like the actual really small initial growth team we really had an aggressive mentality and aggressive approach and what that looked like was at the time a very small percentage of I think hubspot's subscription Revenue would be described as like self-service so we approached a team who owned it we were like are y'all working on this right and they were like nah we're working on a
bunch of other stuff we're like can we can we take this and we're like sure if you want it and so we took it and like immediately blew it up and so that attitude of sort of saying that like every problem is our problem and like radical accountability and like ownership mentality helped us find opportunities that maybe the business wasn't explicitly asking us to solve but
we were able to triangulate why it might be important for the business for us to solve it and when you do that like we look hungry so let's keep feeding us right welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-winning experiences building and growing today's most successful products
today my guest is Chris Miller Chris is VPR product for growth and AI at HubSpot Chris started as an icpm at HubSpot where he helped create their early growth team and as you'll hear shifted HubSpot towards one of the most successful product-led growth businesses in history seven years later he leads both their growth and AI teams and advises Founders on product like growth
and growth strategy in general in our wide-ranging conversation we cover what it takes to become a successful product leader in Tech what skills the most successful PMS need to build how to find mentors why you need to scrape your knees as an early cam also a lot of great stories and insights about what HubSpot figured out about growth across content sales product market segments
and growth Loops I so enjoyed this conversation and we could have gone for another hour if I didn't cut myself off and so I'm really excited for to listen to this conversation with that I bring you Chris Miller after a short word from our sponsors this episode is brought to you by vanta helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate your growth
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visiting sidebar.com Lenny to learn more that's sidebar.com Lenny foreign thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast I'm so excited to be on the podcast thank you Lenny for having me uh fun a huge thank you to Kyle poyer for introducing us I've heard so many great things about you from so many great people and so I'm really excited to be
chatting and I wanted to start with your very unique role that you're in now at HubSpot and it feels like it might be a sign of things to come for product leaders your title as far as I can tell is VP a product of growth and AI can you just talk about what that is and how growth and AI relate in the context of HubSpot I've been leading plg at HubSpot for like several years now and I
recently took on the AI leadership role it's a special place to be in and that I get to help lead HubSpot in terms of how we should be thinking about building the foundational technology to create AI powered experiences and then also lead the strategy of how we leverage those experiences to help that B2B business Builder be way more successful using our
platform than they might have been you know in in years past so it's a it's a really cool uh intersection point between those two things there's a lot uh a lot we can do there one thing I took away from what you just shared is that you are given these two teams to lead which aren't necessarily connected but I think it tells me that you're doing a great job at HubSpot and I'm
gonna try to pierce through your modesty and I'm curious what is it that you think you've done really well or been successful at that got the leaders at HubSpot to decide to give you this other team that feels like an incredibly important uh initiative in this time of AI so when I joined HubSpot in 2016 it was definitely like an element of timing that really worked in my favor uh it was
maybe like a year or so after HubSpot had launched their free CRM which was like a big you know strategic play for them for us excuse me at the time and it was meant to be disruptive but I don't think that there was a fully formed perspective on what was going to happen after that right like how are we actually going to get leverage and Enterprise Value out of
this sort of big enormous piece of free software we just put into uh into the universe right and I think the pedigree of product manager at HubSpot at that time was also uh a bit different like there are folks who Maybe started their time at HubSpot and support and so uh intimately familiar with the product and with customers you know some
of these people had closed thousands of of support tickets and my background was a bit different I was actually less of a feature pm and I was sort of more of a growth PM in My DNA and so I sort of looked at this through completely different lens and I I guess I understood that that what we were trying to actually do was product-led growth but we didn't really have the
shared vocabulary to call it that right and so I think to answer your question I think I was just willing to take some risks and really push for the things that I believed made sense even though maybe based on the titles uh that I had at the time I I wasn't sort of inherently given a seat at the table and sort of really pushed my way into some of these
conversations and then was eventually invited to them right and uh and and so just always had an interest in driving a strategy that was a a click or two higher than maybe what my immediate team was focused on and was always curious about how other parts of the business function like I used to spend a lot of time sitting on the sales floor just going into the other buildings and
talking to other folks working on different parts of the business and and that's part of maybe the Serendipity that I miss about being in person which is that you might just discover something from you know having a casual conversation with someone at the water cooler you're like oh that's an interesting problem like I think my team can help with that
so you absorb a bunch of context around uh how pieces of the business are connected and you can start to really widen your aperture in terms of the size of opportunities that might be in front of you that maybe you would have missed if you would have been so heads down on execution work and so I think that if I had to guess how people might talk about that if I wasn't in the room maybe they
would cite that but it's set to say hard to do those uh serendipitous water cooler chats in these remote hybrid times huh yeah everything's so scheduled and tightly scheduled and you're bouncing from Zoom to zoom and you know obviously HubSpot has embraced hybrid and there's a ton of benefit to it and in fact you know I was a new dad when I came back to work and my my son wasn't
in daycare and so it was so cool just be able to like pop out in between meetings and play with them for a few minutes just to go back and you don't get that when you're in the office all day so definitely a lot of upside but certainly it's you got to be a little bit more creative in terms of the that serendipitous knowledge sharing the osmosis learning and and just context
sharing that happens more organically when everybody's sharing the same physical space you talked about how some of your early success was taking risks and being in meetings maybe you shouldn't be in is there an example or a story that comes to mind of doing that where you kind of took a risk early on being kind of in European at HubSpot and or something that worked out really well
surprisingly uh this is a funny story for anybody it helps about listening uh I I apologize in retrospect for this but um there was a time where we were having a lot of debates around pricing and packaging and you know there's and we'll get into this but our go to market model and sort of you know where we play in the in the addressable Market
create some complexity in the sense of you know we're serving different parts of the market simultaneously with the connected unified platform and so how do you think about packaging and go to market and we were trying to figure out how to simplify simplify simplify and at the time I was in ic individual contributing PM so who am I to sort of have a point
of view of pricing and packaging but uh you know the person I was working with my designer um her name is Mariah Moscato she's a she's in product now she's excellent we we were uh part of a Triad and we we sort of both had a similar school of thought in terms of what the pricing and packaging could be and we were over in Dublin where we have our European headquarters and there was
a party happening at the Guinness uh sort of Storehouse and I don't know that we were exactly on the guest list but we figured out a way to get into the party and we ran into the CEO at the time and out of the blue I think he had asked us what we thought about pricing and packaging it was sort of one of those funny you should ask moments right and so we ended
up kind of pitching in the midst of pints being sort of handed you know the every which way you you turn this vision for a completely different way we might approach pricing and packaging and he was he was pretty intrigued and he said why don't you come to the next executive meeting and and Pitch us on it I think that meeting was maybe a couple weeks away and so we looked at each
other we were like oh that would be like not exactly what we expected in terms of I think people welcoming maybe a contrarian point of view at that at that moment in time and so we sort of were invited into this meeting with folks that we generally don't get to spend a lot of time with to pitch this thing that swam a little bit upstream and we ultimately didn't go
full steam ahead down that path I think a lot of elements of what we pitched have made it made their way over time into hubspot's pricing and packaging but it's certainly I think opened the door for us and and for me speaking for myself certainly for me to uh be welcome back into that room in the future and to be able to contribute ideas towards
important decisions you know I love that it's another example of serendipity and just running into people yeah also I think it's a really good example of just how important it is for PMS to be proactive and think ahead and not just kind of rely on like people coming to you asking you for your advice and like getting invited to Rooms I feel like so much of a of success in the product
leadership role is just like suggesting great ideas being ahead of where people are and having the answers like you have the answer right there in the moment right in because you did the work ahead of time is that something you find as well that that ends up being really important yeah uh one of the traits that I look for in PMS that I that I hire onto my teams and
also when I think back to the people that I've learned a lot from working with over the years one of the common behaviors or or traits is like Relentless curiosity this like insatiable desire to understand things and a lack of fear in admitting when they don't understand things and being uncompromising and getting the answers so that they do understand and I think if you can bring
