Gabrielle Hope
VIP Rebrand & Product Alignment — cover

When the rebrand skips Product

Surfacing the structural questions a rebrand hadn't asked.

Client
FanDuel
Role
Design Manager — Strategic Design Lead
Year
2024
Read
2 min
Information Architecture
VIP Rebrand & Product Alignment — inline

Problem

Brand Strategy and Marketing kicked off a company-wide rebrand of FanDuel's VIP and VIP+ customer segments under the internal name Project Sapphire. The rebrand was already in motion when Product and Design were brought in. Dev-complete was targeted for mid-August, with VIP+ marketing rolling out concurrently.

Little forethought had gone into how the new identities would live in-product. We had an existing VIP account page and a VIP onboarding flow built for the old identity, and a VIP+ in-app earn/redeem experience (transitioning from third-party to native) with no defined relationship to either. The team was on track to ship visual changes against a structural foundation that hadn't been agreed on.

Discovery

Mapping what existed in-product against what the rebrand was about to change made the gap visible. The rebrand assumed VIP and VIP+ were two flavors of the same identity. Neither the existing touchpoints nor the planned changes accounted for the structural question underneath them.

The central ambiguity, once named: was VIP+ a standalone rewards program, a customer status tier, or both? That question wasn't anywhere in the rebrand scope, but every product decision downstream depended on the answer.

Approach

I advocated for establishing a North Star structure even if initial delivery was scoped to VIP only, so Design and Engineering could plan for the full state without accumulating UX debt.

I surfaced the questions the rebrand had skipped:

  • If VIP+ is a status, does it need its own onboarding when customers cross into it?
  • If it's a program, how does it relate to the existing rewards system?
  • How does status progression get reflected in-product?
  • How does the VIP+ in-app earn/redeem experience (transitioning from third-party to native) fit either model?

Each question forced a structural decision before visual execution. The output wasn't a finished design, it was a structured set of unresolved decisions that needed to be made by the right people before the rebrand could ship coherently.

Outcome

The team paused on visual execution and resolved the program-vs-status question first. The North Star structure became the planning frame for both VIP and VIP+ work going forward, allowing concurrent delivery without locking in structures that would need to be undone later.

Reflections

  1. The most valuable work on a rebrand brought in late isn't visual, it's structural triage.

    Brand-led initiatives that skip Product often have unresolved system questions buried under surface decisions. The fastest way to add value is surfacing those questions, not solving them.

  2. Asking the right questions counts as design output.

    I didn't ship a redesign. I shifted the team off a trajectory that would have shipped one prematurely. That's strategic design output, even when the artifact isn't a Figma file.

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