growth—and an audit of your brand’s stakeholders/decision makers, too.
Questions to ask:
What is the business trying to achieve right now? How well is the current brand serving us in trying to achieve that?
How does our brand sit in the competitive landscape? How is the landscape changing?
Who are the brand’s key decision-makers? Whose opinion influences theirs?
What’s their background? What do they care about most—professionally? Personally? What do they have to prove?
What are their strengths and weaknesses? How much experience do they have with branding?
What do they care about most? What does the board (or equivalent) care about most?
What is the most important business goal? Separately, what is the company's mission?
What are frequent sticking points?
What to focus on:
Identifying your brand stakeholders (who has to have input on or approve brand-related decisions?)
Understanding leadership’s perspective on brand (what level of buy-in do you have?)
Conducting internal research to identify gaps, challenges, and potential growth areas
Gaining a holistic understanding of the brand’s market position, internal perceptions, and external realities
What you’re doing:
Early-stage activities (Pre-Seed–Series C+):
Audit your stakeholders, business goals in context of brand, and communication style (brand listening tour template)
Conduct informal customer interviews and internal surveys
Analyze social media mentions and comments
Do a brand SWOT analysis
Conduct a thorough competitor audit (positioning, creative, SWOT)
Later-stage activities (Series B+):
Commission in-depth market research studies
Utilize advanced analytics tools for brand sentiment analysis
Conduct focus groups across different market segments
Engage external brand consultants for objective assessments
Pro tip 🫥
“Brand work” is often invisible. Sometimes the best opportunity to develop your brand is not something customers immediately see—but rather educating your org and upper management on what brand work means and why it matters. Perfect segue to step two!
2. Brand Alignment
During this phase, you’re focused on stakeholder alignment, creating a unified vision and strategy for the brand based on the opportunities you identified for growth and alignment. It involves bringing together key stakeholders to define core brand elements, establish goals, and scope any brand activities in connection to business objectives.
Questions to ask:
What about the brand needs to change to better address the opportunities we identified?
Do we need to launch a campaign to build awareness?
Do we need to refresh or even rebrand?
What constraints do we have?
What could go wrong that we can anticipate ahead of time? (pre-mortem template)
What internal education is needed about the role of brand in growth?
What to focus on:
Bringing together key stakeholders (executives, third-party agencies) to define core brand elements (mission/vision, key audience, key value prop, attributes) (core strategy summary template)
Getting alignment on the opportunities to act on, across all stakeholders influencing the brand’s development and growth (ultimate launch calendar template)
Establishing goals and scoping brand activities (phase 4)
Ensuring alignment with overall business objectives
Extending brand alignment to employees at all levels and across all departments (internal comms!)
What you’re doing:
Early-stage (Pre-Seed–Series C+):
Facilitate a brand purpose workshop with founders (template)
Establish core brand values, mission, and vision statements (distinct from business goals)
Alignment is a literal prerequisite for building a consistent, compelling brand identity. Alignment isn’t something you get once—it requires ongoing effort and involvement from all levels of the org. This post is a deep-dive into how I tactically build alignment:
Identifying, securing, and allocating the necessary resources to execute the goals established in the alignment phase: This includes both “hard” resources (budget, headcount, time commitment from cross-functional teams) and “soft” resources (internal buy-in, positive morale, organization, airtime in internal comms, and proactive change management).
Questions to ask:
What will it take to act on these opportunities?
How much time, money, and headcount do we need to be successful?
What is the biggest source of friction around securing resourcing?
How is our current org structure setting us up to succeed (or not)?
How well does everyone understand your team’s goals and what each person is responsible for?
What to focus on:
Organizing budget and budget requests
Building a strong relationship with your finance team
Tracking spending and performance/ROI
Establishing clear approvers and approval flows (part of a great DACI framework)
Organizing team and org chart and making sure other teams know who does what
Delegating resources in support of other teams
What you’re doing:
Early-stage (Pre-Seed–Series B+):
Allocate a portion of the founder’s time to brand-building activities
Identify and leverage free or low-cost branding tools/channels
Engage freelancers for specific brand projects
Later-stage (Series B+):
Allocate substantial budget for brand initiatives across departments (future post on allocations upcoming)
Establish a dedicated brand management team and scaling your media buying function
Invest in brand management software
Develop strategic partnerships with top-tier agencies and consultancies
Pro tip 💸
Brand resourcing varies dramatically across companies, industries, and macroeconomic trends—keep in mind that benchmarks are only so useful.
