Diagnosis stories

It's never what they hired me for.

Symptom: rebrand stuck before a deadline

The redesign that wasn't about the website

A Fortune 1000 property-data company had a new brand vision, a hard four-month deadline, and no way to activate any of it.

What it actually was: 68,000 pages of accumulated org chart wearing a website costume, and three marketing teams moving in three directions. I had every team moving the same way within two weeks. We cut the 68,000 pages, rebuilt the product taxonomy, launched on deadline — and the company secured $6B in private investment. Then I onboarded their new CMO and left a roadmap.

CoreLogic

Symptom: brand strategy stalled, teams siloed

The team that talked to customers it didn't have

An audio-tech company in 2B+ devices still marketed like the B2C sound giant it was thirty years ago — but its actual customers were OEMs.

What it actually was: a company that couldn't see its own funnel. I changed how the team saw its audience, and the stalled initiatives unstuck themselves: 75% of the website republished in six months, a CRM stood up, a dormant 50K list reactivated, the anniversary campaign turned into a live funnel.

DTS / Xperi

Symptom: everyone doing everything

The company that lived in the founder's head

A startup with strong technical momentum and no operational structure — priorities in email, timelines in three brains, every decision routing through the founder.

What it actually was: nothing tying strategy to execution. I built the operating system: shared source of truth, weekly North Star cadence, decision paths mapped. The founder handed off what used to live in his head. One exec got 5–7 hours a week back. The systems still run — without me.

Motive Labs

"Sarah is someone to identify and propose new structures — and make those new structures stick."Nataliya · Motive Labs