that to the table it's much easier to have an outsized impact on whatever org you're a part of or whatever Mission you're working on or whatever team you know you may be a member of are there any other traits in that list of traits you look for that you think are really important and maybe other people don't focus on yeah Relentless curiosity is is probably
my number one my number two would probably be resilience specifically if you're working in growth I think if you're doing growth right right like if you're doing product-led growth the right way then you're trying to balance the science of you know and sort of taking like a somewhat hygienic approach to validating assumptions and hypotheses with being really ambitious and and really
pushing for the things that are going to have massive impact for your customers at the end of the day and when you're doing that you're gonna fail more than you're gonna be successful along the way right and if you're not resilient that can be really demotivating right like I I think there's a a stat that some you know growth person put out there years ago
which is at like on average only 20 to 30 percent of experiments a growth team runs might be successful so that means like 70 to 80 percent of the time you're you're you're not putting numbers on the board and you're extracting learnings hopefully that you can apply to the future but I think if you're not resilient what I've seen happen is you end up sort of
grasping for a win which can sometimes look like making bets that are too small and too insignificant to matter right if you're sort of primary modality of product like Growth work is experiment driven product development and you're hitting more than like 30 40 of the time that you're thinking too small right and so that resiliency piece is certainly
important in my mind I think coachability is another one uh in in the sense that I still think that like the sort of sub-category of like growth product management is still like fledgling compared to PMS working on like platform features and so even when I'm interviewing folks I'm not necessarily looking for 10 years of experience doing plg I think
that's mostly an unreasonable ask but it can certainly be taught and even if you do have uh some experience doing plg work it's important to know that what that work is going to look like is going to potentially vary in a meaningful way from shop to shop and so being coachable and adaptable to whatever the context is of the business or problem space that you're working on I think is
an important trait that I look for and and PMs and then creativity is so important too valuing Simple Solutions to really hard problems I think of building the next like super sophisticated widget is the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning like growth might not be for you right like I think the best growth like product leaders and growth Minds
that I've that I've worked with over the years or have had the uh the the privilege of learning from over the years like I think the thing that I that I notice about them is they are almost like ambivalent to the solution and certainly ambivalent to like how complex a solution may or may not be and sort of taking like little to no pleasure or pride in the complexity of a solution so
long that it delivers the outcome that the business and your customers need I think is a is a really cool trait and I I kind of like categorize that under creativity you mentioned this phrase Relentless curiosity and it made me think about a story I read about you or the way you got into product management was you're at some startup and the the founder was
just like I've read that the courage all our problems is going to be hiring product manager and you heard that and you Googled what is product management and then you ask them can I do that and that's how you got into the role so first of all is that true and second of all is what's your advice to people trying to get into product management and what any lessons from that
experience so first yes that is that is 100 True uh that is that is how I stumbled into uh product management so appreciate all the folks who took a shot on me back then but um but yeah I mean this was at a time where I would say product management has been as a function was definitely not ubiquitous across Tech like there was a lot more at least in the world that I was in a
lot more of like a standard waterfall approach to building products with a lot of like middle layers of engineering managers and really no one who had the job of like owning the problem from a customer's point of view and so there wasn't a ton of content out there and we're even a ton of people in the city at the time that I could really talk to to sort of
learn and so a lot of what I did was scrape my knees through the first years and a lot of like painful trial and error and then you know eventually I think there's a lot more energy and interest around the the around the tradecraft and the function and so I think it's much easier today for someone to learn the fundamentals of product management without necessarily needing
to do it via like trial by fire my uh advice to folks who are interested in like breaking into product management specifically is uh Focus a few things one focus on structure right I think like there's usually a lower barrier to entry to do product management at like a smaller shop which they might not have as much access to the best talent out there
right but I think what you may often give up in those instances is you know structure to your own sort of professional development and formal training and education and potentially even the opportunity to work for people who are like truly dial tested and have seen the movie several times and can actually like wisdom share it because truthfully it looks different in every company and
so it is one of those functions I do believe that taking like a truly like academic approach towards you know upskilling has like fairly diminishing returns because it's it's tough to field curveballs in a classroom right and so choosing where you want to break in is is is almost as important as choosing that you want to break in in the first place like thinking about who you're
going to be reporting to thinking about what's the track record of success for people at that company breaking into product management trying to think five years in advance and work backwards I think are all sort of important thought exercises along the way I would also say that if you're already at a shop you know where you are working a different
function and you're sort of like product curious right like go go talk to the PMs and like literally let's say it's like go reach out to a PM and ask how you can make their day easier figure out what you can do in your spare time that they can offload to you and uh do a little bit of volunteer labor even if that's just shadowing right because I think just getting that context and
understanding the sort of rhythm of how a team uh ideates and defines problems and prioritizes and ship software is the experience that's going to be the most important because a lot of product management is also managing personalities and figuring out how people want to work with you and figuring out how you work for them and so you know just just getting that
Hands-On you know hands-on experience or at least direct sight line into sort of the day-to-day of a team is is really important because the extent to which you can understand their problem space and understand the things that keep them up at night you can be valuable and then you know at the very least what you get out of it is hopefully an advocate right
or a sponsor at the end of the day who is willing to uh Gamble some some professional and you know political capital on you to get your foot into the door even though you might not have any formal experience on your resume there's so much stuff that super resonates there one is that I always think of like the bare minimum job of a PM is just to be useful to people on the
team and help them do better work and if like if you do that alone right bring the donuts exactly yeah it must be old I don't know that anybody uses bringing the donuts and now we had Ken on the podcast we talked about it we asked to like what is the digital version of that when everyone's working remote I think that's something that even if you're a brand EPM you come
across soon enough and then the other piece there I really love this metaphor of scraping your knees because I find that to be so important to be coming up PM is you think you could just like read these things take some courses and it's gonna go you're gonna go you got this and you're not gonna mess up but I find that messing up is so important in helping to learn to do the job because
like you said there's relationships and people and changing plans and leaders and it's just like you're not going to get it right and you learn how to deal with all these things by messing it up so I super agree with that and even even though you said it's easier not to learn to be a PM it's still I think important to scrape your knees a number of times
for you to actually learn to do the job along those lines what did you find was most helpful to you to learn the craft of product management in the first few years what do you think back to like oh that was really helpful other than just doing it messing up sometimes getting it right yeah so my first product management sort of like job slash mission was working on a b to
B to C product and there's a lot of unique challenges that came with that you know our customer was not the end user of our product we sold into institutions who then white labeled our product and then resold it to the End customer and so at the end of the day our customers own the relationship with the end user and not us and so the challenges that that created were
that there was a lot of distance between us and the voice of the customer let's try the voice of the end user and we ended up building a lot of things to satisfy the buyer and the customer but not necessarily the end user and that's challenging because you don't necessarily know whether you're building something to get a contract signed or
you're building something that's going to Delight the person using at the end of the day or provides sort of like magical value and so I think I probably shipped a lot of bad product those years if I'm being completely honest like I don't know that I would look back at would I ship back then or what we we shipped back then and sort of say like you know they were the best
possible solutions the best possible product it wasn't until I got my second product management job where it really was an inflection point where I was like oh God this is what this is supposed to look and feel like where was that I was I was uh working on a fitness technology company and the person who really I would say changed my entire Paradigm of what
product management is supposed to be someone I know you know to read most about who I believe was on the Pod absolutely uh last October uh shout out to Farid if you're listening free designing a good friend and mentor and he's like really helped me level up and what was interesting about those years is it was the first time I'd really gotten to work on a product where it was a freemium b2c
