In this episode, host Michael Bernzweig welcomes Kuber Jain from Headspace to discuss the integration of automation in business processes. They explore how to design systems that support both customers and internal teams, focusing on personalization at scale and balancing automation with human connection. Kuber shares insights from his experience at Headspace and other leading companies, emphasizing the importance of data-driven decision-making and product-led growth strategies.
In this episode, host Michael Bernzweig welcomes Kuber Jain from Headspace to discuss the integration of automation in business processes. They explore how to design systems that support both customers and internal teams, focusing on personalization at scale and balancing automation with human connection. Kuber shares insights from his experience at Headspace and other leading companies, emphasizing the importance of data-driven decision-making and product-led growth strategies.
Takeaways
Sound bites
Chapters
Michael Bernzweig (00:05.898)
Okay, I hope everyone enjoyed that last session and this next session is very special one. We actually have a Kuber Jane. He's actually going to be touching a lot of different topics in BDB that are very important in driving growth and AI and all of the technologies that it touches. So,
Kuber actually applies advanced SQL development and machine learning expertise from prior roles at Asana, DocuSign, and Optimizely to his current position at meditation and mindfulness app Headspace. His statistical modeling skills enabled sales opportunities at DocuSign and other organizations and transformative growth across leading SaaS platforms. So with that, Kuber.
Welcome to the event and I'm gonna hand the mic right over to you.
Kuber Jain (01:07.1)
Thank you, Michael, for having me on the podcast. And I'm super excited to be chatting about some of my learnings in the growth world, working at different companies, and how we can leverage that as we think about AI and future developments.
So a quick intro though. So I currently work as a senior data scientist and more focused on driving engagement and retention efforts. I have a decade worth of experience working at companies like Asana, DocuSign and Optimizedly. just very excited about the space, like data analytics, growth, PLG strategies, and just very passionate about solving complex business problems and implementing and to solve like real world problems.
Kuber Jain (02:01.64)
Cool. So let's first understand what is product-led growth, right? So you might have heard of different growth strategy that exist in today's landscape, like product-led growth, sales-led growth, and there's a combination of both of those two as well that actually varies from company to company.
But my core experience have been mostly focused on product growth and hence I just focused on this. So this is basically growing your business or growing your user base based on how your user of your product engages with your product, right? So what happens with PLG is user interact with your product.
And as the user get more accustomed to or engaged to with your product, that user drive more users so that more users can come to your platform. So it's basically like a virality loop that gets triggered the moment your core or core power users just start engaging with your product. Right. So just basically more about your product being the driver of your customer acquisition, retention and expansion. Right.
And when we think about like PLG, the first thing is just like fictionalized experience. making sure that users who come into your product have very seamless onboarding experience. It could be through your freemium models or starting a trial or just like a paid subscription. It depends again from company to company, but making sure that when they get into your product, the experience is seamless and then
they're able to get and understand like what they are going to achieve with their product. Right. And we have seen this strategy work in some of most known familiar brands like Slack, Zoom, HubSpot, who have achieved like double digit growths within a very certain time frame just because of this PLG motion strategy.
Kuber Jain (04:17.938)
So now let's go deeper into that and understand like, why does it matter for executives and founders, right? So like B2B buyers now actually demand like more seamless experience. So it could be just be like having like an instant access or trying to get like value proposition from your product, right? And making sure that there's like a minimal friction when user try to have their first experience with your product, right?
This is the first part, right? The second part is just how do you make sure that the group that you're trying to achieve is basically cost effective, right? So that entails basically using your PLG as your motion and then which actually reduces your acquisition cost, right? If you remember, I started my talk by saying that, okay, you have a set of power users to your product and those users actually bring in more users driving like a virality group, right?
because those users are your satisfied users. And that's how those users basically turn or unlock your growth engine. And the next comes like what signals you can get from your user to be able to enable them with more smarter and targeted motion or strategies to be able to convert them so that they actually pay for your product, right? So all in all, it's a combination of like
making sure you drive seamless experience and also making sure that user, however they're using your product, being able to reach to that core value moment or like aha moment so that they unlock the first value of the product.
Kuber Jain (06:09.384)
And now let's talk about how we can layer AI into this motion, which could be like a game changer. First, as I mentioned, right, like AI when embedded into this PLG motion could actually automate your onboarding. It could personalize user journeys and actually can accelerate your activation through intelligent guidance, right? And once that is taken care of, the next is more about like how a user can be...
experienced with more like personalized recommendations within the product sort, it could just be like, okay, if a user is using one specific feature of your product, maybe guiding that user to notify them with like new features or making sure that user understand like how to better use that feature, right? So it's more about like generating your value prop from your features. And the third is like real time intelligence. So once you start gathering the user data on how they engage with that product,
I think that basically gives you opportunity to identify who your high-intent users are and to be able to capitalize on expansion opportunities.
