In July 2016 I was still a Marketer, but that was about to change. At Addapp, the CEO decided to pivot and test out different MVP’s to find a more sustainable business. I volunteered to take up the Product Management and Coordination of an MVP.  Together with a team of 5 people we focussed on building out Lucid, an automatic stress detection platform for managers.

Goal: build an MVP used by 50 companies in 2 months

With my small team consisting of 2 engineers, 1 designer and 1 data scientist, we were challenged to build in MVP adopted by at least 50 companies in 2 months time. When we accepted the challenge, we only had an idea.

Burn-out & Corporate Stress is a Billion Dollar Problem

In the US there is very little support for employees suffering from stress & burn-out even though it’s a $300 billon problem (US) and a $1 trillion problem globally.  A lot of reasons why employees burn-out are related to the workplace and can be prevented.

Enter Lucid, automatic stress detection platform

What if we empowered busy managers with information on their employees and team so they can pro-actively solve issues before they lead to burn-out, stress and eventually employee turn-over?

Our word choice and tone of voice reflects an emotional state, what if we visualized and externalized that state with existing information?

1. Slack integration & Slackbot to Measure Stress

Lucid would only be a valuable tool if we automated as much as possible and integrated in the current routines of employees and managers. That’s why we decided to integrate with Slack and use message data as well as build a Slackbot to measure self-reported stress levels as well as peer stress.

 

2. NLP Analysis

For this MVP we integrated with IBM Watson’s NLP services, aggregated all Slack-messages per employee and analyzed them.

3. Team Insights & charts

Managers are short on time, so instead of sifting through charts and raw employee and team data, we created actionable team and employee insights.

We also offered charts on the positivity of the team compared to the average, the overall emotions and stress levels.

4. Individual Employee Insights & charts

Besides the health of the team, we also served managers with information and stats of each individual employee that could be used to go into 1:1s.

5. Alerts

Customizable alerts allowed managers to get important information directly in their mailbox.

Key Results

• We built out the back-end infrastructure, an admin to create insights and a web front-end for managers
• Lucid was adopted by 54 companies in 4 weeks
• We released 4 version in 4 weeks with a cross-functional team of 5 people
• Lucid was used by:

 

Even though there was a clear market interest, Lucid was not pursued and shutdown in September 2016.