At Headspace, their focus is on providing their users with a positive experience. They realise that in order to cope with their expanding user base, they need an engineering solution. Through guided meditation and mindfulness exercises, Headspace offers a convenient and personal meditation guide for users to achieve improved health, relaxation, better concentration, and enhanced compassion to live a more fulfilling life with minimal stress and fewer distractions.
Customers Require Additional Tools to Enhance Their Experience
In expectation of a rise in requests after their service expansion, the Customer Experience division at Headspace aimed to continue providing prompt support. Rather than hiring more staff, the team concentrated on establishing efficient protocols and tools to equip their present support staff to manage the additional inquiries effortlessly.
In the role of a Product Manager at Works, Clarissa Negrete was entrusted with the responsibility of expanding customer experience. However, she encountered challenges as the engineering team was short-staffed. She commented, “We had limited manpower in our engineering department while striving for ambitious goals.”
Headspace engaged Works to find their first remote software engineer when they realised that their recruitment process needed improvement, and that they urgently required an experienced developer.
Your Talent Pipeline is Ready for Expansion
In retrospection, Clarissa remembers that it was just her and the first developer at Works who initially developed a tool for the Customer Experience (CX) team along with a Help Centre website. As her responsibilities expanded beyond CX to include all internal tools, the company brought on a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to create an engineering management structure for a growing team of software engineers.
To surpass the challenges of limited financial resources, time constraints, and a highly competitive labour market in California, Headspace partnered with Works to tap into a wider pool of qualified talent for expansion.
With the support of Works’ rapid recruitment, training, and onboarding process, Headspace has recruited two new junior engineers to work exclusively on the customer experience (CX) tool. As a result, of the engineering team, only two are employed in-house at Headspace, and the others work on various projects depending on their availability.
A Robust and Decentralised Team
Seamless collaboration and data exchange were crucial for Clarissa, and she was fortunate to have collaborated with Works engineers who were not only friendly and adaptable but also ambitious, eager to learn, and content with the outcomes. Clarissa states that in her many years of experience, she has never come across such courteous and enthusiastic engineers. Unlike their prior remote engagement, which was impersonal and transactional, Clarissa and her team consider Works engineers to be a valuable part of their team. They organise lunch meetings and all-hands frequently, enabling them to feel like permanent employees, which is something Clarissa has never seen with other remote engineering teams.
The accomplishment of challenging, foundational tasks by developers necessitates collaboration and a constructive attitude. Even though these duties may not appear glamorous or attention-grabbing, they are essential to the triumph of our organisation.
Training and Development Support Offered by Employers
The popularity of programming languages has soared in recent years, yet some languages are either antiquated or require a considerable amount of learning and practice. Consequently, we prefer to recruit engineers who are already skilled in the language essential for a specific role. The link between these programming languages and the labour market is noteworthy.
Works offers continuous backing and direction to its developers via on-the-job training that covers new languages, among other things. Developers can benefit from Works resources by learning and improving their skills alongside their coworkers. This not only helps developers, who can apply this knowledge in their future career ventures, but also benefits the company by enhancing the value of its developers. By investing in their employees’ development, Works is laying the groundwork for its continued success.
Beginning in 2022, Headspace has experienced a substantial rise in its corporate customer base as the company has started to provide its services directly to businesses. Their engineers are concentrating on improving their principal platform, which is enabling Headspace to advance their goal of introducing mindfulness to people globally.
