This edition of The Brand Equation is brought to you by the Villain Team of executive-level strategists, writers, researchers, creatives, and category experts who bring both precision and pace to their craft.
This Issue
Our founder, Lauryn Warnick, sat down with Carla Weis, VP of Brand and Creative at Docusign, for a conversation about a unique challenge.
Docusign is not only a category leader – their name has become a verb, replacing the use of the term e-signature from our vocabulary entirely. A privilege few brands will ever have. That success also poses a challenge for their brand (and many other brands), which is: how do you grow past the product you're famous for?
What we're focused on: How companies grow past the product, feature, or category they're known for, without confusing the market about who they are.
Where this shows up: Companies either stay frozen as an early version of the business, or expand so fast that buyers can't keep up. Trust erodes either way.
Where to look first: What other problems could you credibly solve for their customers? Where do you have the right to play…where do you have the right to win?
You’ve built the product you’re now known for. What comes next?
Every company starts somewhere, with a product, a feature, or a use case that works well enough to build a customer base around. Getting known for where you started is how you get off the ground. For the best companies, that early clarity compounds: buyers remember you, refer you, and eventually shorthand you into the category itself.
Docusign was one of those companies, building the category for e-signature and then becoming shorthand for it. That’s the result of a brand that was specific enough, consistent enough, and useful enough that the market made it the default.
The question Lauryn put to Carla was: what does a brand do when it gets there? Because the same clarity that made you successful can one day make it harder to grow beyond it. Customers trust you for one thing, which is powerful, but that idea can be surprisingly sticky. The companies that navigate this well don't abandon what made them known. They use it as the foundation for earning permission to become something more.
Most companies aren't yet the verb in their category. But the strategy is the same at every scale: get specific enough to be remembered, then build from there.
How brands grow past the one thing they're known for
At Villain, we spend a lot of time in this exact moment: with companies around the $1B mark that have built something real and are trying to figure out how to grow without breaking it.
The distinction that matters most at this stage is between two things that are often conflated: the clarity of what they stand for versus the narrowness of the product they're known for. Those feel similar but they're not the same. Clarity is durable. It's the promise the market trusts you for, and it travels with you as you grow. A narrow product association, on the other hand, can be fragile – useful, until it becomes a ceiling.
When we work with companies at this stage, the first question we ask isn't "what do you want to be known for next?" It's "what do your customers already believe you can do?" The gap between what you want permission for and what the market is already ready to believe is the strategy to capitalize on. Move too far past it and buyers can't follow. Stay too close to it and you cap your own growth.
The brands that navigate this well don't blur what they're known for. They earn permission for more. Amazon didn't stop being a bookstore and become an e-commerce company overnight. They took specific steps to extend trust into adjacent territory, one category at a time. Salesforce did the same: it didn't walk away from CRM, but built an entire customer platform around the credibility CRM established. Neither company asked buyers to make a leap they hadn't earned the right to ask for yet.
Building that permission is key. Companies that succeed do it through consistency, through listening to what customers are already doing around your product, and through making the cognitive leap as small as possible at each step.
Docusign is one of the most instructive examples of a company doing this in real time.
How Docusign expanded without breaking what worked
Carla described a pattern: customers don’t ask for new features directly. Docusign’s approach was to deeply understand the customer journey and listen to the customer experience. The way their customers talked about how they used Docusign kept hinting at problems just outside the product's edges. Where does the document go after it's signed? What happens to the agreement six months later when someone needs to find the terms again? Their customers were not requesting "agreement management" as a product, but the gaps kept showing up in how customers described their workflows.
By tuning into the customer, these gaps serve as a more powerful innovation and growth driver than the closer-in feature requests. A feature request tells you what someone's already imagined is possible. Workflow gaps tell you what they haven't imagined yet, which is usually where the bigger opportunity is.
And a company doesn’t need Docusign's scale to run this exercise. Start listening for the same signal: customers describing workarounds, not asking for features. The question to ask: "what are our customers already doing around our product that we're not part of yet?"
It’s not quite a rebrand, but closing the gap means getting the market’s understanding of your business to match the business you’ve actually built. And the story you tell has to work without you in the room.
Uncover what your brand should become
Carla talked about "constants and variables," or the things Docusign will never flex on, and the things they're willing to test and walk back if they don't work.
That's the part we keep coming back to. The companies that grow well aren't moving the fastest. They know exactly what they'll never change (and they're specific about it, skipping the vague gestures at "our values").
If you're trying to figure out what your company has permission to become, start with what your customers already believe about you. Not what you wish they believed. The gap between those two things is usually where the best strategy lives.
Watch the full conversation
This issue covers a small part of a much longer conversation between Lauryn and Carla, including how Docusign times brand rollouts internally before going external, how they make the case for brand investment to their CFO, and what Carla wishes someone had told her before leading Docusign's rebrand. Watch on Youtube or listen on Spotify.
