How GoodRx Transformed its Digital Employee Experience
GoodRx is the leading platform for medication savings in the U.S., used by over 30 million consumers and 1 million healthcare professionals annually. The company helps consumers save time and money when filling prescriptions so they can get the care they deserve.
We recently met up with Stephanie Stone, Employee Communications & Engagement Manager, to learn how she and her team deliver a digital employee experience that supports this monumental effort and the talented workforce behind it.
While there are a lot of things that make GoodRx a great place to work, a few things stood out for Stone:
“Working with employees from a wide range of experiences is one of the most rewarding parts of my role,” she said. “There’s such a variety of backgrounds—from peoples’ functional roles, to what stage they’re at in their career.
Our employees are accustomed to communicating through video calls and Slack messages. It’s a really different environment compared to the era when employee experiences were limited to the office. During that time, our internal communications relied more on physical notifications like flyers and in-person events. Even the way we provided employees with swag involved a personal touch vs now we have to ship things. It’s a constant learning journey, understanding all of my audiences, and how to speak to and engage them effectively.”
Having a career in an environment with so much to learn is already a major motivator, but as Stone shared, supporting a meaningful and impactful mission makes it personal.
“I appreciate and admire GoodRx’s mission. We’re filling a gap that has existed for a long time in consumers’ access to prescription drugs and equity within healthcare. I love that GoodRx is willing to step in and say, ‘we’re here to help.’”
With a crucial mission and a large team dedicated to supporting it, organizational knowledge built up quickly; however, there wasn’t always a consistently reliable place to store or share it.
“GoodRx did not have an intranet prior to Haystack. There was a curated set of file sharing platforms, and an Okta single sign-on homepage where you could navigate to the tools you used most frequently. We communicated and engaged with employees through disparate platforms, Slack, and email.
There were nested communications channels across various teams, but no home base where an important message for employees could stick for a week.”
While the team was able to communicate through these methods, Stone identified a clear opportunity to strengthen this foundation and deliver a unified experience for employee comms. Slack and email can be great ways to grab attention, but as Stone and many other communicators can tell you, they often fail to hold that attention for long.
“Slack messages have their purpose, but they’re transitory,” she explained. “You might share something important, then a series of less pertinent messages pop in and suddenly your critical communication is already pushed out of sight.”
With that need in mind, Stone and the GoodRx leadership team were ready to implement a digital home base where employees could easily find the information and resources they needed.
“My biggest remit was to find an intranet solution for GoodRx before the end of the year,” Stone shared.
This new intranet wouldn’t be replacing an old one; it would be the first tool of its kind deployed at GoodRx. That scenario came with some unique opportunities and challenges.
“Pre-intranet, employees had somewhat scattered, but established pathways for communicating and sharing knowledge. Those behaviors were really important to understand as it related to introducing a new intranet.
For us, the user experience was a core consideration, not a nice-to-have.”
Even though it’s usually imperfect, the status quo can feel cozy. People are naturally resistant to change, which is why 60-70% of change management initiatives fail. So, whatever new tool comes to replace the status quo needs to be significantly better, not just marginally.
Stone’s bar for the new platform was already set high. She knew what a well-functioning intranet looked like and wasn’t interested in settling for anything less.
“I came to GoodRx from a company that had one of the most sophisticated and well-designed intranets I’d ever seen. My vision of what an intranet should look and feel like—how it should engage with employees—was heavily influenced by that.”
"For us, the user experience was a core consideration, not a nice-to-have.”
As she set out to find an intranet provider for GoodRx, Stone was able to use her previous knowledge and expertise to narrow the field quickly, and conduct a comprehensive review of her vendor shortlist.
“This was not my first time procuring an enterprise SaaS tool. My list of competitors was pretty short because I knew exactly what I was looking for,” she shared.
A couple factors that led me toward Haystack right away were the sales experience and the platform itself.”
Stone found the sales experience across many vendors lacked a focus on her needs and requirements as a well-informed potential customer.
“A lot of vendors paired me with inexperienced salespeople who were so focused on pitching their solution, they didn’t infer that I was already knowledgeable about intranets.
I was also wary of vendors that would say ‘we don’t have that, but we’ll work on it.’ I was focused on what each platform could deliver for my team on day one.