run run tracking app and so we we spent a lot of time talking to users directly and like a lot of like gorilla use a research techniques like literally sometimes going outside and just like talking to Runners and passing to to understand sort of like what were the challenges in finding motivation and sort of why do they choose uh running assistance running applications in the
first place and you know so just that that having that deep connection to the customer and not feeling like you're being kept at arm's distance was uh was eye-opening I was like oh I didn't know that it could be like this and then the second thing that we had at our disposal that was changed the game for me was access to a huge user data set and so having data at
scale to drive decisions being able to know that if we make a change we can prove causation from like a business impact standpoint or a customer Delight or engagement standpoint and so it was almost like I didn't realize I was blind until or you didn't realize you weren't seeing in color it's like that scene in The Wizard of Oz where you know they land on odds
and everything's in Technical and you're like oh my gosh like I can actually make informed decisions about what I'm shipping right and and and having like a level of rigor around that and really being forced to articulate a hypothesis and have a point of view on what the outcomes might be before you actually build something we're all sort of um I would say behaviors and just like a
philosophy around product discipline that I learned from freed and that like group of folks that I worked I worked with closely during those years and that was I think the I consider that to be when I really became a product manager there's two things I want to highlight there that again super resonate one is just whenever I talk to customers I
always like I'm like why don't I do this more often yeah because every time it's like wow I had no idea how big of a problem that was yeah why didn't I do why don't I do this all the time and then you don't again and then you do it months later oh my God I learned so much again and so I think it's just if you're listening you're just like maybe just go talk to a customer today
of the customers and you know you we also learned a lot from talking to people who we wanted to be customers but we're not right and people who have either broken up with our product uh or evaluated it and never fell in love with it in the first place and so I think every PM struggles with you know time management then it feels like you need 60 hours in a day to get
through your weekly checklist or 60 hours in a week excuse me but um finding time to just talk to people like even today like I have a lot of friends who are entrepreneurs or small business owners and some use HubSpot some don't but I usually tend to really enjoy my conversations with people who decided not to use HubSpot and to really try to unpack what drove that decision and was it as
calculated as I think sometimes we can all uh maybe assume that some of these decisions are and then you often learn that like there's sometimes kind of emotional like really instinctual and visceral and maybe connected to Brands more than they've even connected the product and there's a lot of like things that I think when you're in the the proverbial like digital conference room
with your team trying to understand what makes your users tick you're just like directions we're illogical humans at the end of the day at our core right and like that all rides on decisions people make in the day-to-day and it doesn't change necessarily when they're engaging with your product as much as we'd love it to be perfect science so that we can
you know uh Moneyball the system if you will that reminds me of a story where we were doing some user research on a booking feature with an Airbnb and we went to Paris to do these really in-depth user research studies where like behind one of my mirrors and all that stuff and we were trying to figure out why hosts weren't connecting Facebook to their
account this is like I don't know five six years ago because they gave them so much access to where their friends are traveling and reviews and all these things and especially in France they were just like I don't trust Facebook and this was before it became a big thing in the US they're just like I don't trust I don't want them to have any of my data but like look at all this
power you get like no I don't care I don't trust it and yeah yeah that's why I think in customers is so like you could have all the you know usage data in the world that's going to tell you what's actually happening in your product but it doesn't tell you why right like it will never explain the why behind a behavior that you know you can track through events firing and so
that's why that sort of proximity to the customer and and that directing that sort of Relentless curiosity towards the the sort of qualitative stuff is so so important because you just learn things that I just sometimes really unintuitive for you know our blind spots because we're often not the people we're building product for absolutely I want to shift talking about
HubSpot the business but one more last thing I wanted to highlight from what you just shared which is a really good Insight is you shared that your biggest inflection in your career was a manager for read in this case who helped you kind of learn the craft and develop your skills and that's the exact experience I had too just like one specific manager
changed everything for me and that feels like a recurring theme to a lot of people just having one person that really spends the time to help you learn and correct you when you're making mistakes and all that so if folks are wondering maybe why am I not learning enough or why is my care stagnating see if you can just find you know easier said than done but oftentimes just takes
one person to change everything it gets into sort of a conversation about you know the difference between a manager and a mentor versus a sponsor and an advocate mentors are great don't get me wrong I have a ton of people that I would consider to be mentors but when I think about the people in my life who the time that they donated to me the time that they
volunteered to me and and for me calling them mentors I think uh sells what they were very short and I would actually describe those folks as being like sponsors and Advocates people who were willing to put up Capital right whether that's professional social capital to to bet on you I mean truth be told when I interviewed uh with Farid that first time I think back to the interview and I
think I bombed it I don't think I actually don't think I would have hired me back then I actually think and I remember the answers I gave to some of those questions and I don't think that I think they were good but I don't think they were certainly great and uh and and if and I imagine that there was something in there where the decision maker who was freed
said I think I can make something out of this right and I think being willing to invest in someone and finding people who are willing to invest in you is what really matters and finding people who are willing to to again put something up for you whether that be whatever kind of capital it is when I think about true gasoline on the career fire it's finding
mentors but it's also finding sponsors and advocates is there anything that you think you did right to help find mentors and sponsors and advocates for people that are thinking about like hey I I want I need this how do I help myself in the same way is there something you did that helped people get excited to help you something I think I certainly continue to work on but really
putting ego aside and embracing not knowing stuff and embracing not being good at stuff and not feeling self-conscious about that and letting the desire to be the best at something or be or at least be great at something overpower the fear of being inadequate at something and you know I I played Sports growing up and so I I like being coached like I can take hard feedback
and I like it because if I get better feedback than the people I'm competing against I think I can beat them right over time if I work hard enough and so I think just like taking that mentality with me into product management I think has helped me build Bridges with people who don't owe me anything right people who don't necessarily need to be invested in in me at all
but who might get the light out of it somehow you know and I don't know exactly how that works and and the confidence that goes on in folks brains but I I at least that's what's within my control is like how I can show up in those in the context of those relationships and and sort of really Embrace even the hardest like ugliest feedback and and hope that I can
extract something from it that'll make me better at the end of the day I love that advice makes me think about Jules Walters advice which I've referenced many times on this podcast now where his tip is when people are giving you feedback just be like thank you so much for that feedback even though you're melting inside and just are the complete disagree with what they're telling
yeah shout out shout out Jules Jules is also someone who uh has been generous with me in the past in terms of giving time when I when I've needed help with stuff so also a great episode you did with Jules so many people have said what you just said about Jules about how helpful he's been to them so clearly a Class Act to that guy maybe we'll have to bring him
back would love that yeah V2 jewels so let's shift to HubSpot the business which is a pretty incredible success story a from what my notes it's worth something like 30 billion dollars now as a business it's been around for 17 years still growing I think something like 30 year over year and most interestingly OCTA put out this really interesting
report recently where they looked at their data of what tools people are using to authenticate with and they they showed that basically HubSpot is maybe the fifth fastest growing software product in the world I don't know if it's true but feels true because all the other companies make sense there so you don't have to confirm or deny this but clearly things are going great in a
HubSpot I'm curious just what makes HubSpot so special and unique and successful it's specifically unique to HubSpot versus other companies there's a lot in there I can speak to the things that have resonated most deeply with me in my time there yeah the first is legitimate customer obsession it's not marketing it's it's legitimate right like I've witnessed Fierce and
passionate debates internally that the root of what the people in the debate were really trying to unpack was what was the best thing for the customer and so really having that be Central to our dogma and now we think about the business and and and and why the company exists in the first place like really walking the walk there is something that
