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Simpplr:
From 'Modern Intranet' to 'Employee Experience'

Estimated read time:         3.5 minutes

12%

ARR

CSAT

User Growth, YoY

  7

New Products

4x

70%

I joined Simpplr to lead the product organization and help expand the platform beyond its intranet roots. The company had around 130 people at the time, split between India (product and engineering) and North America/UK (go-to-market and operations), with ARR in the low double digits. 

 

When I joined, it was evident that the company had grown quickly, but the product organization hadn't kept pace; no operating model, no accountability structure, and no shared language between product and engineering. I had to restructure the product and engineering organization, establishing a cross-functional pod ownership, and shifting the culture from feature delivery to outcome ownership.

Our broader mission as a company was to transform the work experience for billions of employees around the world, which meant looking beyond traditional internal comms (IC) and thinking more holistically about the realities of daily work.

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If our initial focus was improving how companies communicate with employees through announcements, news, and a central place to find information, it quickly became clear that communication alone wasn’t enough to meaningfully impact the employee experience. HR and IT teams had their own challenges around belonging, recognition, onboarding, productivity, and day-to-day workflows that weren’t being addressed. Supporting those needs became just as important as strengthening internal comms.

HR businesswoman having job interview wi

Addressing these challenges required broadening the platform’s scope. The focus moved from being a communication destination to becoming a system that supports the full employee lifecycle. That meant building capabilities that help employees feel connected, recognized, and productive, while giving HR and IT teams tools to simplify workflows, reduce manual friction, and improve organizational efficiency. This shift became the foundation for the next stage of the platform’s growth.

IC

ENGAGE

IT

ENABLE

HR

SERVE

During this period, we built and launched seven new products from 0 → 1, expanding the platform to serve both knowledge workers and frontline employees across Web, Mobile, Digital Signage, Email, Messaging, and an AI Assistant. We launched numerous AI capabilities, prioritized real customer challenges, and balanced innovation with technical debt while partnering closely with GTM teams to support adoption. As a result, we saw improvements in customer satisfaction (↑12%), user growth (↑70% YoY), and overall company performance (4× ARR).

Artificial Intelligence with Real Impact​

Some examples of the AI Initiatives I've innovated:​​

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  • Writing Assistant (Gen AI) -  To help internal communicators address critical organizational needs and boost reach, engagement, and action, we launched an AI Writing Assistant: a ChatGPT-style agent purpose-built for enterprise content. It generates and suggests communications based on real-time sentiment, perception data, and survey insights, ensuring messages align with what employees care about most. The assistant writes in the author’s tone and format, recommends delivery methods, and personalizes headers, notifications, and channels so each employee receives content in the format and place they’re most likely to engage.
     

  • Audio Generation - To boost engagement and make content easier to consume, especially for on-the-go or multitasking employees, we introduced AI-powered Audio Generation. It converts written content into playable audio using either the creator’s own voice or approved voices of key leaders like the CEO, adding personalization and a more human, accessible way for employees to stay informed.
     

  • Key Takeaways - To help employees quickly grasp the essence of long videos, such as all-hands meetings or major company events, we introduced Key Takeaways. It automatically generates short, 15-second highlight snippets that capture the most important moments, allowing users to absorb the key messages without watching the full hour-long recording.
     

  • Personalization - To deliver the right information to the right employee at the right time, we introduced deep personalization across the platform. By analyzing each user’s role, projects, needs, relevance signals, and organizational context, the system tailors content, updates, documents, and even people insights to what matters most for them. This ensures a more relevant, engaging, and easily discoverable experience, helping employees stay informed, productive, and successful.
     

  • Employee Listening - A sentiment analysis system that evaluates how employees feel and perceive organizational updates by analyzing both direct engagement (comments, likes) and indirect engagement (Slack/Teams messages, emails, and more). When combined with survey results, it provides a clearer, more accurate understanding of how the organization is reacting to news, announcements, policies, and cultural shifts.
     

  • Next Best Action (NBA) - An AI agent that continuously scans intranet activity to determine the NBA for leadership. By analyzing content reach and engagement, organizational sentiment, survey data, and cultural signals, it surfaces timely recommendations that help leaders keep initiatives on track, address emerging issues, and maintain organizational alignment and momentum.
     

  • Recognition & Acknowledgments - A recognition recommendation system that prompts leaders and employees to acknowledge peers for meaningful achievements and milestones. It identifies rule-based moments, such as anniversaries or birthdays, as well as work-related accomplishments, such as hitting targets or completing major projects, and strengthens culture through timely, relevant recognition.
     

  • AI Assistant - An AI Assistant chatbot that streamlines everyday tasks and processes. Users can initiate, track, and complete actions, such as submitting tickets, requesting time off, creating purchase orders, booking rooms, or scheduling meetings, simply through conversation, making workflows faster and more intuitive.
     

  • Smart Search & Smart Answers - An enterprise search experience that gives users direct answers, not just links, so they don’t have to sift through multiple results. It provides an instant, concise response to their query along with a full list of supporting results for deeper exploration.

During my tenure at Simpplr, the company grew to 600 employees, and the product organization expanded from 7 members (4 PMs, 2 designers, 1 technical writer) to 27 members (15 PMs, 10 designers, 2 technical writers), reflecting the scale and breadth of our new product direction.

2025

2024

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