Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI)

27:40Was it as calculated as I think sometimes we can all maybe assume that some of these decisions are and then you often learn it. Like there's sometimes kind of emotional, like really instinctual and visceral and maybe connected to brands more than they've been connected to the product. And there's a lot of like things that I think when you're in the proverbial like digital conference room with your team trying to understand what makes your users tick, you just like, one, directions. We're ecological 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 love it to be perfect science so that we can, you know, money ball the system, if you will.

28:23And reminds me of a story where we were doing some user research on a booking feature within Airbnb and we went to Paris to do these really in depth. Use the research studies where like behind one way mirrors and all that stuff. And we were trying to figure out why hosts were in connecting Facebook to their account. And this is like 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.

28:54But like look at all this power you get. Like, no, I don't care. I don't trust it. And yeah, that's why I talk to my customers is so like you could have all the usage data in the world. That's going to tell you what's actually happening in your product. It doesn't tell you why, right? Like it will never explain the why behind a behavior that you can track through events firing. And so that's why that sort of proximity to the customer and that directing that sort of relentless curiosity towards the sort of qualitative stuff is so, so important because you just learn things that just sometimes really un -intuitive for it.

29:29You know, our blind spots because we're often not the people we're building product for it. Absolutely. I want to shift talking about how to spot 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 you 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 in your making mistakes and all that.

30:03So if folks are wondering maybe why am I not learning enough or why is my career stagnating, see if you can just find, you know, easier said than done. But oftentimes just takes one person to change everything. It gets in a sort of a conversation about, you know, the difference between a manager and a mentor versus a sponsor and an advocate. Mentor's a great, they'll 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 for me, calling them mentors, I think, sells what they were very short.

30:43And 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 bet on you. I mean, truth be told, when I interviewed with Ferry 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 they were good, but I don't think they were certainly great. And I imagine there was something in there where the decision maker who was Ferry said, I think I can make something out of this, right?

31:23And 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, 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, hey, 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?

32:02Something 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 at least be great at something, overpower the fear of being inadequate at something, and I played sports growing up, and so I like being coached. I can take hard feedback, and I like it because if I get better feedback than the people on competing against, I think I can beat them, right? Over time, if I work hard enough, and so I think just taking that mentality with me into product management, I think has helped me build bridges with people who don't owe me anything, right?

32:53People who don't necessarily need to be invested in me at all, but who might get delight out of it somehow, you know? And I don't know exactly how that works, and the calculus that goes on in folks' brains, but at least that's within my control, it's like how I can show up in the context of those relationships, and sort of really embrace even the hardest, like, ugliest feedback. 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 that you're melting inside, and just the complete disagree with what they're telling.

33:39Yeah, shout out Jules. Jules is also someone who has been generous with me in the past in terms of giving time when I've needed help for stuff. So, yeah. 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. We'd love that. Yeah, V2 Jules. So let's shift to HubSpot the Business, which is a pretty incredible success story, from what my notes, it's worth something like $30 billion now as a business, it's been around for 17 years, still growing, I think something like 30 % year -to -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 show that basically HubSpot is maybe the fifth fastest growing software product in the world.

34:32I 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 at 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 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.

35:21And so really having that be central to our dogma, and now we think about the business and why the company exists in the first place. Like really walking the walk there is something that 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 or right thing for the customer being really challenging? I think just sort of having that customer centrity 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.

36:05Another 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 1%, but it's not like really going to make the customers life easier. How do you actually make this real? And 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.

36:33One, I think that's a really fantastic, 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 grow, right?

37:23Like 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 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 the, I think the discipline or the bravery of the courage, whatever, to I think focus on not necessarily tomorrow or the day after and really think about like two, three, four years from now, like what do we, what do the outcomes are trying to drive?

38:05And 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, then 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 products 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?

38:41There's definitely structure you could put around customer's entricity and I think a lot of it for growth at HubSpot and the teams that I lead, it's around like forcing specificity of language. So for example, you look at like a lot of standard documentation for features or experiments, whatever. And you know, when 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?

39:25You 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?

40:02And 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 wanna go in and then keep asking what, what, what, in terms of what's the sort of like true blast radius and domino effect of these decisions is the approach that we take at HubSpot and invite teams at least. Awesome. Okay. So I cut you off in this one bullet point so far. So let's keep going. Yeah. So we're talking about the things that make HubSpot special. So customer obsession is definitely one. I think where we play in 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 try to crawl up into enterprise software.

