On Friday July 22nd, 2022, It was official. We were rebranding ourselves from CredAvenue to Yubi! We were left with 6 weeks i.e 3 sprints before we rebranded our current platform to Yubi which included schematic, infra, and developmental changes.
At this stage, we had more than 3,000+ corporates and 750+ lenders, across 6 different products who were live on our platform. We also needed to ensure our rebranding exercise would not affect our existing customer experience. With many problems to solve and very limited time, we had a mammoth task in hand.
The Challenges
- A delay in launching one product would delay the launch of other products and this was a release where all teams were dependent on each other. We made sure all our use cases were properly identified and well-planned in advance
- Handling authentication for both platforms but with one Auth Service
- Launching 6 different Yubi products at the same time to ensure neither of them breaks because of cross dependency
- Many of our users have IT teams who whitelist our domain URL, hence, it cannot be broken for them.
The Planning
With not much time in hand and a huge milestone to achieve, executing the right plan became important.
Also, a delay in launching one product would delay the launch of other products and this was a release where all teams are dependent on each other. We made sure all our use cases were properly identified and well-planned.
Phase 1 – Notifying Our Users
Sprint 1 of Rebranding: User Notification and Marketing Communications
4th July to 13th July
The primary scope of Phase 1 was to ensure all our users were notified that Yubi was being re-branded.
To ensure this, we enabled a Yubi notification banner on all our product pages, which also tracked how many of our users needed to whitelist our new domain in their firewall.
As part of the planning, we made sure that there were at least 1.5-months between the first Yubi Launch Notification and the actual rebranding implementation (i.e., between Phase 1 and Phase 2).
For inactive users, this phase not only notified them of the upcoming rebranding, but also provided instructions on things they needed to keep ready before we completed our rebranding exercise (Eg., Domain Whitelisting, API Configuration, etc).
In parallel, our design team completed the UX for all the products to make sure the design was available for development in Phase 2.
Phase 2 – Re-Painting Our Platform to Yubi in a Single Sprint
Sprint 2 of Rebranding: Yubi Theme Design Revamp
18th July to 27th July
We have more than 200 react components and 800 pages across all products and more than 50 different email templates used across teams.
Hence, we spent more time planning the entire UI revamp within a single sprint (which includes QA and Go Live).
- Considering the tight timeline, we focussed on revamping the UI through colour palettes rather than making changes to the layout
- Our colour palette was centrally controlled through a theme provider and all our components fetched colour data from these centralised theme providers
- We also started segregating common UI components and began revamping layers one after another
- We revamped the existing font families to new font families
- We revamped the existing colour palette to the new colour palette
- We changed the primary and secondary swatches of all components to the new theme
- We identified landing pages and most visited pages of all products and revamped their layouts
Phase 3 – Migrating Our Domains and Infra-Configurations to Yubi
Sprint 3 of Rebranding: Domain & Infra Migration
1st Aug to 17th Aug
In this phase, we solved all the technical issues such as handling the domain, supporting authentication for newer domains, accommodating domain changes for API, CNAME handling, Mail server configurations, etc.
Supporting Older Domains along With the New Domain:
Many of our users are from the banking sector, which means most websites were blocked in their firewall by default.
For some Yubi products, customers use our APIs on their applications. So it is necessary for us to keep supporting our older application until all our users migrate to the new Yubi Domain.
This led us to a scenario where we had to support the Yubi, as well as CredAvenue domains at the same time. We handled this use case at our infra layer instead of creating multiple instances.
We also routed the CredAvenue traffic and Yubi traffic to the same application server and made our application work for both cases.
Most importantly, we had to handle a massive list of edge cases while handling this scenario via domain configurations.
Also, we kept tracking users who had not whitelisted us via analytics and sent them reminders through email flyers and internal support teams.
Team Work Makes Dream Work!
Ever seen a Slack Channel where you get notifications every minute for two months straight? That was our Slack channel.
Below is the overall glimpse of the entire rebranding infographic in timeline view:
The CredAvenue to Yubi re-branding exercise was an example of great teamwork where each and every team member across 6 different products and 10 different pods including Design, Development, Delivery, QA, Marketing, and Product worked together, supported each other and helped achieve one common goal.
And that’s how we transitioned from CredAvenue to Yubi in 3 sprints!