I don't I don't know that that's true everywhere right I mean I've certainly worked at places where that hasn't been true and there's a lot of factors that can lead to those trade-off decisions at times like is this the right thing for the business the right thing for the customer being really challenging I think just sort of having that uh customer centricity
really baked into the DNA of the company makes those decisions maybe not easier but at least you can have more conviction around the why behind the decision at the end of the day another thing that I think makes HubSpot before you actually move on to the next one I want to spend a little time on this one because I think people hear this and they're like yes okay we're
going to be customer obsessed and then you have to make these hard decisions look at this experiment it's going to grow things or Revenue one percent but it's not like really going to make the customer's life easier how do you actually make this real and is there may be an example where you have to trade off growth versus like we need to make sure the customer is getting what they
need or making the customer happy to make it a little more real even one I think that's a a really fantastic uh maybe not Counterpoint but thing to call out my point of view here is that oftentimes it's a function of what's the time Horizon that the company uses as their sort of Baseline for assessing decisions right and typically when you're making decisions that
could be described as like hostile towards your customers but a net positive for the business you're probably not thinking long term enough right because there's no possible way unless you are completely cloner to Market and there is no competition whatsoever that you could continually be hostile towards your customers and and grow right like at some point that's
going to catch up and so oftentimes I think it's the tension of what do we need to do in the short term to survive versus long term like where are we going like what's the chart what's the path that we're actually charting is I think the true tension but if you're making decisions that might have like lasting impact that our customer hostile like I think that's a really
dangerous path to kind of go down and so having I think the the discipline or the the bravery the courage whatever to I think focus on not necessarily tomorrow or the day after and really think about like you know two three four years from now like what do we what the outcomes we're trying to drive and what are the decisions you need to make in the interim that are going to
lead to that outcome if you stick to that sort of framework or first principle is a better way to describe it and I think you'll often end up arriving at the conclusion that doing the thing that's right for customers at the end of the day is the right decision is there something in the way you operate that helps you systemize that like in your experiment plan or product
specs or experiment results or is there a story of something where you just like ship something that shows this customer Obsession to make it even more concrete for listeners there's definitely structure you could put around customer centricity and I think a lot of it for for growth at HubSpot and the teams that I lead it's around like forcing specificity of language so
for example you know you look at like a lot of standard documentation for features or experiments whatever and you know one of the first things it's like outline the problem I don't know that we even talk about problems without a qualifier like are we talking about a business problem are we talking about a customer problem are we talking about
a an efficiency problem right like describe the nature of the problem and parse it out because if there's generally like speaking if there's a business problem right you might do the thought exercise of asking like well why hasn't that problem solved itself like what's the actual customer problem that is leading to the downstream like negative thing that's happening to the
business and if we can actually like create some daylight between those two things conceptually we can avoid making the mistake of trying to solve a business problem in a way that leads to a bad outcome for the customer at the end of the day and I think also creating a system that makes it easy for PMS to call out assumptions that they might be making so if we do this like what would
you predict to be some of the derivative sort of Downstream things and if you can kind of call those things out and just keep asking like why why why to sort of justify some of the direction you want to go in and then keep asking what what what in terms of what's the sort of like true glass radius and domino effect of these decisions is the approach that we
we take at HubSpot in my teams at least awesome okay so I cut you off in this one bullet points so far so electric you let's keep going yeah so uh we're talking about the things that make HubSpot special so customer obsession is definitely one I think were we playing the market too like you know being a company that has been comfortable sort of staying in the mid-market SMB
mid-market space and like resisting the temptation to to try to crawl up into enterprise software I think makes us special and one of the things is actually like really straightforward which is that you know a lot of enterprise software companies a lot of your revenue is tied up in like a small subset of customers and I think what can happen there is that those customers
decide that they want you to build something and they're willing to sort of threaten their business over it then you'll end up building it and is that necessarily the thing that is going to serve all your customers best probably not you're going to end up having to build and maintain bespoke software for One customer probably then don't get me wrong I think there's a lot
of product folks out there who enjoy that modality of work I'm not one of them uh and and so by playing in the mid-market it means our revenue is distributed more evenly across our entire install base which means that there's no single customer who can hold us hostage early but but what that does is you know with great power comes great responsibility I
think what that does is a forcing function of ensuring that the decisions that we make are a net benefit for the largest swath of customers possible and I think it really is a Guiding Light behind some of our decisions around like connected experience and uh usability and user experience um and so playing in the mid-market I think affords us to be able to do that
so I think that's another thing that makes us special for a company like of our size culture is another one and you know I won't get into the culture code I think a lot of folks have probably read it if not go check it out but I don't I don't know if people have heard of that what is that yeah dharmesh uh you know our co-founder one of our fearless
leaders darmesh one of the things he most famously did early on is he published the HubSpot culture code externally and you can Google it and find it uh anywhere and I think a lot of companies sort of replicated that over the years but by being sort of like really open and transparent about the culture both internally and externally I think one internally it creates like
alignment and it gives everyone something to point to to sort of enforce like why do we why do we choose to work with each other the way that we work with each other right I think it also helps in attracting the right type of candidates because we put it out there we're sort of really open about it if you don't like that culture chances are you probably won't be super
excited to work here but if that's something that you're craving and and I think a lot of quality people crave a lot of the things that are sort of codified in our culture humility empathy adaptability remarkability transparency are sort of all things I think people take quite seriously and so being really open and honest about that and being willing to sort of pressure test it on a
regular basis like is this still a company we want to be we're growing really fast like what has changed what conditions are still able to be supported with the culture we have codified today what amendments might we need to make in terms of who we want to represent uh ourselves to be to our customers and uh how do we want to work with with each other and investing in
that like like hiring really good people that can help us scale that I think is something that makes HubSpot really special amazing I'm reading the culture code on the side here and there's these little quotes that are really sweet like I really like this one sell for the customer not just their happiness but also their success yes why is this episode is brought to you by merge
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culture that like a fun thing that you all do that's like quirky HubSpot ritual yeah there's a ton although you know I think like there's definitely a very legitimate school of thought around how like culture can both contribute to inclusion but also be a headwind to inclusion right like I think a lot of the things that I might associate with like HubSpot culture are very much
rooted in a specific period of HubSpot right it's probably a pre-pandemic period it was probably a period where we were all sort of working in the same physical space And so there's a lot of like inside jokes and sometimes the the things are rooted in very specific quirks of specific individuals who may not even be at the company anymore and so if you're someone who's joined the
company in the past like two or three years and that flies over your head I think we have to ask ourselves like what's the value of continuing to embrace these things right and so I think what we've been doing over the years is sort of taking inventory of the things that like might have been considered part of like HubSpot Legacy culture and really trying to again
pressure test it like does this continue to serve us today and if not like we should be really comfortable of letting it go but one of the things I think is like super dope that we do is we do this thing called peer week which was something that popped up uh during the pandemic and the tldr is that uh it's it's kind of like an event for product
and Engineering where you know travel kind of changed with the pandemic and you know people don't get to see each other in person as much but uh there's a couple weeks in the summer uh in in June we fly everybody in either if you're in North America we fly you to Cambridge if you were in uh Europe somewhere then we fly you to Dublin and we kind of spend a week together and there's
it's not a ton of focus on just like classic productivity there's like a ton of focus on building connections and like safety and there's like getting to know people and who they are is like as human beings but also like damn like I forgot how much I miss whiteboarding and just like actually being able to get in a room with a physical whiteboard with people and work
on some stuff and so this is I think the second year in a row or second or third I don't remember pandemic year is a really fog the brain we've done it and it's like one of the things I look most forward to every year is get everybody in the same city to just hang out I love it I keep peeking at these highlights and they're really interesting so we're gonna link to this