40:49I 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 gonna serve all your customers best? Probably not. Are you gonna end up having to build and maintain the spoke software for one customer? Probably.

41:21And 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. 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 really. 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 usability and user experience.

42:03And so playing in the mid market, I think it 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'm gonna 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 know if people have heard of that. What is that? Yeah, Darmesh, you know, our co -founder, one of our few of the leaders, Darmesh. One of the things he most famously did early on is he published the HubSpot Culture Code externally and Google had been find it anywhere. I think a lot of companies sort of replicated that over the years.

42:34But by being sort of like really open and transparent about the culture, both internally and externally, I think one internally creates like alignment and it gives everyone something to sort of enforce like 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 I think a lot of quality people crave a lot of the things that are sort of codified in our culture, humility, empathy, adaptability, the marketability, transparency, are sort of all things that I think people take quite seriously.

43:19And 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 wanna 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 wanna represent ourselves to be to our customers and how do we wanna work with each other? And investing in that, 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.

43:56And there's these little quotes that are really sweet. I really like this one. Solve for the customer, not just their happiness, but also their success. Yes. Wise. This episode is brought to you by Merge. Every product manager knows how slow product development can get when developers have to build and maintain integrations with other platforms. Merge's unified API can fully remove this blocker from your roadmap. With one API, your team can add over 180 HR, accounting, ATS, ticketing, CRM, file storage, and marketing automation integrations into your product. You can get your first integration into production in a matter of days and save countless weeks building custom integrations, letting you get back to building your core product.

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45:17Yeah, there's a ton. Although, you know, I think 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 hub spot culture are very much rooted in a specific period of hub spot, 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 things are rooted in very specific quirks of specific individuals who may not even be at the company anymore.

45:58And 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 hub spot 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 that I think is like super dope that we do is we do this thing called peer week, which was something that popped up during the pandemic.

46:32And the TLDR is that it's kind of like an event for a 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 there's a couple of weeks in the summer in June where we fly everybody in. Either if you're in North America, we fly you to Cambridge. If you were in Europe somewhere, then we fly you to Dublin and then we kind of spend a week together. And there's, it's not a sort of focus on just like classic productivity. There's like a ton of focus on building connections and like safety and just like getting to know people and who they are is like as human beings.

47:05But also like, damn, like I forgot how much I miss whiteboarding. And just like actually, you know what I get in a room with a physical whiteboard of people and work on some stuff. And so this is, I think the second year in a row or second or third out of the blebber pandemic year is really fog the brain. We've done it. And it's like one of the things I look most forward to every year is getting 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 going to link to this culture code also in the show notes if you want to check it out.

47:35But anyway, let's focus on how HubsWatt 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 HubsWatt's 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 HubsWatt to help it grow into the behemoth that has become. What was kind of the early success elements that were key? I would say the early years of doing freemium. And for the record, there's definitely like an iteration of the growth team before I joined that really like Ryan Balfour was the person who I would say injected that first dose of like PLG DNA into HubsWatt.

48:22So shout out to Brian when we make sure he gets the credit that he's owed. Yeah, we're going to have him on the podcast at some point. It's in the works. Yeah, he's a legend. Brian's great. Absolutely legend. And so after Brian had left HubsWatt, a bit starting stop. And so when I joined and we sort of took another stab at it, I think there are a few things we did. One in the beginning is we really had an aggressive mentality and aggressive approach. Which I think 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.

49:03And 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 no boutique mission and remit compared to like I think a lot of the other teams at HubsWatt's missions and remit at the time. But even though that's what we were supposed to be working on on paper, we were sort of like if we find something that looks like an opportunity and no one else in the business is thinking about it, we're just going to try to fix it, right? We're going to ask for forgiveness rather than permission and start to call some plays.

49:38And what that looked like was at the time a very small percentage of I think HubsWatt's subscription revenue would be described as like self -service, like people putting in their credit card and buying something, 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 laying revenue. But certainly opportunities for efficiency because it was the first time we'd really had a product 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?