Complicated pricing schemes were pretty common. From an accounting standpoint alone, that already felt like a mess that would make most of those platforms a hard sell internally.”
Haystack set itself apart from the other vendors with a collaborative relationship and straightforward pricing structure that Stone and her team could easily justify to stakeholders.
“When evaluating potential intranet platforms, I was focused on creating an experience that felt intuitive, clean, and supportive of employees who already navigate a fast-moving environment. Some options would’ve become overly busy once our various resources were combined, and we wanted to avoid adding complexity. We needed a platform that offered clarity and simplicity from the start.”
At the end of a comprehensive vendor selection process, Stone decided Haystack would be the perfect fit for GoodRx’s new intranet. In July 2025, they launched their new Haystack-powered intranet, dubbed “The Fill.”
"A couple factors that led me toward Haystack right away were the sales experience and the platform itself.”
It’s common for intranet implementations to require a lot of people power and drag out longer than expected. With her previous experience, some forethought, and a flexible platform, Stone was confident in leading the implementation.
“The rollout plan started by deciding how we were going to architect the space within Haystack’s functionality. I had to do that while being mindful of the stakeholders whose information and resources would live in The Fill.
Rather than burying ourselves in resource pages, I landed on a set-up that leaned heavily on Haystack’s groups feature. From the ownership perspective, I knew this would give departmental stakeholders the tools they needed to manage and deliver their resources autonomously.”
Once the architecture and plans were laid, Stone, her stakeholders, and content partners got to work building GoodRx’s first digital home base.
“We aimed for a mid-year launch. The homepage was stacked with editorial and navigation resources so people would log into an inviting space. We started our official launch comms about one month prior. Nothing like this existed at our company before the launch, so people were pretty excited.”
To boost engagement even further, Stone and her team implemented some creative strategies to make activating users fun and rewarding.
“We created custom color-changing mugs that, when hot water was added, would make The Fill logo appear. The first employees to complete their profiles got one. Swag goes a long way in getting people to participate.”
For the initial launch, Stone and her team provided a network of support to help new users, but as it turned out, most users found The Fill intuitive and took to it right away.
“We held voluntary info sessions for employees with Meghan, our Haystack CSM, the first two weeks after launch. We also made ourselves available for internal support, but ended up fielding hardly any questions or support queries, which was a testament to how well Haystack is built and the resources it has.
The adoption rates were staggering; over 80% of our employees were using The Fill shortly after launch. Of all the initiatives I’ve supported in my communications career, this was the most satisfying to roll out.”
"Of all the initiatives I’ve supported in my communications career, this was the most satisfying to roll out.”
With the launch behind them, The Fill was already delivering a meaningful impact for Stone’s cross-departmental colleagues. Crucial information that was once scattered across multiple locations became easy to find.
“Within the HR team alone, we had multiple resource categories spread out across different platforms prior to the launch. It wasn’t uncommon for employees to encounter provisioning issues with tools they should’ve had access to, which led to periodic troubleshooting,” Stone recalled.
Haystack enabled us to make everything accessible in one location. Because provisioning already takes place in Haystack, we can embed resources from all these different places in one spot and trust that employees can get to them.”
Finding information was now faster, easier, and barrier-free for GoodRx, which in itself would have been a major improvement in the digital employee experience. But the benefits were only beginning to show themselves.
“In addition to the intranet, I also oversee internal communications campaigns. Those primarily are used by our HR partners, who need reliable ways to share crucial information on areas like benefits and annual performance review processes.
We’re now able to be more intentional and deliberate in how we deliver resources to employees. It could be an email with a link to a resource page, or a giant tile on the home dashboard during open enrollment. Haystack empowers us with a 360-degree approach to those communications. The ability to weave all our channels together has been a game-changer for employee comms.”
"The ability to weave all our channels together has been a game-changer for employee comms.”
To strengthen the experience further, The Fill also provided employees with an intuitive search function that could find even the most obscure information they might need, instantly.
“The search feature is essential. Anyone who manages or uses a company intranet knows how important the search function is; it can make or break the user experience. I love that it picks up on so many different things and that it’s able to sort information in helpful ways,” Stone shared.
