You’ve recently become the “Head of Product” at a growth-stage startup. Firstly, Congratulations! The “Head of Product” role is one of the most coveted and impactful roles at any company. Momentarily, you feel like a super-hero. However, without the optimal moves, you could quickly become the focal point for multiple challenging issues, whether it is speed of execution, results, innovation, or user experience, just to name a few. This talk given by Headspace Chief Product Officer, Chandra Janakiraman, will guide you through three key moves you should focus on early, to set you up for success, and help you keep your super-hero status.
Chandra is the Chief Product Officer at Headspace, where he manages product, growth and customer experience. Chandra spearheaded the launch of the new Headspace experience, making the meditation platform more intuitive, flexible and effective, while architecting it from the ground up for innovation. He has also overseen consistent double-digit growth across all key metrics over the last two years, while building a highly scalable product & growth operation.
Prior to Headspace, Chandra served as General Manager at Zynga, leading products and strategy for the puzzle-arcade business. Chandra helped scale Zynga San Diego’s product team and business to reach $200M in cumulative bookings and 250M in cumulative installs across 5 hit products. Chandra has also served as a Product Manager at Amazon and began his career working as an R&D engineer at Royal Philips Electronics, for which he holds 16 patents. He has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Madras, an MS in Manufacturing Systems from the Singapore-MIT Alliance and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management.
The content can be accessed online, or via the Headspace mobile app, used by more than 8 million people, in over 200 countries. The Headspace vision is “to improve the health and happiness of the world” and as part of that commitment, they have partnered with charities, foundations and NGO’s around the world.
Headspace has logged over 15.8M downloads and, in June of last year, they raised $36.7M in a Series B round of funding, bringing their total funding raised to $73.7M.