culture code also in the show notes if you want to check it out but anyway let's focus on how HubSpot grows and there's kind of two parts in my mind there's just like how did it start and what worked really well you're actually on the inaugural team I believe of how to spots growth team and things worked out well done I'm curious maybe just to start what you think you did so right
early on in the history of HubSpot to help it grow into the Behemoth it has become what was kind of the early success elements that were key I would say the early years of doing freemium and and for the record there's definitely like a a an iteration of the growth team before I join that you know really like Brian Balfour was the person who I would say injected that first
dose of like plg DNA into HubSpot so shout out to Brian want to make sure he gets the credit that he's owed yeah we're gonna have him on the podcast at some point it's it's in the works yeah he's a legend Brian's great absolute Legend and and so you know after Brian had left HubSpot you know it was a bit start and stop and so when I joined and we sort of took another stab
at it I think there were a few things we did one in the beginning is we really had an aggressive mentality an aggressive approach I think in my and by we I mean the team like the actual really small initial growth team we tried not to be pedantic about where we were spending our time and so we sort of tossed our mission and Charter out of the window we
said cool maybe on paper we were I think like the sales tool activation team it's a very like you know Boutique uh Mission and remit compared to like I think a lot of the other teams at hubspot's missions and remith at the time but even though that's what we were supposed to be working on on paper we were sort of like uh if we find something that looks like an opportunity
and no one else in the business is thinking about it we're just gonna try to fix it right we're gonna ask for forgiveness rather than permission and and start to call some plays and what that looked like was uh at the time a very small percentage of I think hubspot's subscription Revenue would be described as like self-service like people putting in their credit card
and buying something it was it was predominantly product driven like leads like pqls and so we were literally sending everything to the sales team which you know it was learning Revenue but certainly opportunities for efficiency because it was the first time we had really had a product uh at a price point that could be transactional and not a highly
considered purchase and so we were thinking about this and we were like well how does this work like is there even a pricing page in that in the product that people could you know like actually buy something and we found it but it had been neglected it was sort of like I think no one was sort of committing any code to that Repository so we approached a team who owned it we
were like are y'all working on this right like is this is this in active development and they were like nah we're working on a bunch of other stuff we were like can we can we take this and we're like sure if you want it like take it like it's one less code base for us to maintain and so we took it and immediately blew it up we redesigned the whole thing
focused on discoverability like how are people getting on this page focusing on desirability like how are we talking about the value props of the things that we're wanting to sell to customers to help them grow better and then thinking about doability or usability like how do we actually just like remove the friction that's standing in the way and so we we did like a Mad Dash towards
this outcome we wanted to drive and when we released it it worked right like it actually it was actually like a step function change in the way that the physics of the the business in the funnel really looked and I think that was probably a catalyst moment of everyone saying oh well there might actually be something here and so that attitude of sort of saying that
like every problem is our problem and and sort of being willing to like really take like a mentality of like I think like radical accountability and like ownership mentality helped us find opportunities that maybe the business wasn't explicitly asking us to solve but we were able to triangulate why it might be important for the business for us to solve it and when you
do that uh I think the business a a business may get more comfortable putting more on your plate right and so it's like we look hungry so let's keep feeding us right and so you know over time our remit expands and there's other things that we think are opportunities to gain leverage for the business or deliver a delight to our customers in a more
efficient way and honestly in a way that they probably expected to engage with us at that point in time like it was quite odd that there were so many humans involved in every stage of the customer journey and some of our customers just like I just want to be able to try the thing and like buy it if I want to be like I really don't want to be forced into a sales engagement right and so
it's really kind of like meeting the expectations of the modern software buyer in many ways it sounds incredibly important basically your team turned HubSpot into a very product-led growth business which feels very important in the history of HubSpot would you consider what was there before where it was like the beginnings of self-service but they had to talk to a salesperson
would you consider that product LED yes versus okay and so how would you describe what the shift was in terms of the way the sales motion and growth motion changed the go to market motions that we were working on definitely fit under I think the broad umbrella of plg but I don't think the culture of the company was necessarily explicit about like being a plg company
I don't think that's the way we talked about who HubSpot was and trust me there were a bunch of other factors in here I definitely I won't say that you know our team were like the sole driving force behind that that shift in our strategy and approach but certainly the data that we were able to collect and the experiments were able to run and the insights we were able to surface and
the research we were able to synthesize gave us conviction to double down on it for sure and that was definitely maybe the beginning of that inflection point for the company but there was certainly a lot of other things that led to us wanting to become more product like again think about it right like I think any company is probably searching for ways to
operate more efficiently and if your revenue is so tied to like go to market head count like it gets really hard to scale the bigger you get right so I think there's an innate desire to wanna be more non-linear in our growth right and I think us arriving at the right place at the right time created sort of alignment around what the path forward could look like like what like
we want to live in that world how might we get there and I think that's where we really fit into the equation it's like oh we invest in this team if we invest in the type of work this team is doing that's how we're going to build efficiencies over time and it's also we like that because it's in line with what our customers are already expecting from
us and it sounds like you weren't like we need to be more product LED it was more just how do we get the sales process more efficient in the the motion of growth more efficient and that emerged out of that yeah I mean don't get me wrong we were definitely like we need to be more product-led just like like and and I think that's actually the Nuance here
right like you asked you know would I consider what we were doing product-led growth and I think the answer is absolutely but that's because a fallacy that people a lot of I think maybe early stage Founders or folks who are unfamiliar with product growth or maybe only know about it from like an academic point of view uh maybe fall into the Trap of is assuming that like in order to be a plg
company that that's that's you can use that interchangeably with like being a fully self-service business or fully self-service go to market I don't actually think that those things are one of the same I think that most companies at least the larger more successful ones that have sort of done amazing things and are cornering their Market or
category that we would consider to be plg companies have a have a bunch of humans working on really important things on their go to market and it's more of a hybrid motion and I think it's less about again being sort of like myopic about your approach to plg and sort of having it being really rooted in like principles that are I think very kind of like academic or conceptual in
nature but more sort of being pragmatic and saying okay cool like who is our customer what is the product that we sell how are our customers used to buying this thing how would they prefer to buy it in the future that they would like to live in what's the packaging of our products how do our customers decide is it a top-down decision or a Bottoms Up decision
how complex are are building and subscription terms is something that's going to be pretty transactional or something that's going to be fairly considered how comfortable is our target market with the technology in our category are they are we competing against non-consumption are we competing against competitors in the same category and if you actually answer those questions uh
and I think it may be obvious where I'm going with this but based on the answer to those questions the conditions on the ground might lend themselves to be more favorable to product-led growth and be more favorable to self-service right it's why there are companies that the value prop is just so like you don't need a person to sell you boom like I use a loom it's so intuitive
that I can just decide on my own whether I want to buy it you don't need a person to teach you how to use even slack to some example like slack is extremely intuitive right like you would throw someone in slack and they'd use a product in a similar Paradigm and they can probably figure out the basics on their own there are certain products
that don't necessarily check those boxes and so I think what you can do is kind of take a more modular approach to plg and it's like based on how a customer in the best case scenario might go from zero to one when it comes to like activation and onboarding do we need to have a human involved in that process at all or as a backstop if the answer is yes then like maybe
figure out ways to have humans involved where your cost structure is like durable or like at least defensible if that's not the case then like go go take a plg approach to it and so like you know across our entire business we've never taken sort of like a very pure everything here is for this line of business or this product line is going
to be self-service without sort of being able to defend and contextualize why across the entire customer Journey this makes sense and so yeah we have customers who come in through the the product web front door and kick the tires on the product on their own and activate on the product on their own but then when it comes time to buy the product they want to talk to somebody
