Brand is often treated as surface. An afterthought added after direction, structure, and strategy are already in motion. For Slavena Tisheva, the logic is reversed. She approaches brand as an operating system, the invisible architecture that shapes how decisions are made, how uncertainty is absorbed, and how organizations align when no one is watching.
We spoke with Slavena after Wiser Technology recently announced its new brand positioning, united under the slogan We Have the Code® and built on The Code, an internal delivery model distilled from more than 1,000 AI and digital transformation projects delivered across Europe, the Middle East and the US. The announcement comes at a defining moment for the company, which in 2024 emerged from the merger of several organizations and is now formalizing a shared brand identity.
In a group built from multiple operating cultures, the brand could no longer function as a communication layer alone; it had to become the logic that aligns how decisions are made across the whole system.
As Chief Marketing Officer, Slavena led the process of transforming that internal complexity into a coherent internal and external narrative. In this exclusive interview with The Recursive, she reflects on how her background in psychology, sales, and change management shaped her view of the brand, and what “identity after the merger” actually requires in practice.
The Recursive: What parts of your journey shaped the way you think about building a global B2B brand like Wiser?
Slavena Tisheva: I’ve always been obsessed with the “human operating system”, how people make decisions, and how organizations behave as living systems.
My journey didn’t start in marketing; it started in International Management. A defining moment came early in my career at Morgan Stanley, where I watched a massive digital transformation unfold. I analyzed it not just as a process deployment, but as a study in leadership. That is where I learned that you have to architect the outcome. If you don’t design the system for the people who power it, the transformation collapses.
That idea was tested in 2019 when I joined Prime Holding as a Business Development Representative, a company that later became part of what is now Wiser Technology.
I walked into a company of brilliant engineers delivering world-class work, yet as a business, we were effectively silent. We lacked the tools, the structure, and the shared story to translate that engineering mastery into market value.
I realized I couldn’t succeed in that role unless I changed the system. So, I pivoted from selling to building. I launched a sales enablement initiative and personally wrote over 150 case studies just to decode exactly what our engineers were delivering.
That period reshaped my perspective on B2B sales. I learned that it is never just a technical process; it is a psychological one. Clients are navigating uncertainty, bias, and risk. In that context, brand isn’t marketing – it is the ultimate sales enablement tool. It is a scalable system that creates enough psychological safety for a client to say “Yes.”
When we merged to become Wiser, I recognized the same structural issue again, just at a larger scale. There was immense objective strength, but no unified identity that could hold it together. At that point, it was obvious that this couldn’t be solved through communication alone. We had to build a brand promise that would function as an operating system – aligning our culture internally so we could deliver certainty externally.
My work has always sat at the intersection of brand and psychology. And the consistent lesson has been the same: real transformation is cognitive before it is structural. That’s why I don’t see brand as decoration. I see it as the operating system of the company, the logic that governs decisions when no one is watching.
When the repositioning process started, what was the one idea you felt Wiser had to make clear to the market?
We had to start by being honest about the environment we were operating in. Post-merger branding is one of the hardest contexts you can navigate. Several companies come together with different histories, cultures, and operating models.
The broader tech market is inherently chaotic. There is no universal standard for excellence, and clients are under constant pressure. When they see a large merged organization, the default assumption is often execution capacity. They negotiate on speed and price, not on value. What we needed to make clear is that Wiser is not simply a scaled execution provider. It is a unified force that brings structure into complexity.
Internally, that capability already existed. We had teams operating as true strategic partners, not just order takers. But it lived in separate pockets. The task of the brand was to take that level of thinking and make it the standard across the entire organization.
Strategically, this meant moving up the value pyramid, from “doing the work” to truly “guiding the client.” But you cannot command that shift through a slogan.
So the repositioning is not about inventing a new company. It was about creating a shared internal and external language about excellence. It was a way of telling every person inside the group: we don’t just execute briefs; we challenge assumptions and solve real problems.
At the same time, this shift had to be visible externally. Wiser needed to move from being perceived as a collection of specialized vendors to being understood as one system that owns outcomes end-to-end.
“We Have Тhe Code” now sits at the centre of that brand identity. How do you explain what it actually means?
At its heart, it is a promise with two layers of meaning. On the literal level, it speaks to our craft. We have deep engineering mastery. We write the code.
But at the deeper level, it means we have a formula for navigating complexity. When we say “We Have the Code,” we are not talking about syntax. We are saying that we have a repeatable way of moving from chaos to an outcome. In an environment where uncertainty is the default, we are promising a system that creates predictability.
The Code model emerged through pattern recognition. We did not look for heroic moments. We analyzed hundreds of projects, not only our successes, but also our failures. We examined the situations where we struggled, where projects stalled, and where decisions became blocked.
Again and again, the same question surfaced: when something went wrong with a large enterprise client, was it really a technology problem? Or was it a problem of framing the wrong issue, aligning the wrong incentives, or working inside unresolved organizational tension?
Across industries from automotive to financial services, the obstacles were rarely about programming languages. They were about how large systems behave under pressure.
The Code is the distilled logic of those recurring patterns. It is a navigation system built from lived experience. It allows us to enter a complex organization and say: we recognize this structure, we have seen this dynamic before, and there is a way through it.
How did you build this positioning in practice? What were the defining tensions and choices along the way?
From the beginning, we treated this as a discovery process, not as an act of invention. We worked intensively with the board and the leadership to understand what truly differentiates us in practice, not in theory. Then we took our hypotheses to clients and tested them against reality.
The central tension was between “innovation” and “certainty.”
There is a strong gravitational pull in the tech industry toward visionary language: unlocking the future, limitless potential, transformation narratives. We explored those paths. They are attractive because they sound optimistic and familiar.
But when we confronted these concepts with the lived reality of our projects, a different truth emerged. Our clients were not coming to us to be inspired. They were coming to us because they were blocked. Because programs were stalling. Because internal systems were in conflict. Because they needed stability, not abstraction.
We made a very deliberate decision to step away from visionary positioning and to build the brand on certainty instead, on who we actually are when things work, and also when they don’t.
That was the real tension: aspiration versus authenticity. We chose to build the brand on how we truly operate under pressure, how we fail, how we recover, and what we learn in the process, not on an idealized version of ourselves.
That is also why We Have the Code resonates internally. It reflects lived behavior, not an external aspiration. If we had chosen “innovation” as the anchor, it would have remained a poster on a wall. Certainty, on the other hand, is something people experience in real projects.
How do you expect The Code to shape the way Wiser communicates, and what does success look like looking ahead to 2026?
Internally, The Code functions as a filtering mechanism. It gives teams a shared reference point for decision-making. Instead of subjective debates, people can ask structured questions: Are we solving the real problem? Are we creating momentum? Are we designing for long-term ownership?
In that sense, it turns culture into something operational. Not a set of values on paper, but a working toolkit for everyday decisions.
Externally, the impact is equally structural. It changes the axis of the conversation. Instead of negotiating primarily on price or speed, discussions move toward responsibility and outcome. It positions Wiser not only as a service provider but also as a partner that is prepared to take ownership of what happens next.
Looking ahead, success for me means that the line between brand and culture disappears completely. The Code becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It shapes hiring, performance reviews, and daily stand-ups without the marketing function having to translate it. And it shows up with the same clarity across every outward-facing channel, from sales and industry events to employer branding and social media.
Coming from a change-management background, success is an operating system that runs quietly in the background. People don’t consciously “use” it; they simply make better decisions through it.
When teams can confidently say no to work that violates the Code, and yes to the right challenges, because they know who they are as an organization, that is when identity after the merger becomes real.
