Alex Stried is Chief Product Officer at Cerebral, a mental health subscription company that provides online care and medication management. She was formerly CPO at Ellevest, where she launched digital investing and wealth management platforms, banking services, and financial coaching. Before Ellevest, Alex was at Weight Watchers International, where she led the launch of a new line of business — Personal Coaching — and created a safe and vibrant community for the Weight Watchers members.
In our conversation, Alex shares how her team takes products from zero to one, the process of product concept testing, and how to design for your true target market. She talks about how one in five adults struggle with their mental health and how her team was able to narrow in and design for specific segments and personas. Alex also discusses the importance of testing different pricing and packaging offerings to continue to grow your subscription base.
If you look at some of Cerebral’s competitors, you’ll notice they are positioned as a marketplace. Their selling point is that they are connecting a client to a clinician. At Cerebral, we introduced a program called the Cerebral Way that’s designed to assist our clinicians to help guide each of our clients with their care. You’ll come in, have an intake session, get to know your therapist, decide if the two of you want to work together, and set goals for what you want to get out of therapy.
From the next session on, you’ll start to touch base on those goals. Your therapist helps hold you accountable, and, after 90 days, you have an evaluation. Our therapists are trained in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), but they follow our Cerebral Way so all clients know exactly what they’re getting when they come in.
This addresses an important pain point we’ve heard — “If I come into therapy, how long will I have to be in it?” One of my employees even equated it to going to their chiropractor. She said, “I go to the chiropractor and he cracks my back each time. I keep returning for another appointment, but I don’t know when I will be done. How many more sessions am I going to have until I feel better?”
As we heard this feedback, we made it a priority to set folks’ expectations and give them the context to help them understand what they’re doing. All of our clinicians have master’s degrees and have been trained in the Cerebral Way. That is a differentiator.
The new package was designed to increase retention. To determine how we wanted to position our offering, we conducted some product concept testing. We tested a few ideas from an all-access mental health pass, to a punch card, to a starter package.
Our starter package ended up winning because people knew it takes time to find the right care team and build a strong connection with their clinicians. Strong relationships mean folks are more likely to stay with Cerebral longer. We also learned from people who have been on the mental health journey for a while. They know and express that there is not a quick and easy fix to feeling better. It takes time, and these starter packages were a great way to get folks to commit, stay accountable, and ultimately achieve their mental health goals.
Anytime you’re adding something completely new in your offering, you want to make sure that you’ve done the proper research. You want to understand what gaps your current offering has before spending time building a new one. What problem are you solving?
We looked at our cancellation data to see if there were any insights into why clients were leaving. We looked at folks with the highest retention rates to understand what qualities they exhibit and what actions they have taken on the site. We thought that perhaps we could get others to do the same.
Once you dig deep, you can set goals and objectives for what you want your new offering to achieve. From there, you can start to collect insights. I like doing quantitative work before qualitative when I’m thinking about a new offering because there are usually so many ideas. I can use quantitative data to narrow our thinking a bit, and then the team can take the five best ideas and start fleshing them out in some qualitative product concept testing. The qualitative work provides us with an opportunity to understand the attitudes and behaviors of our clients, where our ideas can meet their needs, and where they won’t.
Whenever you’re working in a startup, everybody wants everything yesterday, and rightfully so, because you’re burning money. At Cerebral, we try to have a dedicated innovation team because it’s incredibly hard to build something from scratch while also iterating on your current product offering.
We want to give our senior PMs an opportunity to launch something zero-to-one if they are interested in doing so. We rotate our key players in and out. Some examples of this are when we launched our new innovative program called Cerebral Way, our couples therapy offering, and our newest initiative of re-entering the insurance sector.
In the core innovation team, we have representation from key departments like design and research, engineering, and clinical. These are the folks who know what’s possible and how a potential rollout can happen. The team usually starts as a small group and expands as an idea becomes more real.
In healthcare, the TAM is just so big. One out of five adults are struggling with mental health. This is a huge market and it would be very hard to serve all of these people at once. When we approached the market, we knew we needed to think about what our skill sets were as a company, what we were really good at, and who we wanted to target. Then, we started to narrow it down.
Specifically, we did a lot of segmentation work about a year ago. One of the groups we ended up targeting is what we call Family First. These are busy parents, folks who tend to live in the suburbs, have families, have jobs, and are stressed out. Couples therapy felt like a really good thing to test to see if people within this population were in need of building a better relationship with their partner.
Product managers are in the worst position to price an offering because we know all of the product’s flaws. If you’re in charge of pricing the product, you need to compartmentalize all of these issues. It’s common for folks to price their products too low, so definitely work with your finance team to understand what it costs to deliver your service and the margins investors find attractive. From there, you can do a pricing survey to determine if customers are willing to pay for your product at the price that works best for the business.
Example survey questions include, “What price would be so low that you’d assume the quality must not be good?” and, “What price would be so expensive that even if you found the value in it, you wouldn’t be able to afford it?”
The Goldilocks question is, “What would you be willing to pay for? What feels just right?” You take all of this back and compare it to the pricing target from the finance team, and hopefully, you’re right there. If not, you may have to rethink how you’re talking about your product or you may need to add more value to the product so that people are willing to pay the price the business needs them to pay.
Pricing is actually one of the easiest things that you can change within the experience, especially if you’re a digital product. You should be testing prices at least quarterly. If you can increase your price just even a little bit or get folks into an annual subscription plan, you can do a lot for the company’s bottom line.
Having a pulse on pricing and testing new ideas is a good culture to introduce. We have a team on our growth pillar that is focused on pricing and packaging. You want to be careful because you don’t want to be known for discounting too often or folks will just wait to purchase when there is a sale. It’s better to find a healthy price that is good for the business, and works for the customers you are looking to target.
There isn’t a player in the telehealth space today that has the majority of the market share or the brand recognition. In fact, there isn’t a telehealth company that has over 20 percent brand recognition. When I worked at Weight Watchers, on the other hand, it had 90 percent brand recognition. Everybody knew what Weight Watchers did.
With less brand awareness, there are a lot of opportunities, but that also means there is a lot more work to do. We need to educate people on what mental health telehealth is, how it can help them, how we can make their lives better, and why Cerebral is their best bet. Some conversations that we’ve been having internally are around how our target audience thinks about their mental health. What else are they doing to take care of themselves?? Is it yoga or running? Maybe it would make sense for Cerebral to sponsor a marathon. Those are the kinds of conversations we’re having because we need to continue to build category recognition and brand recognition.
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