Updating Abstract’s Voice and Tone

Over the past few months, we’ve launched a new product and started a new chapter at Abstract. Our team has been busy building Notebooks, releasing new features, and even rolling out a brand refresh. With so many moving parts and the need for new and updated copy, it was important to revisit our brand’s voice and tone to make sure it is aligned with the company’s new direction. 

There are a few reasons why it’s important to have a strong brand voice: 

• It creates consistency, which helps with recognition in the market
• It builds trust with your current and potential customers 
• It shows empathy and creates strong connection with customers

When you start to think about and list all the places you have copy, it becomes clear how important this is. Here are just a few places we reference our voice and tone: product emails, company-wide announcements, podcasts, website copy, help center content, customer communications, brand videos, support tickets, in-product messaging, blog posts, and sales decks. 

Guidelines like these can also help create guardrails for folks who are new to writing copy or in a position where they don’t write much copy. And if I learned anything from launching the By Design podcast, it’s that constraints actually help you get things done (listen to episode 3 with Marc Hemeon!). 

A little history on our voice and tone

We first launched a guide for voice and tone in mid 2019 after a series of workshops led by our previous Director of Brand and Communications, Kasey Fleisher Hickey and Brand Designer Morgan Keys. To help with adoption and making sure our teammates feel comfortable using the Abstract voice, the team introduced the guidelines to the company at an all hands meeting and set up office hours so anyone could come discuss it or workshop ideas. We also set up a #brand-voice channel in Slack where anyone could share examples or ask questions. 

As a member of the content and community team, I helped evangelize our voice and tone in cross-functional projects. One of my favorite applications of the voice and tone was in our brand videos. 

A new chapter

Early in 2020, our new CEO joined Abstract and we realigned our mission, vision, and values. We then began building Notebooks — a platform to help teams gather requirements, review designs, and continuously measure what works. Over time we added many new people to the team and the ways in which we talk to current and potential customers needed to evolve. 

In March of this year, we had the opportunity to run two workshops with Anna Pickard, the creator of Slack’s voice and tone. I scheduled the workshops and invited folks from across the company which included team members from product, customer success, marketing, PeopleOps, and executives. Bringing all these perspectives together helped us to figure out what we’d like to keep from the current voice and tone and what areas needed updating.

There were 3 big themes that came out of the workshops:

1. We want to take our customers with us on the journey
2. Our product voice and company voice need to be aligned
3. We want our communications to be bolder

Communicating the changes

Anna facilitated great conversations and left us with a lot to think about, but we needed to get all these ideas down into a format that was readable and accessible. I started with a document that looked similar to our previous voice and tone documentation with a few added sections. I also did smaller workshopping sessions with teams to talk about specific examples to add. 

After the draft was complete, I used a notebook to conduct a formal review for our executive stakeholders where they could give feedback and/or approve the documentation. Once it was approved, I added it to the “How we work at Abstract” sections of our Confluence and Notebooks. To inform the team and help drive adoption, I presented the process and guidelines in our weekly all-hands meeting. A big thank you to Daina Lightfoot for infusing our brand design in the presentation (and this post). 

A voice that’s values-driven

In our discussion with Anna, we talked about the divide people were feeling between the company voice and the product voice. We decided that this was an opportunity to let our values guide us. Then we expanded on a few of our values and first principles and how they shape our voice. 

Here are two examples:

Value: Service  

We tell the story that people need to hear in the way that meets them where they are, rather than making sweeping declarations and expecting people to catch up. We center the needs of the customer or user rather than the company when telling any story.

First principle: When we ship, we ship together  

We celebrate when our customers reach moments of understanding, success, or when we know that they are engaged and on board. 

Work in progress

As with any type of change, progress doesn’t happen overnight. In the near term, I will act as the ambassador for the voice and tone at Abstract. So far, I’ve read through documents for other teams and provided feedback and suggestions. In the future, my hope is that we can have many folks on the team as ambassadors for the voice and tone. 

Recently, our UX Writer, Heather McBride, proposed creating a company-wide writing hub and an advisory team to help standardize and uphold our writing guidelines, which include more than just voice and tone — things like our a capitalization guide or a how-to on in-product writing. The good news is that we already have a passionate community of writers inside the company who are excited about sharing our writing process with others.  

I’ve heard a lot about starting from scratch, but I’d love to hear more about evolving a brand’s voice and tone over time or when big changes happen with your product or company. If you have any experience with that, I’d love for you to leave a comment or find me on Twitter.