Novus Layer
Cloud security software that engineers loved and nobody could buy. The work was almost entirely in the language — the design followed.
- Client
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- Scope
- Live site
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The problem
Novus Layer had strong technical word-of-mouth and a homepage that opened with the word “orchestration”. Engineers understood it immediately. The people who sign the cheque did not, and were never going to.
They came to us for a redesign. The interviews said the design was not the problem.
What we did
- Interviewed nine buyers, including four who had evaluated Novus and chosen someone else. Every one of them described the product in plainer language than the company did.
- Rewrote the positioning around what it removes rather than what it does — a sentence a security lead can repeat to a CFO without a diagram.
- Built two doors. The evaluator path leads to architecture and docs in one click; the buyer path never has to see them.
- Designed the identity to be quiet. In security, restraint reads as competence; the mark does almost nothing, deliberately.
- Redesigned the documentation in the same type system. It is the most-read surface they own and it had never been designed at all.
Outcome
- Demo requests from non-technical titles more than doubled over the following quarter.
- Sales stopped opening calls by explaining what the product is.
- Docs and marketing now share one component library instead of two codebases.
The strategy phase took three weeks. It changed more than the eight weeks of design that came after it.
