OpsLevel's new look

When you think about a scrappy startup, you don't often see the tradeoffs that have to happen to survive and hopefully, thrive. There are often two camps of founders: Those who spend huge bucks on branding before the product even launches and those who are good with an MVP that will help them get to the next stage. If you saw our earlier branding, you probably knew which camp we fell into.

While we focused on building a best-in-class service catalog and expanding the feature set to support platform engineers in their daily quest to improve developer experience, our brand took a backseat. In true startup fashion, our logo was conjured up by one of our founders in a matter of hours (minutes?) and we didn't think about it much for a year or two.

Last year we decided that it was time to invest in our brand. Our look and feel didn't match our product maturity, our customers who led modern engineering organizations, or our team members who come from creative and interesting backgrounds. We needed a hard reset on the brand.

Putting our mission where our mouth is

We started with a mission statement that helps drive our focus and decision-making every day: Connecting developers to the tools and knowledge they need to build, ship, and operate high-quality code faster.

To us, this means that everything we do should provide value to the operators of OpsLevel and support their objective of making their teams operate more smoothly. But our old branding didn't reflect the simplicity, clarity, or efficiency we were promising to provide. We had a lot of jargon, competing use cases, and generic clip art. We'll be the first to admit: It wasn't exactly smooth.

It didn't align with our mission statement or reflect the customers that we help solve big problems for. So we set out on a journey.

We're not hiding anything

Earlier this year we launched a free trial of our product and while it may seem like table stakes for a SaaS company to have a self-service entry point, it's not quite the norm in our category of internal developer portals. But to us, not allowing people to experience the product before deciding to talk to us didn't align with our mission statement. Once we ripped the band-aid off, we realized that we wanted everything to be clear and to-the-point including our new brand. From a brand perspective, our mission statement translated into clean lines, modern colors, and simplicity in the best possible way. We want the product—and the brand—to speak for itself.

This update to our brand means so much more than look and feel. For us, it means putting our values and our mission into practice. 

You might be wondering what's going to change about our product with this new look and feel. We remain focused on our mission and building a product that supports engineering teams as a whole and helping platform engineers along their hero's journey. Our roadmap remains focused on that. They'll just have better swag on the way.

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