Spotlight: Lindsey Pakula, director of product communications

Working closely with the technology team to build and improve the features available within Sharecare’s comprehensive care platform, the product team works with everyone from marketing to customer support, to implementation. They strategize with stakeholders – such as our customers, partners, and sales, account management, and marketing teams, among others – along each point of product creation and delivery on how to use our products and offerings to maximize value across different use cases and advise best practices for building and promoting rewards programs that are capable of meeting clients’ goals for their workforces. 

Our Employee Spotlight this month is a member of the product team who works with teams across Sharecare and beyond to determine how our services can and should be tailored to client requests for specific problems – and helps communicate and demonstrate the value held within the many different features of our flagship digital health platform. 

Meet Lindsey Pakula, a director of product communications who works from our headquarters in Atlanta. Residing just a few miles east of downtown in East Atlanta Village, Linsdey met her husband, Brandon, in a local bar called the Graveyard – and the rest is history. They’ve been together since 2010, and have two sons, ages two and five. A boomerang employee who returned to Sharecare in 2020, Lindsey is a member of the product team that we’re excited to introduce today. 

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Tell us about your role, Linsdey. 

As the director of product communications, I work under Toni Pashley, executive vice president of product, and my role is focused on helping both internal and external stakeholders understand how our products and features work and how to strategically leverage them to solve client needs. My role is a blend of product strategy, product marketing, and ultimately just helping everyone understand how everything works together.  

My day-to-day is varied. I write the monthly product release notes that are delivered companywide when we add new features, 11 times a year. I also maintain the product documentation library, an internal resource for employees to understand all the Sharecare products and features we have across our various lines of business and how the offerings work, right down to the granular details. I also work closely with the sales and RFP teams to help position Sharecare, our products, and services to truly meet client needs. On a given day I may be helping answer tough RFP questions, sitting in large sales meetings and finalist presentations to talk about our offerings and conduct product demos, or be leading internal product training. 

Can you share your journey to Sharecare? 

I went to the University of Georgia, so I’ve lived in Atlanta since I finished school. I originally started out working at a small marketing agency that specialized in healthcare marketing. And I’m actually a Boomerang employee! Sharecare recruited me in 2015 back when we had only a few hundred employees, to help sort through what eventually developed into account management. I was with the company through our acquisition of Healthways, and I worked in account management when we launched some of our very first enterprise clients and started selling our services to employers and health plans more than half a decade ago. 

I left for a couple of years to work for a diabetes startup in an account management role but returned in 2020 to join Sharecare’s strategic partnerships team. Back then, it was the team that managed our digital therapeutic partners and programs. In that role, I managed those relationships and helped the behavioral health team build the new iteration of Eat Right Now, our weight management and diabetes prevention program. Then about two years ago, I joined the product team and became a liaison to nearly everyone else in the company. 

You came back to Sharecare a second time, what do you love about your job and the company? 

My current role is fun because it allows me to use all the skills that I’ve built over the years of my career. Even though it was nice to learn some new skills in a different environment, when I had the opportunity to come back, Sharecare had grown a lot in the time that I was away, so I was excited to reinsert myself and hit the ground running, armed with all the historical knowledge I previously had. 

I love being able to help our clients and their members get the most out of Sharecare. I enjoy helping them discover new things that they didn’t even know that we could do. I’ve been in a lot of different roles within our company and have witnessed the incredible growth, and now the maturity of our products. We’ve come such a long way with our capabilities, and it’s fun and fulfilling for me. It’s also given me a unique perspective on our company history, about what we’ve built, and why. 

What do you love most about the Sharecare app? 

The digital advocacy and benefits navigation features have been such a game changer for me, as someone who manages not only my own health, but the health of my entire family. In fact, I always tell our clients that my kids were on my husband’s health plan because it was easier for us to split it up that way – but I wanted to move them to our plan because it’s nice for me to get the claims and the explanation of benefits together under one organized place. The utility and convenience of having the medical, dental, and vision information is so helpful. 

And then of course, if you need additional help managing your health, our advocates are incredibly useful. I had my advocate schedule appointments with my primary care provider because I can never find the time to call during business hours. They called my doctor and got it all set up on my behalf and I just got an email confirmation. It was amazing. 

Can you share a little more about your family? Where’s home? 

I’m based in Atlanta. I had an internship here but never planned to stay long-term because I grew up in Nashville and just always assumed I would go back. Then I met my husband, Brandon, in a bar called the Graveyard and the rest is history. We’ve been together since 2010, so it’s been 14 years and we’ve been married almost 10 years now. 

We live just a few miles east of downtown, in East Atlanta Village. The neighborhood is a little enclave built in the 1920s and 30s, so there are cute little Craftsman bungalows, and it has a little strip of restaurants and bars. There’s a little club where we would go to see live music and get drinks in our 20s. Now we have kids, and mostly just go to the park. Our neighborhood has sort of grown up with us, which is fun. 

How do you keep your RealAge down? 

I have two boys, ages five and two, and I feel like they keep me young. They’re at the age where we’re getting into the world of kids’ sports. We’re always trying different activities, but in general, we spend a lot of time at Atlanta Parks checking out the playgrounds. We play soccer in the backyard and enjoy riding bikes, taking walks, and trying to foster a healthy love of fun and active things to keep our brains and bodies healthy. 

I don’t have as much time to get the physical activity as I used to, but I try to out for a walk or go to a yoga class at least a few times a week, and it’s honestly so important for not only my physical and mental health, but even really, those things help my social well-being and purpose.