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- [00:01]
Alex Streed
LinkedIn news I've always been curious, always.
- [00:09]
Tomer Cohen
Looking for patterns in society, how people navigate and find their way. You always need some level of conflict to initiate that dialogue. It's never a straight line. I'm Tomer Coyne, Chief product officer of LinkedIn and this is building one.
- [00:26]
Alex Streed
Even today I work with my CX team and I say please bless. Block off 15 minutes on my calendar for canceled users because I want to have a conversation with them to understand why they're leaving.
- [00:39]
Tomer Cohen
That's Alex Streed, CPO of Cerebral. For her, direct interactions with customers is paramount. Stick around as we dive into her best practices for building user centric products and so much more.
- [00:56]
Jessi Hempel
From LinkedIn News. I'm Jessi Hempel, host of the hello Monday Podcast. Start your week with the hello Monday Podcast. We'll navigate career pivots. We'll learn where happiness fits in. Listen to hello Monday with me, Jesse Hempel on the LinkedIn podcast network or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:19]
Tomer Cohen
There is no replacement for interacting with the users of your product. I don't mean looking at dashboards or user research videos. I mean having real direct conversations with them. One of my favorite ways of gathering feedback is reaching out to people informally. I would often see people using the LinkedIn app standing in line or on a train to someplace and I would introduce myself and ask them about their experience. And while not very structured, the feedback they share is super insightful, it's authentic and it speaks to the need they have at that moment. I highly recommend trying this out. It will not disappoint you. One sex practitioner is Alex Streed. She's the CPO of Cerebral, a leading online service that specializes in mental health from therapy to medication. Before she came to Cerebral, Alex was the CP of Ellevest, an investment service with an emphasis on financial literacy that's geared towards women. She also cut her teeth working on product at Weight Watchers, and her product background is filled with building experiences that are tailored made for specific segments. In each of these endeavors, it has been essential for her to understand the users on a granular level, focusing not just on acquisition but also retention, which is key. Let's jump into the conversation you started in public relations, which is not usually where you see product people start. So what inspired you to pursue a career in product? Was there something you learned in PR and marketing that really helped you in the product role?
- [02:50]
Alex Streed
So when I moved to New York, I got my first job at a small boutique PR agency and one of the things that I learned there was storytelling and how important it was to be able to represent your client, be able to represent yourself, and to be able to sell, essentially. I didn't think that that was something that I wanted to do long term, but it's something that I took away from that. And so while in grad school at nyu, I was looking through the intern database to see if there was something that I thought that I would enjoy. And there was this opportunity at Weight Watchers on the product management team. And so the PR agency that I was working for was in food and wine. And so I was like, oh, okay, this. This could be interesting. They were looking for help to grow their food database. That was one of the client pain points, was that there wasn't enough foods to track in the food tracker. And so I didn't know anything about product management, but I was like, this is interesting. I want to get in. This is a public company. Like, let's see if this is something that I wanted to do. And unlike most people, I started my product career pretty early. I was 20, 22, 23 years old. And I remember graduating and, you know, begging the VP of product, I was like, I want to stay on. Like, this is amazing. I love being part of this team. I love helping solve problems for the users. And so from there, I ended up getting onto a project. This was like, right around the time where your parents might have been getting on Facebook, but they wanted to build a Weight Watchers community for people to connect, because folks were not necessarily using Facebook to talk about their successes and their failures with weight loss. And so they wanted to create a private community so folks that were in the Weight Watchers program could share with each other. And so I got to build a product from 0 to 1, which was really exciting.
- [04:58]
Tomer Cohen
That sounds like a great journey into it. And you started with storytelling, which I think is an essential skill in life.
- [05:04]
Alex Streed
Yes.
- [05:05]
Tomer Cohen
But very critical in product, because you have to sell your product, whether it's internally to your stakeholders and partners and why this would be successful. You want to excite the team, but also externally to your future users. That will give you a shot at using your product. And love how you kind of stumbled upon a little bit on this role and you found that it was really powerful for you because you've done so many roles and obviously you're a well rounded product executive. You have multiple skills and traits that are really powerful, whether it's storytelling or data or. Or building. When you look back at your career, is there something specific that you think you bring to the Table. That is a skill set or quality that kind of helped you throughout your career, given how unusual it started.
- [05:51]
Alex Streed
Oh, gosh. I think one of the things that has helped me be a successful product manager and eventually a product leader is that I've always been curious. I've always wanted to learn a little bit more about why something was happening. I wanted to dig into the data, I wanted to talk to users in real life. I mean, even today I work with my CX team and I say, please block off 15 minutes on my calendar for canceled users. Cause I want to have a conversation with them to understand why they're leaving.