50:19Like is there even a pricing page in the product that people could 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 codes to that repository. So we approached the team who owned it and we were like, are y 'all working on this, right? Like is this an active development? And they were like, nah, we're working on a bunch of other stuff. We were like, can we take this? And we were like, sure, if you want it. 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 to this page focusing on desirability?

50:58Like 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 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 business and the funnel really looked. And I think that was probably a catalyst moment of everyone saying, oh, whoa, there might actually be something here.

51:31And so that attitude of sort of saying that like every problem is our problem and sort of being willing to like really take like a mentality of like, I think like radical accountability and like ownership mentality, help 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, I think the business, 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? So over time our remit expands.

52:09And 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 in an honestly, in a way that they probably expected to engage with us at that point in time, I mean, 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.

52:40That sounds incredibly important. Basically, your team turned Huff Spot into a very product -led growth business, which feels very important in the history of Huff Spot's growth. 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. Okay. And so how would you describe what the shift was in terms of the way the sales motion and growth motion changed? The going to market motions that we were working on definitely 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.

53:22I don't think that's the way we talked about who Huff Spot was. And trust me, there were a bunch of other factors in here. I definitely, I won't say that our team were like the sole driving force behind that shift in our strategy and approach. But certainly the data that we were able to collect and the experiments we were able to run and the insights we were able to surface and the research we were able to synthesize and 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 were certainly a lot of other things that led to us wanting to become more product.

54:01Like 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 good market head count, like it gets really hard to scale the bigger you get, right? And 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 we wanna 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.

54:38If we invest in the type of work this team is doing, that's how we're gonna 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 we 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 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. It's just like, like, 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?

55:08And I think the answer is absolutely, but that's because of fallacy that people, like 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, maybe fall into the trap of is assuming that like in order to do a PLG company, that's, you can use that interchangeably with like being a fully self -service business or a fully self -service go to market. I don't actually think that those things are one and 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 bunch of humans working on really important things and they're going to market.

55:54And 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 product? How do our customers decide? Is it a top -down decision or a bottoms -up decision?

56:29How complex are our 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 and our category? Are they are we competing against non -consumption or are we competing against competitors in the same category? And if you actually answer those questions, and I think it may be obviously 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?

57:02It's why there are companies that the value prop is just so, like you don't need a person to sell you loom. Like I use 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 could throw someone in slack and they've used 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?

57:47If the answer is yes, then maybe figure out ways to have humans involved where your cost structure is durable or at least defensible. If that's not the case, then go take a PLG approach to it. And so across our entire business, we've never taken a very pure, everything here is for this line of business or this product line is going to be self -service without 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 product web front door and kick the tires on the product on their own and activate on the product on their own.

58:25But 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 -in 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 businesses, desires and not necessarily solving for the customer at the end of the day.

59:01But we also sell into different segments of customers that are maybe digital natives, but not familiar with products in our category. And maybe they're coming from not a competing product, but they're coming from a more rudimentary system like spreadsheets. I mean, I've seen customers using post sit notes to manage their, you know, their, their, their, their deal pipeline, the real old school way and that like that would 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 fires that you need to put out.

59:41You 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 same and 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.

1:00:17Like 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 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. Who can like help see if the solutions we offer are a good fit for them. And there are 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.

1:00:48Amazing. I think on the one hand, this could be a whole podcast that's just talking about 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 to someone really have to talk to someone and how do we help them not have to talk to people in that moment.

1:01:21So 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? What assumptions are you making in terms of why being product led are going to be net positive for you the business or for your customers? And I might even ask them to define what product led means to them. We can kind of get on the same page of what we've been talking about. How would you define it? Do you have like a rough, you have an answer to that just so people get a sense of what it probably means?

1:01:58Yeah, 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. Awesome. And I think the key thing is that 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 I think is really normal, like a hardship circumstance where a customer needs to like end their relationship, right? Like every SaaS 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.

1:02:35Like, isn'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 in fact, like these are the normal conversations that I have with founders all the time. I'm actually an operator and residence at OpenView. And so I speak to a lot of their poor co's. And this is usually the conversation that we in the paving. And I think what's always interesting is like how different the sort of array of answers are when you ask that question.

1:03:08Some were 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 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 sales led go to market products do, right? Some it might be 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 side of the house to like help every single customer at scale, which is generally a byproduct of having a really large top of the funnel.

