Six months after delivering the WebCanvas identity, the product has struggled to find traction. The brand is being used correctly — I’ve checked the site, the pitch decks, the LinkedIn presence. The system is holding.
But the company is floundering.
This is the uncomfortable version of the outcome: technically correct work applied to a fundamentally unclear business problem. The identity didn’t create confusion. But it also didn’t create conviction. It made the company look like what they said they were — which turned out not to be a thing the market was ready to reward.
What I keep thinking about
Did we surface the business clarity problem in the discovery phase? I went back through my notes. We flagged that the positioning was under-resolved. We noted that “collaborative infrastructure for design teams” was a category without established demand signals. We built an identity that was confident in its execution while the positioning remained open.
In retrospect, we should have refused to proceed past discovery until the positioning was resolved. The brand system problem was downstream of a strategy problem we didn’t have authority to fix.
The calibration going forward
Before committing to identity work, the positioning question must be answerable: what kind of thing is this, and who believes they need it?
If it’s not answerable, the work is identity design for a placeholder. That’s not wrong — sometimes companies need to go to market to find out — but it should be named and priced differently.