- [06:27]
Tomer Cohen
This resonates a lot. The notion of being able to go deep, I think is critical in product. And without a learning mindset, without a curious mindset, it's really hard to establish that before we go to cerebral. You spent time in finance. You were the CPO of ellevest, which, for folks who are not familiar, was a product dedicated for women investors. And I'm curious, what did you notice about women investors that helped you to solve this specific problem in closing the investing gap?
- [06:59]
Alex Streed
Yeah, so I started at Ellevest. We were a team of maybe five or six people working at a like a WeWork type location. And I think what we noticed at first was that there really wasn't anything in the marketplace for women. The finance industry has historically been built for men by men. Like the symbol of Wall street is a bull. Like, it doesn't get any more male than that. And so I don't know any woman on this planet that's like, man, that really speaks to me. Right. You think of like cnbc, you know, you have all these like ticker signs moving across the screen. It feels a little bit like gambling or horse racing. And you know, that's. That's not what investing is supposed to be. Right. Historically, I think it has left women out. And so we realized that there was an opportunity and we started talking to as many women as we could to really understand their pain points around money. And so things that we would learn in those early days were that, you know, women, they get one salary or one big lump sum bonus. And they're like, well, how do I divvy this up? Like, I have lots of goals. You know, I want to buy a house one day. I want to take a European vacation for my 40th birthday. I want to retire. Well, I want to send my kids off to good colleges. Like, they have lots of different goals and so they're curious how they're supposed to you know, divvy up the monies. The other thing that we heard is not so much that she was risk averse, but that she was risk aware. Right. She was not necessarily afraid to invest in anything, but she wanted to understand what she was investing in. And you know, at Ellevest, it was very important to our chief investment officer that all of that was in diversified portfolios. And so we knew that whenever we launched our product, like, we wanted to explain that to her so that she knew what she was doing. The other thing was that she was interested in impact investing and investing for social responsibility. The majority of women spend their incomes on their families and in their communities. Women are more likely to be philanthropic, and so our product needed to reflect that. The other thing that she did not know, which is a very true and real thing, is that women's salaries tend to peak 10 years earlier than men's salaries. And so they tend to peak in the mid-40s for women and in the mid-50s for men. And the problem with that is, is that if you're not investing now, and if you're not investing the right amounts, you might miss out and you may not have enough for retirement. And so we needed to build that into our product offering. And that's really essentially how Ellevest was born.
- [10:00]
Tomer Cohen
You know, you talked about being curious before as an important quality in terms of doing product. And this is a great example for it because you can assume that investing is investing and it just caters to everybody in the same way, but the way it caters to a sheet is not necessarily how it caters to a he. And actually the system itself is really built for men. And the point you raised about everything from the product design sounds like even onboarding, even the steps you would do before even how you would design what is a saving plan sounds very, very different. Was this kind of a lot of user research that the team has done, is this kind of known gaps that you brought with you into the role?
- [10:42]
Alex Streed
Yeah, I think that's right. If you look at maybe some of Ellevest competitors like a Robinhood or a Stash, I mean, it is very much like, come in, invest now and go. And I think at elvest, like we had to think about our onboarding experience and making sure that people understood the value of the offering, what types of investing products we offered, you know, how much money you are expected to gain over, over the course of time, the difference between, you know, saving and investing. So all of those things were part of the onboarding funnel. And we continued to iterate on that. I mean, no one's ever done with their conversion funnel, but yeah, I mean, we continued to make that as educational and as helpful as possible.
- [11:32]
Tomer Cohen
So I'm going to shift to another industry you went to innovate in, which has not been innovated in from a product perspective in a long time. And that's healthcare. Before we go into Cerebral, what drew you to healthcare from finance? What was your story there?
- [11:47]
Alex Streed
Yeah, so while I believe that, you know, being financially sound is super important and it helps women leave bad jobs, bad relationships, I believe that women should always have control over their money. I decided to move into the mental healthcare space because I. I truly believe that if you do not have a healthy mind, you really don't have anything because you need your brain to think, you need your brain to work, you need your brain to. To be you. Right. And so everybody at Cerebral is there because of the mission and what we do. And so many of us have friends and family members who have experienced mental health issues. You know, there are employees at Cerebral that use our product offerings, and we're really proud of that. Like, we want to make sure that people feel like that there's a safe place to go, that there's no longer a stigma when it comes to mental health. And so it really felt like it spoke to me and that the timing was right.
