The Evolution of Workplace Mental Health: An Interview with Gavin Wade, CPO at Unmind
Leading Product for a mission driven business and what it means to deliver value to users of a mental health platform.
You’ll maybe notice a few things that are different about this edition of the newsletter. We’ve had a small rebrand. I’d been thinking about where to take things in the future and I realised I wanted a simpler and more coherent value proposition. So, officially this is the first edition as ‘Immeasurable - A Tech for Good Newsletter’. You’ll still find much of the same content but I’m widening the focus to include commercial companies working in the Tech for Good space. The main reason is that there are just so many folks doing exciting work in this area.
In this edition, I was very lucky to speak to Gavin Wade, Chief Product Officer at Unmind. We talk about leading Product for a mission driven business and what it means to deliver value to their users. You’ll also find the usual jobs listing and best of the web.
Before we get started, I just want to make a quick request. If you’d like to hear from more amazing people like Gavin please make sure you sign up or consider sharing the newsletter with your network. Doing one of these two things helps to keep the momentum behind the newsletter going and helps us reach more people.
The Evolution of Workplace Mental Health
with Gavin Wade, Chief Product Officer at Unmind
Hey Gavin.
Thanks for agreeing to answer my questions. Would you mind introducing yourself?
Thanks Tom, I appreciate being invited to participate in your newsletter.
I have been working in technology for 25 years and was very fortunate to have worked with Mary & Tom Poppindeck for a brief period time very early on in my career - they literally wrote the book on lean software development. This massively influenced my approach to developing products and set me on my product journey.
Prior to Unmind, I worked at OVO energy and started there when it was very small, 2 product teams, a few hundred employees and less than 0.5% share of the energy market. In the 7 years I was there, we grew it to 8000 employees, 45 products teams across London, Bristol, Edinburgh and Lisbon, and become the 3 largest energy supplier in the UK - it was a wild ride and I learned so much.
Now I am Chief Product Officer at Unmind, where I am responsible for Product, UX, Content and our Science team.
And can you tell us a bit about Unmind? What does the product offer its customer and its users?
Unmind is a mental health and wellbeing (Business-to-Business-to-Employee) platform for the workplace, from a wellbeing app for employees to supporting our clients in understanding how their culture impacts mental health and supports and educates their managers on what it means to build an environment where everyone can flourish in their wellbeing.
Unmind has four key products:
Unmind Elevate is for employees, allowing them to measure their wellbeing and providing over 700 hours of clinically backed content.
Unmind Talk provides access to therapists and coaching in 50+ languages
Unmind Manager - science backed training containing over 40 bite-sized videos and courses to help managers build the knowledge and empathy that teams need to flourish
Unmind Insights - allowing companies to understand how mentally healthy their environment is
There is a great short video on our website, which gives an awesome overview of Unmind.
Tell us a little bit about how you get work done at Unmind?
Unmind is made up of cross-functional teams, that not only include product people, designers and engineers, but also content specialists and clinical psychologists. They work closely with our colleagues in Commercial to understand client’s challenges, along with conducting user research to get to the nub of user challenges in regards to their mental health.
What are the key differences you see in your role as Chief Product Officer when working at a mission-driven company compared to other types of organisations?
People come to work for Unmind due to the mission, so it's doubly important that they feel the work they do connects directly to that mission. As we pivot in our strategy, we need to ensure team-level missions and OKRs are constantly tied back to why we are here; so people feel continually connected to that mission.
Are there any other examples of how, being a mission driven business has altered how the business operates?
We have to be the gold standard for our mission, whilst balancing this with being a VC-backed SaaS start-up in a very volatile market. This means we apply equal weight to human centred KPIs, as well as commercial and operational KPIs.
How do you ensure you’re delivering real value to your users, both businesses and their employees?
Being a B2B2E product, the buyer and the user are very different people, with different needs. A large part of our buyer insights comes through our amazing commercial colleagues and client advisory board, and we conduct regular user research, coupled with data to ascertain the user challenges and opportunities. We balance these through the pursuit of our mission (to be the most trusted and effective global partner for transforming workplace mental health) and product principles, like not putting revenue ahead of user wellbeing.
