Acting CMO & Head of Product Marketing · Paris · 2020–2022
Linagora: eleven products, no answer to "what is this company?"
The situation
Prospects had no comprehensive idea of the offerings and no understanding of Linagora as an ecosystem.
Those aren't my words. They came out of the customer journey work. Linagora had been publishing open-source software since 2000: Twake Workplace, LinShare, LinTo, LinID, LinPIK, Petals, plus a services arm doing consulting, migration, audit, training and certification.
Eleven products sold eleven ways meant every deal restarted the explanation from zero. The company had twenty years of credibility and no way to transmit it in a first meeting.
When I arrived
When I left
Eleven products, no shared answer
One brand platform and one vision
Every deal restarted the explanation
A single membership that packaged the ecosystem
Six candidate values
Three ownable ones
No first-contact journey
A redesigned journey with the website at the centre
What I built
The global software strategy, authored and iterated across five versions.
A brand platform landing on "Your Open Source Enterprise Partner" and a vision of enabling technology independence, a third digital way between American and Chinese platforms, which is a real and ownable position for a French open-source publisher selling to European institutions.
A value proposition framework that reduced six candidate values to three ownable ones. A redesigned first-contact customer journey. Linagora One, a single membership bundling products, solutions and services. The website rebuilt as the centrepiece of the strategy, with uniform product sites beneath it. A six-month execution roadmap naming the resource each line required. And Twake positioned specifically for governments, regulated industries and European institutions.
The judgment call
Diagnosing it as a packaging problem, not a messaging one.
Everyone agreed the messaging was unclear. The instinct in that situation is to write better messaging. But the journey work showed the confusion was structural: the buyer was being asked to assemble the offer themselves, from eleven parts, in a first meeting.
Linagora One existed to make the ecosystem itself the product. One membership, everything included. You cannot message your way out of a structure that makes the buyer do the assembly, and a positioning fix is sometimes a packaging fix wearing a different hat.
Frameworks installed