October 2025 Bonfire Marketer of the Month: Sonder’s Yash Mani

Each month, Braze selects one individual as our Marketer of the Month to celebrate the exceptional work being done by members of our Braze Bonfire community. Whether it's providing support for their fellow marketers or going above and beyond by sharing their innovative ideas and strategies, these individuals are making essential contributions to their companies, their users, and the customer engagement space as a whole.

This month, we’re learning from Yash Mani, Digital Experience Lead at Sonder, the all-in-one wellbeing app. Yash is responsible for creating meaningful digital touchpoints that support users’ wellbeing journeys. He oversees the downstream apps responsible for member experiences, including Braze, Qualtrics, Mixpanel, and related data systems. Formerly a senior consultant at Deloitte Digital, Yash is passionate about using technology to deliver personalized experiences that make a genuine difference in people's lives.

What is your favorite part of your job?

The most rewarding aspect of my job is knowing that our work directly impacts people's lives for the better. What I find most engaging is developing digital experiences tailored to each member's specific needs.

While we're still working towards full personalization, the process of building toward that vision is genuinely exciting. It's particularly meaningful when we receive feedback about how Sonder has made a real difference for our members. These stories reinforce the value of what we're creating.

I also appreciate collaborating with various teams across the organization, from data engineering to content and mobile development. This cross-functional work keeps me connected to all aspects of our operation and provides a comprehensive view of the member experience.

Who from your team uses Braze on a day-to-day basis?

On any given day, Braze is accessed by several key teams across Sonder:

• Our Customer Operations team uses the platform to onboard new customers and their employees into our system. They're responsible for creating customer segmentation and implementing customizations to meet specific client needs.
• The Proactive Engagement team represents our power users. They build and deliver relevant resources to our members, leveraging Braze's campaign and messaging capabilities to ensure timely content delivery.
• Members of our Mobile team regularly access Braze to test various components, particularly content cards and modal delivery, ensuring these elements integrate smoothly with our app experience.
• Our Data Engineering team also interacts with the platform, primarily checking and troubleshooting our data payloads to maintain the integrity of our member information and engagement metrics.

Sonder has goals around activation, retention, and engagement; what have you prioritized to achieve these?

Since joining, a significant part of my work has been collaborating with our data engineers to clean up our entire ecosystem. While content quality is important, I've found that data quality is the critical foundation.

When we first implemented Braze, we supported just a handful of customers. Today, we serve over 450 organizations with approximately one million eligible members and 75,000 active users each month. This rapid growth created considerable technical debt and outdated data structures that needed addressing before we could effectively scale our engagement strategy.

My prioritization approach has been to focus on establishing clean, usable data first, as this enables everything else we want to achieve.

What initiative or campaign are you most excited to work on this year?

I'm really looking forward to our project that will transform how quickly we can engage with members through Braze. Currently, our data syncs to Braze once daily, which limits how responsive we can be with our communications.

We're implementing a solution that will reduce our Braze data sync time from 24 hours to near real-time. This means we'll be able to trigger more timely and relevant messages based on member actions and needs.

This will allow us to respond to member behavior as it happens, rather than the next day. For a wellbeing platform like ours, this timely engagement can make a significant difference in supporting our members when they need it most.

The project will also position Braze more centrally in our engagement strategy, moving us closer to using it as our primary customer data platform. I'm excited to see how this enhanced capability will improve our member experience and engagement metrics.

What is one recent initiative you’re most proud of?

We recently implemented a personalization survey initiative that I'm particularly proud of. We identified a gap in our member data—we were missing key information about members' topics of interest, preferred resources, and demographic details, like gender and year of birth.

Using Braze's custom HTML capabilities, we designed and embedded a streamlined survey experience directly within our member journey. As members completed the survey, we captured their preferences and used Braze's Snowflake data sharing to enrich our warehouse data.

This initiative has enabled us to fine-tune our content strategy, creating targeted canvas flows and content series based on actual member preferences rather than assumptions. The data collected has become a valuable asset across our organization, helping us deliver more relevant resources and support.

Interested in collaborating to build the future of customer engagement? Join a collective of experts to forge connections, share ideas, and accelerate your career at the Braze Bonfire Community.