Product rebranding is arguably the worst backlog requirement

Rebranding, product renaming does not happen as rarely as it might seem. Here are a few possible reasons.

• The name is out of date in the modern world.
• Several products combined under one umbrella brand
• A company, along with products, is absorbed by another company
• The name began to cause bad associations

In general, a new name can give an impetus, attract attention, properly position the product on the market. To come up with a new name is only a small part, somewhere around 1% of all tasks. It is necessary to do a large amount of technical work, which does not introduce new scenarios, or solves the problem of the customer. It is impossible to calculate the return on investment for these “non-functional” costs. This is the pain of a product manager.


I will not add water to the text, but confine myself to a list that can be used as a checklist. These actions are typical for software products. Physical goods have their own characteristics.

So where do you need to make changes.

Interface. Logos, text information.

Installer Name. If the product is a cloud service, then it can also have an installable part, for example, browser extensions. Product

metadata in the properties of library files, folder names.

The name in stores , if it is distributed through the Appstore, Google Play, Microsoft Store and others.

The End User License Agreement may contain the name of the product.

Reference information , whitepapers, documentation, title on the support forum.

Entries in the price list , for example, in Salesforce. Usually, renaming does not change the directory number (model number / SKU / part number), but it could be. So it will be necessary to make new numbers.

Marketing and technical materialsincluding, but not limited to, slides, site pages.

All this, in a good way, must also be tested so as not to accidentally forget the old name.

If you work with partners, you should notify them in advance. Because they will also have to follow the steps from the list above. In the case when they only sell or introduce, the amount of work is less. If they make a decision on your product, then most likely they will need to go this way completely.

A simple example, you are making an “Awesome client for Axapta” solution for Microsoft Axapta, after renaming the platform in Dynamics AX and your product name should be changed to “Awesome client for Dynamics AX”.

As you can see, renaming is a big project. Pitfalls may appear at each stage, in the form of an unplaced text, or a legal ban on the use of the old name, so you have to clean it very quickly. And most importantly, this requires the involvement of resources from both developers and the QA team.

And it would seem that the new name was chosen and agreed upon, but its replacement may not fit in one release.

In addition, interesting recommendations from Microsoft