- [12:54]
Tomer Cohen
And, Alex, when you go into an industry like healthcare, what is unique in your perspective when you build for mental health? I can think of so many dimensions, not even going into ethics and legality, but those are kind of the obvious ones. What are some of the principles or the way you think is very unique in this specific space and product?
- [13:12]
Alex Streed
So for one thing, I would say that we have two different customers, right? We have our customers, our clients that are coming in to receive care, but we also have our clinicians, and we have to build tools for them and we have to keep them happy because they, at the end of the day, are the ones that are servicing our clients. And so we want to make sure that while we're building great tools for them, but that the clinicians are also very involved in building out product offerings for our clients. And so we work very, very closely with our therapy team and our medication management team and our clinical quality team to make sure that what we're doing is safe and sound and compliant. We have all of our clients take what we call like the PHQ9 and the GAD7 before each of their sessions. So we're much more data driven, I would say and we actually interviewed a couple of clinicians just last week and talked about, you know, what makes us different from some of the other places. And a lot of folks had said, you know, I've never had as good of training as I've had at Cerebral. And so those things are, like, very important to us. And those things are things that we invest in and that we want to continue to invest in as we scale the company.
- [14:37]
Tomer Cohen
When you think about your core audiences, and you mentioned the kind of two main customers you have, the patients and the clinicians, do you break them into other kind of subcategories of core audiences, and you build different functional, social, emotional needs for them?
- [14:53]
Alex Streed
Yeah. So Cerebral has three service lines that folks can join. One is therapy, the other is medication management, and the other is a combination of the two offerings. And we want to make sure that folks know at any point in time they can upgrade or they can downgrade to something different. And so we do work with our therapy team to set expectations for the client of, like, what they can expect on their first therapy visit. Because it's going to be very different than, like, a prescriber on medication management. Right. And so we work very closely with the teams on that and, like, understanding what happens, you know, ongoing, you know, for medication management, it may not matter to some clients, like, who exactly they work with, because you don't meet with them as frequently as you would a therapist. You meet with a therapist on a weekly basis, and so that match and that relationship is really important. But maybe to someone who is just on medication management, you know, they see their prescriber once a month, maybe once every other month if they're feeling okay. And so they don't necessarily need to work with someone that they, you know, feel really like a close relationship with. And so we do think through, okay, what is the journey of someone on therapy? What is the journey with someone on medication? And then how do we make sure that folks feel like that when they come to Cerebral, that their prescriber and their therapist are talking to each other, that they don't have to explain information twice? Like, we're very fortunate because we actually own and have built our own emr, our electronic medical record. And so we're able to launch new features as quickly as we want there to help benefit the clinicians and to help them do their jobs better.
- [16:48]
Tomer Cohen
So this is a good segue into innovating, because you can assume that innovating specifically in mental health could be quite challenging, almost, you know, scary. If I would kind of invoke that word a little bit when you talked about the emr. That's one example of you build homegrown products. Do you have guardrails for the team about how to innovate or experiment? I'm assuming those are very different than your classic Internet company. How do you think about innovation when it comes to mental health?
- [17:18]
Alex Streed
We do product concept testing. We talk to real live customers about what it is that they are looking for in a mental health service, what's working for them, what's not working for them. So all of that is pretty typical. Where the guardrails come in is like, we want to make sure that when we're doing user interviews that we're not sharing any type of pii that these videos aren't getting out. So we're working very closely with our legal teams to make sure that that is not an issue. The other thing is, is like, we have, unlike other telehealth companies, an amazing clinical quality team. And there are psychiatrists and doctors that, you know, we can have conversations with and we can talk to about, like, what is medically sound. And so as we're thinking about, like the medication journey, for example, one of the things that we talked about is, you know, sometimes folks just like, don't want to go to the doctor. And so, like, is there a way that we can check in with them without them actually having to get on a call? Is there, like, after we do that first visit, a way that we can check in just to let them know that we're thinking about them, just to check in to make sure they're taking their medication. And so thinking through that with a doctor, I think makes a lot of sense because, sure, we could build that, but like, is that clinically sound? Is that the right thing to do? And so, you know, working closely with those teams to do that.
- [18:48]
Tomer Cohen
We are going to take a quick break, but when we come back, Alex will tell us how cerebral prioritizes user retention.