and there's legitimate reasons why right like there are maybe it and security concerns that they need to get somebody on the phone for maybe they're coming for a platform where data migration is a huge fear they have and that's not something that's easy to do in a self-service environment yet I think that's going to change over time but today it's still kind of painful when
you're doing rip and replaces and so to try to like brute force that into a sort of self-service motion for every customer writ large would be solving for your business's desires not necessarily solving for the customer at the end of the day but we also sell into different segments of customers that are Maybe digital natives but not familiar with products in our category
uh and maybe they're coming from not a competing product but they're coming from a more rudimentary system like spreadsheets I mean we've I've seen customers using post-sit notes to manage their you know their their uh their deal pipeline the real old school way and that like that was sort of their locus of control for their sales team right and so there are use cases like that if you're
a smaller team you kind of have an acute understanding of the pain points that are like today's buyers that you need to put out you don't have to deal with the burden of a huge data migration and the person who's going to be in the CRM day in and day out is also the person who gets to make the final call and what CRM they're going to use there's a ton of those customers that we
never talk to in person right and like that's awesome too and so being comfortable with things not necessarily fitting into like clean boxes and seeing and and having conviction that a modular approach or a more hybrid approach is actually the way to optimize for the customer and the business at the end of the day is is something that I think we
embraced really early on like one of the first metrics that I had was activation rate but it was also how much demand am I sending to the sales team and there was no like Turf War about that right it's like oh that's net positive for people if people are able to get helped and a lot of the questions that they have cannot be answered with the product
today we should absolutely be proud to connect them with one of our awesome people in sales we can be like help see if the solutions we offer are a good fit for them in their instances where people just don't want to talk to somebody and our job is to make sure that there's a friction-free way for them to make that decision on their own amazing I think on the one hand this
could be a whole podcast that's just talking about this your plg learnings knowing it feels like HubSpot is one of the biggest success stories of transitioning more and more into plg at least at that point even though you're saying it was plg early on it feels like a huge shift to the business so I really like this framework you just shared of if you're trying to become more product
LED just think about the zero to one from visit to activation and when does someone really have to talk to someone and how do we help them not have to talk to people in that moment so either in that direction or just broadly if someone was trying to explore how do we become more product LED what are kind of like the first couple steps and Dives you'd recommend they do to
help them down that road first I would ask like why do you want to be product LED um what assumptions are you making in terms of why being product LED are going to be net positive free of the business or for your customers and I might even ask them to Define what product LED means to them so we can kind of get on the same page of what we're even talking about how would you define
idea of like a rough you have an answer to that just so people get a sense of what it probably means yeah at the highest level it's like taking a go to market approach where your product's job is to grow revenue and you use humans as a backstop and not the other way around right awesome and and I think the key thing is that like humans can be a backstop there
are moments where it's going to make sense for humans to be a backstop right one example that like is I think it's really normal like a hardship circumstance where a customer needs to like end their relationship right like every every SAS company deals with this some take a fully automated approach but most usually have some sort of escalation path that will result in a
human having to like resolve this like it doesn't make them any less product LED I think every company at its core is like having some humans behind the scenes interface with customers on things related to go to market right but I think once like defining that and getting on the same page about that I think you can learn a lot and and by the
way like these are the normal conversations that I that I have with with Founders all the time I'm actually an operator in Residence uh at openview and so I speak to a lot of their poor codes and this is usually the conversation that we end up having and I think what's always interesting is like how different the sort of array of answers are when
you ask that question some are like oh it's about top of the funnel Demand right like we want to be more product-led because we want more leads we want more signups you're like oh okay and then that's like a very defensible reason right like there's a lot of data that shows that freemium products attract a lot more top of the funnel demand than uh you know sales LED go to
market products do right some it might be uh a matter of like constrained resources like we need we absolutely need to be more product LED in the stage of the company because we simply cannot hire an army of like implementation Specialists and folks on the customer success outside of the house like help every single customer at scale uh which is generally a byproduct of
having a really large top of the funnel right and then there are others that are it's about Revenue efficiency right and so when you've been kind of articulate the outcomes that you want to drive it helps triangulate where to begin right so if you are really focused on top of the funnel demand trying to do self-service checkout is a silly place to start right and so just
like really doing the thought exercise of articulating like why do you care about this like why are you actually interested in this in the first place if if you do this what would change about your business like what assumptions are you making and when you can actually list those things you can map them to parts of the customer Journey where there may be opportunity
to be more product-led at the company isn't there yet awesome maybe a couple more questions along these lines and then it's just a couple more questions I definitely want to ask when someone is trying to go in the direction of product LED growth AKA more self-service and I guess maybe let me just ask is that sort of how you think about equivalency of those two okay what are
maybe the most common mistakes they make that aren't as obvious you know I mean the number one mistake is like hiring a head of growth giving them no resources and expecting them to pull rabbit out of their hat I feel like every you know every plg veteran has some joke that they tell about you know the poor head of growth who has no tooling no engineering Cycles uh
no designer no access to data and then are you know handed a really scary big number and told to to go move it I think that's a that's a common mistake that I stood the test of time another one is expecting really a quick turnaround and thinking of it the same way you might think about hiring a sales like an incremental sales headcount which is that you're expecting
near-term liquidity from that investment but when you're doing plg at its core it's still r d right like you're still sort of planting seeds with the hope that like over time this is going to play out in the form of like durable High efficient growth but if you're expecting you know you put a team on something and then you want those that team to sort of
have outsides impact and sure there's gonna be low-hanging fruit but I think just like not having the patience to see the investment through and cutting bait too early is another uh I think mistake some companies make and then I also think that bad data hygiene is the other one so not having taken a beat to properly instrument their product messy data no real self-service way for people
to access that data like having analysts bottlenecks can be a terrible position to be in and so uh eating your veggies and like getting your house in order from a data standpoint I think is a crucial First Step because if you can't actually measure what's happening and like why and then maybe the last one is people giving up because they don't have enough
data right they're like we can't do plg because we don't have this massive data set the way that HubSpot has or the way there and be Airbnb has and it's like you can still do plg you just need to use different data like the way we think about data is that like Quant data is just another form of data the same way experiment results are just another data point you can learn a ton from just
talking to customers like quality research is super duper important right and so if you don't have data to tell you exactly what every single person is doing in your product in aggregate you can still talk to 10 customers and probably get a clear sense of what's happening and why it's happening which you wouldn't even get from the Quant data so people sort of like getting
demotivated or companies getting demotivated because they think they're too early to do plg so if you can still do plg pld at its core is just having your product sell the value prop of your what Your Business does right and you can you can still deliver on that without being able to stand up a very like robust and sophisticated experimentation practice
kind of along those lines but going even broader without disclosing Trade Secrets of how HubSpot Works how would you describe the loop of growth of HubSpot in the words of you mentioned Brian Balfour and Farid but it's kind of the growth Loop of HubSpot either now or recently just like a simple way to think about how a HubSpot grows our Loops are less tactical in fact like
if I'm being brutally honest right like I think Loops are kind of hard to achieve in B2B SAS right like I think there's some examples of that but I think like some of the best Loops come from like ugc user generated content I think like a lot of b2c like Community focused platforms can do loops really well I think if it's like B2B SAS it's like hard to find things that get loopy
and you know that this is me going I think all my reforge hormones are going to be upset that I said that but like I think that's the truth when I think about the flywheel of upspot I I think it's a much like it's more of a macro flywheel right and like just to kind of lean into our own lingo it's it's really attracting gauge and delight and so one of the
principles that guides our thinking and our strategy is like give value before you extract value and I think that was at the core of inbound marketing and its Inception about like outbound marketing was asking for something from customers or prospects before giving anything and so it's core it's like okay yeah if you give a little for free people who are
