The Challenge
AppDynamics had built its reputation as a leader in Application Performance Management, but the market was changing quickly. New competitors were reshaping the observability category, customer expectations were evolving, and the brand needed a clearer way to communicate its value beyond product features.
The opportunity was to reposition AppDynamics around what had always made it distinctive: connecting technology performance directly to business performance.
The Insight
Research with employees, customers, and stakeholders revealed a disconnect. Internally, teams lacked a simple, shared narrative. Externally, customers were overwhelmed by more data, dashboards, and promises of complete visibility. Our Definition of our platform as the Central Nervous System of IT was falling flat and creating roadblocks for everyone to explain what we do the same way.
The real need wasn’t to observe everything. It was to understand which signals mattered most to the business.
That insight became our strategic North Star:
The Idea
We reframed observability around business impact.
Instead of leading with infrastructure, telemetry, and technical complexity, we focused on the human and business outcomes technology makes possible: more customers converting, more transactions completing, more travelers reaching their destinations, and better digital experiences. Technology performance became a means to something bigger.
The Work
As Creative Director, I helped translate the strategy into a scalable visual and storytelling system spanning brand, campaigns, customer stories, events, video, sales enablement, and internal communications.
Customer success became central to the narrative. Stories featuring brands including Match.com, Carhartt, Alaska Airlines, and Paychex demonstrated how AppDynamics helped organizations connect technical decisions to meaningful business outcomes.
The platform gave teams across Cisco AppDynamics a simpler way to communicate a highly technical product while creating a consistent foundation for creative execution across channels.
The Impact
Observe What Matters shifted the conversation from monitoring technology to understanding its impact on the business.
It gave internal teams a shared narrative, differentiated AppDynamics in an increasingly crowded observability market, and created a more human way to tell complex technology stories—from global campaigns and Cisco Live to customer storytelling and analyst conversations.
The result was a brand story built around a simple idea:
Don’t just observe everything. Observe what matters.