We are amazingly fortunate to hear from users every day, that we are transforming their lives, whether it is bringing them back from deep dark places or saving relationships to sleeping more at night. It truly does energise you to do your best work every day.
I’ve heard you talk about building product that ‘meets the user where they need it most’. Can you tell us what you mean by that?
Everyone’s mental health is unique and not only does our product need to meet their own needs through our content covering all areas of the bio-psychosocial model, we are building our content and services into their flow of work, through integration with HRISs (human resources information systems), Slack, Team, etc - removing as much friction as possible to people engaging with their wellbeing.
What have been the key factors that have led to the growth of Unmind to date?
Having a clear difference to others in the market, understanding that and leveraging it. Not being distracted by competitors, this is vital or else you end up chasing them and becoming part of the sea of sameness.
Being a mental health company, trust is vital to our success and our science team keeps us honest and holds us to high standards of integrity. There is friction with wanting to move quickly, but this friction means we build something better.
What’s on the horizon for how future technology will impact our wellbeing? Either for good or bad…
It’s good! Through technology we can reach more people and help them live mentally heather lives, we can begin to augment human expertise, such as therapists, through AI to speed up recovery and help more people.
Other than using the product do you have any advice for other organisations on how they can look after the wellbeing of their staff? There seems to be a lot of wellbeing focused perks around these days but what do you think has the biggest impact?
Go beyond giving apps to your employees, it really doesn’t matter how many apps and well-being services you provide, if the culture of your organisation is toxic to mental health. Give your leaders and managers the support they need to create cultures where people can flourish in their wellbeing.
Who inspires you and why?
I am very lucky to have a lot of people who inspire in my life, to name a few:
Martin Eriksson - as well as being a product legend, is my friend and mentor
Steve Peralta - Chief Wellbeing Officer at Unmind - inspires me to constantly go deeper into what it means to live a mentally healthy life
Cassie Harman- VP of Product at Kaluza - taught me what it means to be a product leader
Any last messages you would like to share with our readers?
To be the best leader, manager, colleague, friend, parent, partner, you need to learn to look after yourself first. I assume you all clean your teeth every day, well if you spend the same amount of time understanding and looking after your mental health, you will flourish in life and be able to tackle challenges that come your way with love in your heart.
Do good jobs
A curated list of Tech for Good jobs
Product, Delivery and Leadership
British Heart Foundation - Head of Innovation and Product Development
Hybrid (London), Salary: circa £70,000
Teenage Cancer Trust - Product Owner
Hybrid (London), Salary: £47,534 per annum
Macmillan - Data Platform Product Manager
Hybrid (London), Salary: £52,000-57,000
Mind - Digital Product Owner or UX specialist
Remote or Hybrid, Part time, Salary: £41,242 - £46,783 pro rata
Design and Research
Marie Curie - Senior UX Designer
Remote or London, Salary: £48,000 plus London Allowance if applicable
Cancer Research UK - Lead UX Designer
Hybrid (Stratford), open full time, part time, job share and compressed hours, Salary: £48,000-£56,000
Cancer Research UK - Senior Service Designer
Hybrid (Stratford), open full time, part time, job share and compressed hours, Salary:£48,000 - £52,000
Hey 👋, if you or someone you know runs a charity who’s hiring or thinking about hiring tech roles but feel like you need some additional industry experience to make the right hire, I offer free 30 minute consultations to charity folks to put you on the right tracks. Just get in touch via Linkedin.
Food for thought
The most inspiring or simply useful content from the rest of the web.
“Why Chayn took down its chatbot in 2020 and what we’ve learned about building culturally-aware chatbots since” - Hera Hussain shares some excellent insights into the complexity of building effective chatbots in the service space.
Designing for connection - Deepr provide a toolkit to support designing for human connection.
Design Patterns for Mental Health - An amazing resource for people building products and services with a focus on mental health.