interested in sort of hearing the rest of how that album sounds are going to come and stick around for more and so in our pre plg days it was content marketing and you know white papers and listicles and ebooks and things that people had to download that uh were really filling the top of the funnel and that is just take another form with plg and so you know we intentionally put
out a lot of free software and the idea is that this software is not sort of gimmicky it's not designed to run out of value on day one it's actually designed so that our smallest customers can get some value out of it in a sustainable way but if they're if they're engaging with it deeply enough they're going to run into the limits of what that what that value is and if
we've done our jobs and delivered what we what we believe we we were supposed to deliver then the decision to purchase becomes a no-brainer and if they're delighted with you know what the experience of being a customer they're going to become Advocates and they're going to become promoters and they're gonna tell their peers because what we also know is that a lot of small business
owners and even medium-sized business owners uh take a lot of guidance from their their community of peers right and sometimes that's a digital Community sometimes that's not and so anytime we win an advocate through delivering like an excellent customer experience they bring more people into the top of the funnel and so it's a really like honest
and I I would say an honest macro Loop in in the sense like that's the way we think about our flywheel oh man this could be a whole other hour of a podcast just diving into this stuff this is so good you shared this interesting story that I didn't I wasn't aware of so tell us what's kind of known for content and SEO you know you search for anything and
there's always a HubSpot article about it and so is what you're sharing here essentially that was like a big part of the early days SEO free content that drove people to the site and the product wasn't free is is what I'm hearing and and then is shifted to now it's a free product that anyone can use and that's what drives the top well yes correct amazing I can't give a specific number
but you know a large percentage of our Revenue flows through the product and it's not necessarily like maybe where people ultimately purchased but that's their sort of first conversion event with us right like they were in the product they liked what they saw they spoke to somebody and then eventually became a customer and that that is like now a pretty robust uh top of the funnel
for the company so I think this is a really interesting story of just starting with one growth channel of SEO essentially content marketing and then shifting to something else is there any lessons from that experience for people trying to kick-start their growth of SEO versus the streaming approach is there anything there that just like this worked really
well for us and you should probably try this or SEO kind of runs out in this specific type of business I'll admit I'm definitely not an SEO expert I've been fortunate to work with some of the best marketers in the world who you know I think are Bonafide Legends at this point in terms of what they've been able to achieve at HubSpot and building that lead and sign
up machine what I will say is being really aggressive about experimenting with new channels is so important and diversifying your channel mix is so important is so important because things can change overnight and that might disrupt your entire funnel right like a Google algorithm change uh can have a massive impact if you're relying on App Store optimization
a change in Apple's algorithm might have a massive impact I mean what we're seeing with generative AI I think there's a lot of people losing sleep at night because it's unclear how this is going to impact like SEO writ large right like if that's what fuels your entire business it's like being on Google search result page then like what what's going to happen in this new sort of
world we're about to enter and so I think to the extent that you can not have your funnel be relying on a single or a couple of channels is is really important we're always testing new channels like one of the channels that you know we're spending some time experimenting with is this concept of micro apps and it's actually not A New Concept for HubSpot
one of the first micro wraps you ever built was a maybe dartmesh built this the original one but it was called website grader right and it was uh you put in your domain and it crawled your site and then gave you a set of sort of recommendations for how you would optimize your site and it was free right it was definitely a one-trick pony but what it did was it created an
interesting conversation which is like okay cool now that you have this information what are you gonna do about it right and one of the things you could do is you could become a HubSpot customer and you can use our product to fix a lot of this stuff right and that worked for us it worked really really well and so we've done that play a few times and it's something that we'll
probably continue to do like we have a bunch of these micro apps you have like a brand kit generator we have an email signature generator we've experimented with like a build my personal generator there's a couple of ones that I can't talk about right now but we'll learn a little bit about in a few weeks at inbound but um yeah micro wraps are an exciting new channel for us
and you know some will be successes some will flop and will probably Sunset them but you know being being willing to fail in the pursuit of finding you know new distribution channels is also really important that's an awesome Insight is there a place people can go to find these micro apps that you all have built uh there will be soon oh mysterious I
also noticed darmesh tweeting about some AI projects he's working on is that related to these micro apps was that just him on his own time just doing fun stuff uh very related to micro apps you know we have the I would say chat spot is actually and for those who don't know what chat spot is chat spot is a bit of an AI co-pilot that darmesh built that has sort of been very positively
received by both HubSpot customers and non-hubspot customers alike and so that's something that where you know wearing my AI hat spending a lot of time thinking about sort of what direction do you want to go in the chat spot but again it was something that we kind of put out in the universe to see what happens and now it's like oh we're getting yeah an interesting amount of
sign ups every month like who would have guessed that right I don't think that that was that definitely wasn't on the road map a year ago right and I think being a 17 year old SAS company that can still operate with that sense of urgency and and Pace helps a lot too like why wait to you know get consensus on the decision when we can kind of put something out there and then see
see what happens and see what the data says yeah I was just going to say that it feels like such a win-win-win including it's just like a release for people on the team that have been there for a long time just to work on something totally different and new and just launch a new product yeah 100 I love that is there anything that just like significantly accelerated growth in
the last I don't know number of years that was like wow this really changed the game covid I mean covet was obviously challenging and awful lot so many levels but it was scary like it was super scary right we were all terrified we didn't know what it meant for our jobs like my own sister who also works at HubSpot now she at the time was was transitioning
into hospitality and was two months into her job when she got furloughed because of covid so who knew what the world was going to look like and sort of how it was going to impact businesses I think we were prepared for the worst and we actually caught a bit of a coveted Tailwinds and a lot of other businesses did because companies who never had to think about
digital marketing all of a sudden had to and it was urgent right it was it was a it was a burning need for them to figure out how they were going to weather this storm and I think one of the things that HubSpot did and this is one of the sort of phrases we we use internally is like never waste a good crisis and and so one of the things we leaned
into was sort of like Goodwill pricing and we lowered the price on some of our tools and created some temporary leniency around certain things and just the removal of that friction ended up being like a really interesting Tailwind for for the business and specifically for the business that I run which is our our starter business our free and started business we really accelerated
growth during that period which was not like I think if I I think if uh you would have looked at my bingo card in you know March of 2020 I don't know that I I had that on the bingo card I'm looking at the stock price in another window here and I could see I could see what happened I went that went great and even you know it came down with the whole Market but it's coming
right back up okay with that we reached our very exciting lightning round I've got six questions for you are you ready yeah what are two or three books they recommended most to other people truthfully I don't read a ton of books got a one and a half year old I also probably didn't read a ton of books before but it's a nice excuse to have that's why I
don't have time to read today when I think of books that I I think about a lot still there's a book called everybody lies and it's it's a book I believe the the guy who wrote it uh was a data scientist at Google and you know the part of part of the message is that everybody's a data scientist and really trying to like democratize the idea of like using data in your everyday lives
to make decisions and like demystifying the idea of data science but the way he kind of does this is through uh comparing Google search data and like uh you know what we know people to be actively looking for answers for with sort of qualitative survey data and you know people lie on surveys all the time for a variety of different reasons but uh no one lies to Google because
it's transactional if I lie to Google I'm not going to get what I want and so it kind of really explores like what it means to tell the truth and how honest we are with ourselves and with the internet and so I really love that book the other book I really love is um shop would carry water which is it's like a parable about a a young boy who
wants to become a samurai but the sort of message of the book is about falling in love with the process especially the most mundane parts of a process of becoming great at something and that's something I kind of it's a good reminder about patience humility and sort of taking things one step at a time and I often like reference chocolate carry water a lot reminds me of the scorer
