This week we were lucky enough to grab some time with SEDNA’s amazing VP of Product, Leigh Steed-Middleton. When pitching SEDNA as the only email solution needed, no one knows the ins and outs better than the product marketing team, and we were keen to get their unique insight on SEDNA. To that end, Leigh was kind enough to sit down with us and explain what makes SEDNA so special in a world saturated with smart email platforms.
Could you give a brief overview of your role at SEDNA?
I am responsible for defining the vision of the Product. My role entails leading the product team toward achieving strategic initiatives which translate into a product roadmap. The product team includes product management, strategy, research, and design.
What is it about SEDNA as an email smart email platform that sets it apart from other solutions on the market?
Most of our customers value speed as one of the most important features of SEDNA. For me, it’s the clarity and context it delivers around communication, the ability to get up to speed in any conversation and then monitor it. More importantly, SEDNA is designed to bring you into a conversation at the right time to ensure each person brings the most value when needed, rather than generating noise the way traditional email threads tend to do.
Why do you think email is such a challenge for complex businesses, and what makes it a competitive advantage?
Learning to use email is like learning to count—if you were born any time after the 1980’s you will almost certainly have had an email address for most of your life. Google even created a wonderful TV ad about a parent who set up a Gmail account for their child and used it to create an archive of memories from their childhood for when they grew up—it inspired me to do the same. This is the underlying challenge in a nutshell. Something as ubiquitous as email—which was built for simple one-to-one or one-to-few communications—has now been manipulated into a tool for complex transactions in an entirely alien context.
But it is just this that provides such a huge opportunity. Everyone knows how to use email, and almost everyone has an email address. It’s reliable, straightforward, and easy to use. Leaning into this and supercharging it, as opposed to trying to unbundle it, is a huge competitive advantage for SEDNA, one we should never shy away from.
Let’s fix the core and then amplify it.
Could you tell us about SEDNA’s integrations and why they’re such a powerful element of SEDNA’s appeal?
Text is a transport layer for all kinds of data and information —emails carry a huge amount of untapped value for businesses. But this is only one source of data—businesses rely on many more.
The way we think about integrations at SEDNA is that the more services we can connect to that are business-critical to our customers, the more opportunities we have to enrich the data that exists in the emails inside of SEDNA. This allows us to transform that information into insights that become actionable, moving data from one system to the next, kicking off powerful workflows and processes that improve the efficiency of our customers and improve their ability to be more effective in business.
This all translates into a unit of value everyone is interested in—saved time. The more time we save for those users, the more value they can create for their employers.
As the VP of Product, what are you most proud of about SEDNA?
The scale of the problem we are solving. I have experienced problems with email in every job I’ve ever had, and no one has ever attempted to solve it. Slack and other group chat tools compounded the issue. Winning at the email problem once and for all would be a huge achievement.
What SEDNA features are the ones you find most compelling?
It’s hard to pick but probably the Activity Panel, the Tagging features, and My Messages.