The Challenge: 
When I joined PagerDuty, the brand was fragmented, overly technical, and lacked a strong visual identity. As the company grew beyond DevOps and prepared for its 2019 IPO, it became clear we needed a unified brand that could scale with the business. Without clear guidelines or a consistent system, it was difficult for internal teams or external partners to create on-brand materials. We needed to reposition the company in a shifting category and build a flexible, recognizable brand that resonated with a broader set of audiences.

The Approach:
We approached the rebrand in three integrated phases to build a strategic, scalable, and expressive brand:

Phase 1 Positioning: Laid the foundation with clear brand strategy, audience insights, and internal alignment to guide all future creative and messaging decisions.
Phase 2 Brand Identity: Developed a cohesive visual system and tone of voice, then built flexible tools and guidelines to ensure consistent expression across teams, channels, and partners.
Phase 3 Rollout & Activation: Launched the new brand through company-wide education, updated assets, and external campaigns spanning digital, OOH, product, and events.

Phase 1: Positioning To start, we really needed a clear, differentiated brand foundation that could align internal stakeholders, guide external messaging, and scale with the company’s growth. For this, I brought in the agency Prophet and led the brand positioning work as the foundation for the rebrand, acting as the primary point of contact and driving alignment across the executive team and company stakeholders.

The work included customer and analyst research, executive interviews, and a competitive audit. It resulted in a clear brand essence—Empowering everyone in moments of truth—and defined our category (Digital Operations Management) along with three key differentiators: 

-Built for real-time
-Fits the way you work
-Trusted and loved by teams

Phase 2: Brand Identity I led a comprehensive agency search to find the right creative partner to bring our brand strategy to life, ultimately selecting Collins for their bold conceptual thinking and systems-driven design approach. 

As the creative lead, I managed the partnership and oversaw the evolution of our visual identity- ensuring alignment with strategic goals and resonance with both internal teams and external audiences. Together, we developed a flexible, modern design system built to scale across marketing, product, and culture, and I drove consistency, stakeholder alignment, and execution across all brand touchpoints.

Key components included:

• A refined logo system and updated color palette anchored in PagerDuty green

• A distinctive typography system and dynamic layout principles

• A graphic pattern language inspired by the complexity and order of real-time systems

• A photography style focused on “systems” and “moments,” capturing both scale and humanity

• Tone & Voice framework rooted in our brand values to guide written communication across all channels and audiences.

Phase 3: Rollout & Activation The new brand system was launched and applied across all internal and external touchpoints. This included digital and OOH advertising, our website, product, social channels, video content, presentation templates,content, internal documentation, and branded office environments.

My team was responsible for internal education, which included training sessions, toolkits, guidelines, and templates to help teams adopt the new system consistently. The rollout culminated in a company-wide launch event and celebration, featuring a live brand reveal, new PagerDuty swag, and a preview of how the brand would show up in the world- making it a shared cultural moment across the company.

The impact: The rebrand laid the foundation for PagerDuty’s next chapter, supporting IPO readiness and expanding our relevance across the enterprise. It unified the company’s external presence and internal identity, improved brand consistency across every channel, and raised the bar for creative execution. The system became a trusted platform for growth and storytelling, enabling the business to scale with confidence and clarity.