takes care of itself I think is the name of the book yeah yeah I've heard of it with Jim Bill Walsh amazing okay what's a favorite recent movie or TV show oh man on Amazon Prime I'm a Virgo and it's uh it's a boots Riley show boots Riley directed sorry to bother you was just you know blew my mind you know it's so it's super surreal and funny and dark uh and it stars
Jarrell Jerome who I think he played one of the characters in The the Netflix Central Park five I think he won a couple awards for that too and that was a that was a show I watched recently where I didn't had no expectations going into it other than I knew it was a boots Riley show and was just like enthralled because it touches on you know it is a really cheeky way of touching on a lot
of like really important topics but often hard to talk about topics and themes and and it's it's kind of delightful uh to to get through it so I'm a Virgo I just I just binged Barry uh from season one through four Harry Winkler was spectacular and then this came off of succession too I the theme Here is I like really dark comedies yeah really really dark comedy is it
kind of my thing all right and that first one was called I am a Virgo because I thought you were just saying you're a Virgo no no I'm a Virgo yeah amazing I will check that out okay what's the favorite interview question you'd like to ask candidates I think it depends on what level of role that they're interviewing for like I I don't really interview as many
like Frontline PMS anymore but I used to really like doing case study questions and like really random ones too I'd be like tell me how many people cross the Longfellow Bridge oh no and like you know a week and I I could not care less with the actual number they arrived at was but it's more for me to observe like what's the array of like data points
that they can kind of start to collect in their mind to inform their calculus and how close can they get to Ballpark and like what's their like what's their defense behind their thinking and then you know it's just like the process of watching people's brains move in those moments is uh you learn a lot about how they might operate as a product manager I think in
in those scenarios I try not to overdo them so if you think there's a lot of like inherent bias in some of those types of questions and so trying to think of things that are kind of like really relatable to anybody who might be looking to you know work on a team that I'm leading is I think a requirement there but I would say the other question I really like to ask uh is if the people
that you most recently worked with were in a room and you weren't there like how would they talk about you one it's because like sometimes like I I will reach out and get references like right and so like the extent to which that might actually be part of the interview process is is very legitimate but also I think it it's usually very clear whether the
person is taking like an honest and like introspective uh and self-aware approach to answering that question and uh I I like to see people being really self-aware because I don't think anybody ever comes in any situation perfect right like I have a lot of rough edges to my personality that I think people have just like learned to deal with over the years but
I try to be self-aware about them at the very you know I can do nothing else I can't change them at least like recognize them and and do what I can to like mitigate the blast radius and so I think just getting that uh getting a sense of the EQ of a candidate and and their self-awareness is is really important for me because at the end of the day if you're in product you can be
the smartest person in a room but if people don't want to work with you you're probably not going to go very far do you have a favorite life motto that you come back to or you share with other people The Details Matter and that's both in work and life I imagine yeah The Details Matter The Details Matter and one of the I read a cool interview with the the
product leadership team at stripe and one of the things they talk about is for their product managers they want you to have taste and like it was a really kind of controversial thing to say because like oh that is so subjective like who gets to decide what taste is right like that that's maybe that's even biased to some extent and they and I think they had a super defensible answer
about how they Define taste and taste in their opinion was to be so interested in something it doesn't matter what that thing is where you can go deep enough in it to have a strong set of informed opinions right and that's how they defined it and they were almost ambivalent to what that thing that was right what the subject was but having taste I mean something
that you were passionate about that you have spent enough time learning and understanding and appreciating and critiquing and being frustrated with it you have like a point of view is that that is potentially even polarizing is is taste like riding the fence is usually not taste right and so when I think about the details matter that's almost like a nod to taste right like
obsess over the details of something right whether that be art music products film whatever uh is I care a lot about that I love that and that comes back to a lot of the things we've talked about of talking to customers looking at the data like actually having the the first hand information on what people need and what people want from your product yeah absolutely
okay I'm just gonna ask two more and uh and I'll let you go what is a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you love I fell in love with golf right before the pandemic but the pandemic really is when I lost my mind and was like obsessed with golf right it was like you know one of the one of the few safe things that you could do outside that was social and less
dangerous than you know getting a drink with your buddy at the bar what's the joke it's like men invented golf so they could go on walks with each other and like that's essentially what kind of drove the interest in golf and I'm also was horrible at it when I first started and so I think also as like you get older and maybe you get more uh establishing your career or you know
I've been in the product LED growth sort of like Lane for a while you almost forget what it's like to be really bad at something until you have a kid and then everything's new and you're failing every day but like golf was like you know a refreshing consistent experience of frustration and inadequacy and just like kind of really embracing that and like
just waiting in it for a while knowing that like it's just gonna take cycles and time to get better and better it was something I got really addicted to and so I tried to play golf whenever I can and most recently I bought a Garmin watch and that thing is just like magical like you you roll up to the First Tee Box you look at your watch it knows exactly where you are which golf
course sometimes it'll even tell you which you know tease you're at because in golf sometimes or further back and sometimes you pull your head and it tracks your swings it toast distances it reads the greens for you and I just want to play golf just to use that watch oh my gosh if you're going like you know some of the guys that I golf with a
couple of them had had one recently and I just was like enthralled by it and I literally went home and ordered it that's that same day and it's been like the coolest product or Gadget that I bought in a while damn I love it and I was also thinking as you were talking about getting into golf connects back to your Relentless curiosity and resilience
they look for in people that you hire so clearly you have it yourself final question I believe you a dog named Fernie which is short for fernet yes okay so on that note what is your favorite Curry cocktail if it's not just a shot of fernet I mean the night cap is always a shadow for that sometimes you might you know Miss a little Coca-Cola with that I think where do they do that
is that Spain I have not heard of that or Argentina I don't know it's definitely a country that that's a thing my wife has been really into really high quality Margaritas like made it home and uh we're big into aperol Spritz in the summer so I would say that that's usually what dominates the uh the happy hour rotation these days I just had an apple is it aperol aperol
Spritz right yeah I mean I'm not good at pronunciation I just had that for the first time it's amazing hey that's gonna be my new go-to you had you had an apparel Spritz for the first time recently yes I don't know what that was that was like the Zeitgeist a couple summers ago I mean and then there's oh man there's the other one too like the Negroni spagliados are having a moment to
um it's like a Negroni with uh Prosecco um oh that sounds amazing yeah so there's so much knowledge to be gained in this podcast episode Chris this was incredible thank you so much for being here two final questions where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and maybe ask you a question or two and two how can listeners be useful to you you can check
with me on LinkedIn shoot me a message Christopher Miller there's a lot of Christopher Miller's on the one that looks like me who works for HubSpot I have a Twitter I don't spend a ton of time x I have an X account but I haven't spent a lot of time on the the app formerly known as The Bird app but I'm on Instagram at milsy Joe Young which is a nod to one of my favorite old
uh Monster films Mighty Joe Young And so yeah I'm on Instagram a bunch too so yeah that's where you can find me and then I know a few other things that you wanted to share one is that you advise on plg and things like that so maybe talk about that real briefly and then also you're hiring at HubSpot where can people know about that I definitely do a bit of Angel Investing and Advising
companies on the side and you know I really enjoy it I think there's uh something really cool and awesome about getting to see fresh problems all the time and not necessarily being so laser focused on the sort of categories or verticals or Target customers that you're dealing with you know for 40 plus hours a week um and so I it's kind of refreshing to
spend time with Founders who are working on products in different categories and having different challenges at different stages of of growth and being able to figure out how I can be a resource to them and so if you're looking for if that's if that sounds interesting to you you're a founder or had a product out there uh definitely reach out and maybe
opportunities for us to collaborate and maybe that can be a resource cool and then on the hiring fund any specific roles you want people to know about that you might be hiring there's there'll definitely be more roles opening up in the fall but I think most immediately I'll be looking for like a group product manager to work on the AI platform team that I'm that I'm leading in what a role
yeah it's a great role with a fantastic team in a space that might be a little important uh these days and so if you go to the HubSpot job site that role should be there if by the time this podcast is uh you know live that that girl should definitely be up there amazing Chris thank you again for being here Lenny pleasure thank you for having me this has been amazing bye everyone
thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode