How Headspace Expanded from Meditation App to Wellness Platform

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May 8, 2025

Cori Shearer, Lead Product Manager at Headspace, shares her journey from a Senior PM at Quizlet to her role in enhancing mental wellness. She discusses Headspace's transformation from a meditation app to a comprehensive wellness platform after acquiring Ginger.io. Cori explores the integration of AI through the feature Ebb for personalized mental health support. She emphasizes adapting to consumer needs and the ongoing evolution of mindfulness practices, highlighting the importance of user feedback in product development.

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ANECDOTE

Headspace's Unique Origin Story

Headspace was founded by Andy Puddicombe, who became a monk and wanted to share meditation widely.
It started as the first meditation app focusing on mindfulness to make the world happier.

INSIGHT

Expanding Mental Health Care

Meditation is just one way to improve mental health; human-delivered care is also essential.
Headspace's merger with Ginger enabled expansion beyond meditation into coaching, therapy, and psychiatry.

ANECDOTE

Joining Headspace Amid Pandemic

Cori joined Headspace in 2021 during the pandemic while experiencing her own mental health crisis.
Using Headspace helped her reconnect to mindfulness and inspired her to support others through the platform.

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Cori Shearer is currently a Lead Product Manager at Headspace, where she has spent the last four years leading teams focused on growth as well as engagement with their full suite of human-delivered care offerings like coaching, clinical, and AI-based services. Prior to Headspace, Cori worked at Quizlet as a Senior PM focused on acquisition, activation, and international growth. She is also an entrepreneur, startup advisor, and instructor for Product School.

Key Takeaways:

Headspace was founded in 2010 by Andy Puddicombe as the first meditation app in the app store after Andy returned from being a monk and wanted to share everything that he had learned about meditation and mindfulness with the world.
After Headspace acquired Ginger.io in 2021, it evolved from a single product focused on meditation into a platform of health and wellness services that now includes human-delivered care in the form of coaching, therapy, and psychiatry.
In parallel, Headspace has also expanded from a pureplay consumer app to a B2B solution with Headspace for Work, which offers health and wellness services to companies and their employees.
As Headspace has evolved on both of these two dimensions, it has needed to stretch its brand in new and different ways while also adapting its product to be able to serve a range of customers with different mental health needs. This has meant slowing down at times to make sure they got things right for their customers, and building a new set of outcome metrics to measure efficacy.
In late 2024, Headspace launched its AI companion called Ebb, which helps users navigate through Headspace’s various products and services to get what they need to improve their mental health and ultimately live happier lives.

Cori Shearer:

Website: https://www.corishearer.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corishearer/
X: https://x.com/alacodeblog
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alacodeblog/

Phil's Carter:

Website: https://www.philgcarter.com
Substack: https://philgcarter.substack.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarter
X: https://x.com/philgcarter

Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io