On Brand is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
4. Brand Activities
This is the primary execution phase, where the alignment achieved in earlier phases is leveraged to implement cross-functional activities, especially integrated brand marketing campaigns. These activities distribute the brand and drive the high-level metrics chosen in the alignment phase.
🗒️ Note: This phase usually refers to integrated campaigns, but it could also refer to other brand building projects like the rebrand process. Instead of a “campaign,” maybe you’re producing a photo library to use in ads, web, and other collateral, because you identified that as a gap during the opportunities phase.
Questions to ask:
Based on the opportunity, what channels or types of activations make sense to focus on?
What scope or tier activation makes sense for the goals we set?
How can we create connectivity between channel strategies?
What’s mission-critical vs. a nice-to-have?
What to focus on:
Evolving your internal playbook for cross-functional projects like campaigns
Turning strategic insights into compelling briefs for brand campaigns
Creating memorable and engaging brand experiences, culturally-relevant and timely campaigns
Building campaigns that build upon one another (brand universe-building)
Maximizing efficiency and consistency in brand activities
Develop co-marketing initiatives with strategic partners
Create immersive brand activations or pop-up experiences
Undertake website redesigns, rebrands, or brand refreshes
Pro tip 🏁
Strong brand leaders devise strategies that allow them to build on assets and themes over time, getting the most “mileage” out of the work their team produces. This approach is more efficient, helps build trust among leadership, and earns brand trust through consistency.
5. Brand Insights
This phase involves measuring the impact of brand activities, analyzing results, and extracting actionable insights. It helps uncover what problem to tackle next, bringing the process back to phase 1: brand opportunities.
Questions to ask:
How did what we produce perform? How did it land with our audience?
What did we learn? What would we repeat or do differently?
How do those learnings flow through to help us identify new opportunities?
What would we change about our internal processes?
What to focus on:
Understanding what worked, what didn’t, and why
Assessing current measurement capabilities, choosing the right measurement tactics based on activities
Leveraging proxy metrics when direct measurement is challenging
What you’re doing:
Early-stage (Pre-Seed–Series A+):
Monitor website traffic and growth channels/engagement metrics (CTR, web to signup conversion rate, retention over time, email open/bounce rates, etc.)
Track social media follower growth and engagement rates, conduct regular social listening and desk research (brand insights template)
Collect and analyze customer feedback through direct interactions
Conduct A/B tests on messaging (headlines, CTAs, paid ads)
Use AI-powered sentiment analysis across multiple channels
Seek insights wherever possible and work within constraints to be data-informed and aware. Even without extensive resources, techniques like desk research can effectively back your creative intuition with cultural, contextual, and categorical insights.
Why have a method?
I find it useful to apply this lens to brand building because of how multiplayer, amorphous, subjective, drawn-out, and sometimes immeasurable the brand-building process can feel. 🥴
All of that gets easier if you can help your team identify where you are in the framework: outlining each phase, clarifying what to focus on, and communicating to stakeholders what you’re unlocking or enabling.
Things to watch for
It’s easy to jump right into the “activities” phase. But without first understanding the players (stakeholders, decision-makers) and factors (biases, opinions, motivations) that influence your brand and brand-related decisions, you’ll struggle, again and again, to find alignment.
Same goes for the context in which your brand exists 🥥🌴: you need to understand the competitive landscape, customer needs and expectations, and cultural trends at play in order to design messages and strategies that land right or stand out.
In turn, it’s much easier to secure resourcing when there’s established alignment on goals and clarity on what it means to deploy that resourcing effectively.
Resourcing unlocks campaigns and activations (at exponentially larger scales), which in turn, should be measured. Better insights and more granular measurement are typically easier to achieve with scale.
Each phase relies on the success of the previous phase.
It’s the first job of the brand operator to determine which phase your team is operating in now—and where it should be. It takes asking yourself, “Are we working on the right thing? Do we need to go back to the alignment phase?” (Honestly, that never hurts.) 🥞
There’s lots of room to refine this methodology over time. I’d love to hear how your approach matches or differs from mine—what would you add or change? 🤔
so generous of you to share this.. Thank you!
so strategic. great insight, thanks for sharing this