What do you do when your brand is growing faster than your culture?
This client was was built for clarity. A clean, intuitive finance tool that helped consumers track spending, save effortlessly, and feel like they were finally in control. Not in a “finance bro” way, just in a quietly powerful, slightly smug, “I finally get where my money goes” kind of way.
It took off. With a sleek UX and a tone that felt more Spotify than spreadsheet, it became the go-to for young professionals looking to ditch their clunky banking apps. Fast downloads. Faster growth. Investors noticed. So did the big banks.
But as the product scaled, the company blurred.
The challenge
They were opening new offices, hiring fast, and starting to feel the internal friction that comes when you’ve outgrown startup scrappiness but haven’t quite figured out what comes next. New joiners wanted clarity. Long-timers wanted direction. Leadership wanted to protect the culture that got them this far, but no one could quite say what that culture was anymore.
And under that, something deeper:
They were hiring clever, ambitious people who wanted to be on the journey but needed to know what the journey was.
People could sense the company was heading somewhere big, but the vision was abstract. Not secretive, just distant.
There weren’t enough senior leaders to mentor others through the fog, so people were finding their own way. Some brilliantly. Some barely.
And meanwhile, outside the company, the brand felt cooler and clearer than ever.
That disconnect, that gap between external confidence and internal confusion, was the real risk.
The thinking
We began by mapping the internal signals. How people described their day-to-day, what they felt proud of, what they confided on blow-off-steam walks. We asked, What keeps you here? What would make you leave? What story are we asking people to believe when they click ‘Apply’?
We surfaced tensions early-stage brands rarely articulate:
We’re still agile, but the stakes are higher. How do we move fast without spinning out?
We say “autonomy,” but do our people know how to steer?
We sell clarity to consumers, but do we offer the same to employees?
From there, we shaped a platform to anchor the employee experience without turning it into theatre.
Key strategic elements:
A consumer-aligned EVP: one that echoed the values of the product, but made space for the messiness of growth.
A fresh tone of voice for hiring: still cool, but no longer cryptic.
Tools to help emerging managers tell the company story with confidence even if they weren’t in the founder’s Slack group.
Pragmatic rituals for growing teams: onboarding stories, narrative prompts, culture “check-ins” that didn’t feel like HR homework.
By stepping back from startup clichés and treating culture as a living system not a slogan, our client built an employer brand that felt as considered as its product.
The EVP work helped transform internal ambiguity into shared direction, giving teams across time zones a clearer sense of purpose and place. And by aligning internal experience with external promise, the company didn’t just keep up with its growth, it made meaning of it.
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