BetterUp

Building a people experience platform for BetterUp

About
the Client

The BetterUp experience brings together world-class coaching, AI technology, and behavioral science experts to drive productivity, engagement, and retention at scale. BetterUp believes that well-being and peak performance go hand-in-hand, which is why they pioneered the Whole Person ModelTM, a holistic way to build inspiring leaders and thriving teams. Their model allows you to strengthen mental fitness and, in return, improve individual resilience, adaptability, and effectiveness.

The results? The ability to unleash your personal and professional potential to live a more meaningful life filled with clarity, purpose, and passion.

“This milestone represents 2 million moments where a member has signed up — to grow, be challenged, and find deeper connection. It’s 2 million moments where a BetterUp Coach provided a different perspective, an insight, a reflection.”

BetterUp Team

The challenge

  • Scaling the Business with a Stable Foundation: BetterUp prioritized redesigning and rebuilding two existing platforms – an Analytics Dashboard and an Assessments Framework – that were critical to the success of their business and product. Both platforms required a quick time to value as they struggled to handle a high volume of users. At the same time, many accounts faced performance and latency issues, making it increasingly difficult to scale the business and onboard larger clients.
  • Incorporate BetterUp’s Partners & Systems: BetterUp works with over 2,000 organizations and serves 500K employees, making performance, privacy, and security vital. Over a short period, they signed several enterprise contracts and, in return, needed experienced engineers to augment their team and address these new clients' complex and specialized needs.
  • Hiring the right talent: Like most startups, BetterUp understood that hiring and onboarding the right people for the job can take upwards of 6 months. Instead of exploring this long, drawn-out process, they enlisted the help of Rootstrap, who had talent readily available to hit the ground running. With over 100 BetterUp developers split into small groups, Rootstrap’s backend engineers seamlessly integrated and collaborated with BetterUp’s teams and systems, making quick progress on the application.
  • Measure Twice, Cut Once: On the QA side, the team performed functional tests, generated test cases, and utilized test case management tools for traceability of work and to capture metrics that reflect the quality of the released features.

What we did

  • Own Development Cycle & Planning Process: BetterUp hired senior Rootstrap engineers who managed the sprints, led daily stand-up calls, and effectively took ownership of the two platforms. They conducted 2-3 day working sessions on the product enhancements while fixing performance issues to increase user engagement. These new features allowed customers to measure progress, view business outcomes such as employee retention, and manage users.
  • Maintaining and Expanding Assessments: The Whole PersonTM Model is a scientific-based system that helps BetterUp and its coaches create the appropriate protocols for their users. A key component of this framework is their Assessments, a tool designed to track engagement and performance. To make the development of these Assessments self-service and accessible to the broader team, Rootstrap strategized on how to rebuild the entire code/database to make their output more scaleable. As a result, team leads could generate new assessments on their own instead of depending on the engineering department.
  • ‍Demonstrating ROI to Customers: The Analytics Dashboard is another module Rootstrap took ownership of. Directly linked to the Assessments, Rootstrap reconfigured the Dashboard to demonstrate value to BetterUp’s customer base and to showcase the stickiness of the platform. In return, BetterUp used the Dashboard to maintain and renew business. Through the portal, partner companies could view usage metrics and gauge employee performance, which impacted reduced employee attrition rates.
  • ‍Expanding Reach: As BetterUp looked to scale, they faced a host of challenges typical in the startup space. Initially based in the US, they were looking to expand in the EU, which presented massive blockers for the team. Rootstrap successfully helped BetterUp migrate its databases from US-based servers to the EU and comply with GDPR and other standard EU regulations.

The Result

  • Large Increase in Users: BetterUp saw a significant increase in engagement on both platforms. The original Analytics Dashboard could only handle 5k users per account; the new platform can now manage accounts with over 100k users.
  • Millions of Member Sessions: After Rootstrap’s work, BetterUp reached a milestone of two million member sessions on its platform, successfully increasing user engagement and putting the startup in a solid position to continue to scale.
  • Working More Efficiently: As part of their commitment to demonstrating ROI to their customers, BetterUp was able to calculate an overall 52% reduction in employee burnout and 66% increase in productivity.
  • Onboarding Enterprise Clients: Rootstrap was central in onboarding large enterprise clients, including US Government Agencies, Chevron, Google, and NASA.

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