- [18:55]
Alex Streed
One of the things that we learned was that folks who went to three therapy sessions in their first month were more likely to stay past six months.
- [19:07]
Lars Schmidt
From the minds of visionaries to the desks of disruptors, I'm Lars Schmidt, host of the Redefining Work podcast. Join me each week as we explore the new world of work through the lens of those shaping it. CEOs, HR leaders, investors, and more. Be a part of the conversation that changes everything. Subscribe to Redefining Work today.
- [19:34]
Tomer Cohen
And we're back. I'm speaking with Alex Streed, CP of Telehealth service Cerebral, which specializes in mental health. So Alex, due to the personalized nature of healthcare interaction, Cerebral is quite in a tricky position when it comes to measuring the complete end to end user experience. Right. So the variability in the styles of clinicians, the subjective perceptions of patients, the complex non linear nature of mental health outcomes makes controlling the quality of the service very challenging. So how do you go about thinking through the quality of the experience? How do you measure it?
- [20:08]
Alex Streed
So we own a lot of product. It's basically two big experiences. The way that I have structured my team, our North Star metric is lifetime value to cac.
- [20:23]
Tomer Cohen
So lifetime value to customer acquisition cost makes sense.
- [20:26]
Alex Streed
But to get there, I have different pillars working on different things. And so we have a growth pillar which is mainly focused on bringing in quality customers at a low cost. We have our retention pillar that's focused on keeping people here longer, making sure they're happy, making sure they're engaged, making sure that if they're not working with the right clinician that we get them a new one. I have a clinical quality team that's focused on making sure that the clinicians are happy. Because if the clinicians are not happy and they're leaving Cerebral, guess what? Those clients are going to leave Cerebral too, that their clinician leaves. They're not happy. And so that's really, really important.
- [21:11]
Tomer Cohen
So you mentioned that true north as being kind of LTV and CAC and all those kind of proxy metrics coming into that from retention and growth. Is there like a causal relationship? You know, now that you've been in this role for several years now, what do you know now that you wish you knew three years ago in terms of a causal relationship for the product?
- [21:33]
Alex Streed
So it's all about activation. It's all about getting people in and getting them to their sessions. So when I came into Cerebral, we did a deep dive. We wanted to know of the people who retain the longest, like what's happening, what's going on here? And one of the things that we learned was that folks who went to three therapy sessions in their first month were more likely to stay past six months. And so we put a growth hacking team on getting people to their first three sessions, whether that is through, you know, trying different notifications or phone calls to schedule, or getting the clinicians to schedule the next call on the last call, like whatever those things are. We noticed that activation was so key and that if people got off to a great start, that was the way to go. It's funny because you said, like, what do you wish you learned three years ago. Like oddly enough, I sort of learned the same thing at ellevest because it was really around retirement, like people who could get in and get a retirement goal set up. It was like you never left because you don't need your retirement money for a long time. And so before leaving ellevest, I had a team that was thinking about how to get people started on retirement quickly. So I think it is about like finding that one thing to get folks in and ready and then putting a team on it and swarming it.
- [23:02]
Tomer Cohen
I couldn't agree more. I think we can go sector by sector. It could be gaming, it could be across any segment. And there is that key action or key journey that it takes time for the user for the member to realize the value of the service. And usually it's not instantaneous. There's something that happens and it sounds like in the case of healthcare it's really need a couple of sessions to build a relationship and to really see that value come through.
- [23:30]
Alex Streed
Exactly. Like we're, we're actually debating right now internally, like what do we even call that first session? Because it's not therapy. Like you're coming in, we're meeting each other, you're getting to know me, you're asking questions, you're asking why I'm here today. It's not a therapy session, it's an intake session really. And so we want to make sure that folks realize that so that they're willing to come back to that second session where they're going to, you know, really dive in and start working on goal setting and what all of that looks like.
- [24:02]
Tomer Cohen
Super helpful in the space of mental health, I think we can all start to ideate of what could happen. You know, I talk a little bit about how we're still getting used to the idea of a self driving car, but what about a self driving psychologist or a psychiatrist? Would we ever get used to that? Would that, would that ever be something that we see in the future? When you think about telehealth or healthcare industry in general, it doesn't have to be contained to mental health, but in general for the healthcare industry, what do you think will change in the next kind of five plus years? And on the same note, what do you think would not change?
