Why Headspace is a Leader in Mindfulness

Headspace is experiencing heady times as recent news events attest. And businesses can learn a lot from the company’s success.

Headspace, the successful meditation app, is making waves. To commemorate World Mental Health Day, Headspace and Snap announced new Headspace Minis, which give Snapchat users quick bursts of meditation energy. And recently popular author Herbert Liu profiled the company favorably, stating that Headspace is winning the “app medication war.”

Liu noted that Headspace is has been expanding its effort to provide wellness benefits for employers, and to gain distribution through the traditional health care system. He discussed how Headspace wields an advantage by forming relationships with businesses such as Microsoft, which recently announced it is adding Headspace to its Teams product. In addition, unlike other mindfulness apps, Headspace provides credible research that its program is effective.

In 2020, being mindful is not a nice to do but a must-do for businesses at a time when employees are enduring unprecedented levels of stress. At the same time, mindfulness goes beyond managing stress – it’s also essential to designing products and services, period. As a result, businesses are taking a closer look at incorporating meditation apps such as Headspace into their productivity tool kits.

Headspace is more than a symbol of the popularity of Mindfulness apps. The company is doing many things right. For instance, Headspace is a lovable product. As we discussed on our blog in 2019, Headspace is lovable because it creates a magic moment, where the person’s energy changes while using the product. A change in energy means you’ve identified an experience that people really care about.

Headspace can also teach businesses about creating successful ecosystems. Businesses innovate today by creating ecosystems that share experiences, technology, data, and operational capabilities. Apple, for instance, has seized leadership in the wellness space by working with an ecosystem of healthcare providers and technology firms to develop the Apple Watch. Headspace is doing just that with its mindfulness app. The company’s relationships with insurance companies and employers are essential to its uptake and improvement. A bigger ecosystem gives Headspace a bigger pool of users to provide ongoing feedback to improve the app.

Apply product development techniques such as design thinking and lean innovation to create the necessary ecosystem to build a lovable product. At Moonshot, we apply a methodology known as FUEL to help companies test product development ideas while mitigating the risk and cost of doing so. (More about that in this blog post.)

Apply tools such as the lovability framework to understand how to build and measure a lovable product (we discuss Headspace to bring to life the concepts of the lovability framework.)

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