Kuber Jain (07:21.608)
So how AI powered strategy would look for B2B SaaS is again, starting with having like an in-app tool. So if I'm a new user, just making sure that I understand how to navigate within the app, right? So it could just be like making sure that they are aware of how to navigate within the product. It could just be through learning curves or accelerating their competency, right? And this actually like...
This AI powered strategy also basically trigger your analytics where you can help personalize user with more of a targeted strategies and offer them like optimal moments to be able to showcase how frequently they're engaging with the product or how they are actually driving the value from the product, right? So in case of like head space, we can just say like, okay, if a user is coming on our app daily, we can...
enable users or motivate users to come back again by showing them like, OK, you have done one meditation today, so we just keep a counter or like a streak where the moment the user see a streak, he's more motivated to come back every single day. So that way, the increasing number would be actually motivating for users to come back. The last part is like how I can be used to flag risk to flag users who are at risk.
So those are primarily with the user who are inactive or not interacted with your app. So using AI, we can actually enable some of the proactive signals so that we can take a preventive measure instead of, or like a proactive measure to prevent that user from getting churned.
Kuber Jain (09:07.792)
Next is like how do you align team and data for this AI and PLG success? The first part is team and collaboration. So product marketing, sales, everyone should work in coordination for PLG to be a successful because it's not something that one team can own this and drive this PLG motion as is in silos. It's like a collaborative effort. Next comes data, right?
making sure you have right tools set up so that you can track user data who engages with your product and use that data to be able to generate insights on user behaviors, their engaging patterns, and leveraging that to maybe upsell or cross them. And the last part is sales evaluation, right? So once you understand your user base or how much they're engaging with your product, you can give this information to your sales team to be able to do an outreach.
to those users who are power users and showcasing them with what else they could achieve with your product.
Kuber Jain (10:15.408)
Next is how to overcome challenges and preparing for scale. So the first one is like infrastructure investment. I think all AI deployment currently needs an infrastructure investment, whether it's setting about real time capabilities, setting up your cloud infrastructure, or maybe having a right events tracking in place, right? All this comes with an investment, right? So you need to make sure that you're able to think about an infrastructure where you can...
understand like a user journey from end to end to be able to support users in their engagement with the product. Next one is like balancing automation. So think about how you can still maintain human touch while actually leveraging AI for efficiency, right? So I said this in my previous slide, like once you start collecting data on users who engage with your product, you can just show those insights to your sales team and leverage that to be able to.
drive more human touch and drive that conversation in terms of understanding what user actually needs going forward as well. And then it's all about like a continuous iteration. So we need to just continuously think about how can we refine our product and AI models based on the feedback that we get over the data or the insight that we see from data, right? Because one aspect of this is also collecting feedback from users either through an NPS or a churn survey.
to be able to have a qualitative angle to your data insights, to be able to share what your users have to say about your product, whether it's a missing feature or whether they're very happy using the existing state of the product or how they can get value out of the product.
Kuber Jain (12:08.552)
So we all know future is the AI and it's essential that we layer AI on top of this PLG motion as it would amplify your growth motion. Let it be like product led, sales led or referral led. It could be anything. But the important thing is it's just like, how do you unlock that growth, right? And it all starts with how your product drives or attract the core users, right? So mastering
those mastering the strategy around unlocking growth will actually lead to like higher retention and making sure that your company have a strong competitive mode.
Kuber Jain (12:57.064)
So key takeaway from this presentation, use your product as your engine, make sure that your product drives the ultimate growth engine with hyper personalization and automation, right? Right from the beginning when the user first come into your product and then making sure that your teams are aligned across data, insights and how are you able to use that to be able to accelerate expansion opportunities. And the last one is...
focusing on innovations. So trying to innovate continuously as the user need evolve, business changes, macroeconomic situation changes, the expectation changes. So it's all about like continuously iterating to be able to drive more outcomes with your product and to be able to show your actual core value of your product where user feels happy and continuously engage with you.
Kuber Jain (13:56.968)
So that's about it and thank you.
Michael Bernzweig (14:04.289)
That was a fantastic presentation and I can absolutely tell you that a lot of the executives here at the summit are global enterprise brands and SaaS leaders and absolutely product-led growth is something that touches on a whole range of brands from
consulting to SAS to even e-comm. So there's a lot of different areas that are impacted. Coming up right after this session for anybody that is listening and has some questions, we'll have the Q &A session coming right up. So get your questions together and pop them into the Q &A and we'll be joined by Kuber and a few other panelists.
on that Q and A panel where you can ask your questions live.