- [24:40]
Alex Streed
So maybe I'll start with what I don't think will change. I don't think you will start talking to a AI therapist. We're not gonna go down that route. There is still something so important about human connection. And I mean today with the technology. The one major thing that AI lacks is common sense. Right. And so Cerebral has taken a stance to say that your therapists will not be fake therapists. Right. That is very true. However, just like a computer today has helped us be able to create a telehealth company, we do believe that AI will help our therapists become more efficient when it comes to note taking, when it comes to follow ups with the client. You know, we're already starting to test some of those things where we create messages and the therapist goes in and then they like edit them accordingly. I would say it gets it like maybe 80% of the way there. But instead of the therapist now spending 15 minutes on their follow ups, they're maybe spending 5 minutes on their follow ups. So I see it heading in that direction, but I don't think AI is going to replace human connection. Yeah.
- [26:00]
Tomer Cohen
So the fundamental basis of it, there's the human to human interaction, but that could be amplified to be even better or more efficient or more powerful with AI.
- [26:10]
Alex Streed
Exactly.
- [26:11]
Tomer Cohen
That's very powerful.
- [26:12]
Alex Streed
Exactly.
- [26:13]
Tomer Cohen
Alex, this was wonderful. I've learned so much. Thank you so much for your time.
- [26:17]
Alex Streed
Thank you. This was great. Keep doing the great work that you all are doing at LinkedIn. I will share a quick story. I actually found my job at Cerebral because I saw the Chief Product Officer positioned on the job posting and then I reached out to our COO and ROTOR and said, you know, I think I would be a really great fit for this position and I don't feel like I would have been able to do that without LinkedIn. So thank you for helping me find a job that I love and I appreciate all that you guys are doing over there.
- [26:50]
Tomer Cohen
That's wonderful. I think I'm going to start every future broadcast with how did you find your job? And helping it will be LinkedIn.
- [26:56]
Alex Streed
LinkedIn, right. They'll be a very common theme.
- [27:00]
Tomer Cohen
As always, I want to go over some of my key takeaways from this conversation with Alex. First, the importance of engaging with your users. Alex emphasizes the value of direct communication with customers, specifically with those who decided to churn basically leave the service. At this point, she's not trying to keep them on, she's trying to understand their needs and what led them to leave so she can build a better product. There is no substitute for direct feedback. Even with what you're going to hear is not pleasant. Next, the importance of early engagement. Alex emphasizes first impressions and actions as critical factors for long term retention. At Ellevest, she focuses on encouraging women to start retirement planning right out the gate, establishing a foundation for sustained engagement. Similarly, at Cerebral, she found that users who attended at least three therapy sessions within their first month were more likely to continue using the service. These examples highlight her strategy for not just acquiring users, but actively guiding them through value added experiences very early on. What she's ensuring is that users perceive immediate and tangible benefits right from the start. It's critical to understand that user acquisition is meaningless unless users stick around. Third, ultimately, Alex knows that a core part of the service is the clinician care, and making sure clinicians have a great experience directly impacts the patient experience. It can be easy for product builders to only focus on building the product for the patient, but not to put too much effort and thought into making it really easy for the providers to do their work. And instead, what Alex is doing is she found that investing in better product for clinicians was potentially even more worthwhile than adding more features for the patients. So, learning from Alex, I'll leave you with a call to action. Ask yourself when was the last time you spoke directly with a churned user? If it's been more than a month, make sure you set time on your calendar to do so.
- [29:06]
Max Miller
If you liked this episode, don't forget to rate and review us on Apple podcasts. We'll be back in two weeks with a new episode from Michelin starred chef Dan Barber, the founder of Row 7 seeds.
- [29:19]
Assaf Ghedron
It's amazing. Our grandparents stabbed in the dark. Today we have genetic markers and we have technology that allows us to be very specific, allows readers to be very specific in their work. AI is the next generation of that specificity and that efficiency and that speed.
- [29:35]
Max Miller
Can't wait two weeks, Then tune in next week for a rapid fire bonus round with Alex.
- [29:40]
Alex Streed
Is there an app out there that lets you know if you're being a good Parent or not?
- [29:45]
Max Miller
Building one is a LinkedIn editorial production. Our host is Tomer Cohen, LinkedIn's chief product officer. This episode was produced by Max Miller. Our associate producer is Lolia Briggs. It's mixed by Tim Boland and engineered by Assaf Ghedron. Enrique Montalvo is our Executive producer. Dave Pond is head of news production. Courtney Koop is head of original programming. Dan Roth is the Editor in Chief of LinkedIn. Thanks to Alicia Mann and Jenna Kaplan. If you know of a product leader we could all learn from, send us a line@pitchinkedin.com.