“When searching for anything, be it where to park when you visit our Santa Monica office or how to change enrollment information, you can find it. It doesn’t matter whether you’re new to GoodRx or have been on the team for a decade, The Fill makes it really easy to find information.
The Haystack search functionality, along with our team’s standardized approach to naming resources, has made a huge difference for us.”
"The search feature is essential...I love that it picks up on so many different things and that it’s able to sort information in helpful ways."
Stone and the GoodRx team also found The Fill to be a powerful tool to strengthen their employer brand, bolster engagement for initiatives, and foster its pervasive mission-driven culture.
“Engagement in this virtual home room is a major benefit that I don’t think people realized we were missing until we had it,” Stone said.
“For example, having a home page where we can focus on inspiring activations our social impact team took part in is really valuable. Before, our team might post a recap about the event on Slack, but if you didn’t catch it within that day, it was already out of sight. Now, we can shine a big spotlight where everyone can see and engage with it.”
Finally, The Fill gave Stone and her team a reliable way to measure the effectiveness of the communications and resources they were sharing. They were able to understand which posts and pages resonated with the largest audience, but equally importantly, which critical resources were getting engagement.
“One of the biggest things I’ve learned about internal comms is that you can send out all the editorial content, experience highlights, and updates you want, but at the end of the day, much of your audience is strictly there for the everyday information. If they’re getting that information, then it’s a success.”
One of the most transformative benefits The Fill brought to GoodRx was its ability to strengthen, rather than replace, the tools and processes everyone already knew and loved. Looking back, Stone was able to identify numerous areas where their new system was greater than the sum of its parts.
“There are dozens of cases where integrating Haystack enriched our existing comms practices,” she recalled.
“In the past, our CEO and senior leadership team would host a monthly All Hands meeting. After the meeting, we’d email employees a link to Dropbox where people could access the presentation. If someone wanted to watch or re-watch the presentation, they’d have to search through their email again to find the link or recall where it lived in Dropbox.”
Now, we have a dedicated page for each All Hands that employees can easily find and access. We still generate and send out an email automatically through a Haystack post, but it always links back to the intranet. It removes the burden from the employee by making it easily searchable on The Fill.”
While this in itself was a high-leverage way for The Fill to show its value, Stone and her team also found that connecting existing tools and workflows increased the value of their intranet as well.
“Since we’re a Slack-heavy organization, we’re able to add links to resources on The Fill in Slack now,” Stone said. “I’ll look at the metrics in Analytics, and the ones that are shared via Slack often get an outsized number of views.”
Connecting well-loved and used apps didn’t only result in more visibility. It also went a long way toward building trust and earning buy-in from teams that relied on specialized tools to track and share knowledge.
“The connected apps feature has been really beneficial. Instead of alienating people with new processes, we’re able to accommodate what people are already used to.
We have teams that are huge users of Confluence and JIRA. But we made a concerted effort to show them how enabling connected apps on their profiles would make life easier for them.”
“There are dozens of cases where integrating Haystack enriched our existing comms practices."
With such a transformational implementation, Stone’s mission to implement a modern intranet for GoodRx was clearly a success. She was able to bring the best of the organization's knowledge, resources, communications, people, and culture into a central home base.
“Our leadership team could tell that the implementation was a success just from the sheer number of employees talking about how game-changing it’s been,” she said.
However, it was the leadership team’s quick adoption of The Fill as a strategic tool for bettering the employee experience that truly brought it home.
“We recently conducted our annual employee survey,” she recalled. “Across the feedback, employees pointed to our intranet as a way to support or strengthen many of the opportunities highlighted in the results. That tells me they value and really place their trust in it.”
"Our leadership team could tell that the implementation was a success just from the sheer number of employees talking about how game-changing it’s been."
As a qualified expert who has implemented multiple high-leverage platforms throughout her career, we asked Stone to share a piece of advice for others striving to do the same. She had this to share:
“My biggest piece of advice is to start by taking stock of where your organization and employees are today, how resources are presented, and how people are engaging with them. You’ll naturally find a mix of what’s working well and what isn’t. Your role during implementation is to preserve what’s effective and thoughtfully retire what no longer serves the organization.”
It’s always exciting to get to work and grow with teams like GoodRx, who are not only dedicated to improving the digital employee experience every day, but also the day-to-day lives of people across the country.
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