1:03:52And then there are others that are, it's about revenue efficiency, right? And so when you can 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 phone exercise of articulating like why do you care about this? Like why are you actually interested in this in the first place? 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 is there yet.

1:04:34Awesome. Maybe a couple more questions, long designs, 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 ahead of growth, giving them no resources and expecting them to pull a rabbit out of their hat. I feel like every PLG veteran has some joke that they tell about, you know, the poor head of growth who has no tooling, no engineering cycles, no designer, no access to data, and then are, you know, handed a really scary big number and told to go move it.

1:05:24I think that's a common mistake that I stood the test of time. Another one is expecting really quick turnaround and thinking of it the same way you might think about hiring a sales, like an incremental sales head count, which is that you're expecting near -term liquidity from that investment. But when you're doing PLG at its court, still R &D, right? Like you're still sort of planning seeds with the hope that, like, over time, this is gonna 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 at that team to sort of have outsides impact and show those are gonna be low -hanging fruit.

1:06:08But I think just like not having the patience to see the investment through and cutting bait too early is another, 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 analyst bottlenecks can be a terrible position to be in. And so 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?

1:06:53And 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 UBSBOT adds or the way that they're in B, Airbnb has and it's like, you can sell the PLG. You just need to use different data. 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 that probably get a clear sense of what's happening and why it's happening.

1:07:31You wouldn't even get from the quant data. So people sort of like getting demotivated and companies getting demotivated because they think they're too early to do PLG. It's like, you can still do PLG. PLG at its core is just having your product sell the value prop of your business does, right? And you can still deliver on that without being able to stand up a very robust and sophisticated experimentation practice. Kind of along those lines, but going even broader. Without disclosing trade secrets of how HEPPS .orgs, how would you describe the loop of growth of HEPPS .bot? In the words of you mentioned by Ambalt Form for read, what is kind of the growth loop of HEPPS .bot?

1:08:07Either now or recently, just like a simple way to think about how HEPPS .bot grows. Our loops are less tactical. And in fact, if I'm being brutally honest, right? Like I think loops are kind of hard to achieve in B2B SaaS, 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 SaaS, it's like hard to find things that get loopy. And you know, it is me going, I think all my reforge for me is going to be upset that I said that, but like I think that's the truth.

1:08:42When I think about the flywheel of UBSPOT, I think it's much like it's more of a macro flywheel, right? And like just to kind of lean into our own lingo, 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 imbound marketing at its inception, like outbound marketing was asking for something from customers or prospects before giving anything. And so it's core. It's like, yeah, if you give a little for free, people who are interested in sort of hearing the rest of how that album sounds are gonna come and stick around for more.

1:09:21And so in our three PLG days, it was content marketing and white papers, and listicles, and eBooks, and things that people had to download that were really filling the top of the funnel. And that is just taken over form with PLG. And so 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 engaging with it deeply enough, they're gonna run into the limits of what that value is.

1:10:02And if we've done our jobs and delivered what we believe we were supposed to deliver, then the decision to purchase becomes a no -brainer. And if they're delighted with what they experience of being a customer, they're gonna become advocates, and they're gonna 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, take a lot of guidance from their community of peers. And sometimes that's a digital community, sometimes that's not. And so any time we win an advocate through delivering an excellent customer experience, they bring more people into the top of the funnel.

1:10:42And so it's a really honest, and I would say an honest macro loop in the sense, but that's the way we take about our flywheel. Oh man, let's give you 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 help us what's kind of known for content and SEO. You know, you search for anything, and there's always a help spot 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 what I'm hearing, and then it shifted to now, it's a free product that anyone can use, and that's what drives the top of the funnel.

1:11:21Yes, correct. Amazing. I can't give a specific number, but 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 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 is now a pretty robust 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 kickstart their growth of SEO versus the freemium approach?

1:12:01Is there anything there that just like this work 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 I think are bona fide legends of 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, because things can change overnight, and that might disrupt your entire funnel, right?

1:12:42A Google algorithm change can have a massive impact. If you're reliant 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 SEO writ large. That's what fuels your entire business. Being on Google search result page, then what's going to happen in this new sort of world we're about to enter. I think to the extent that you cannot have your funnel be reliant on a single or a couple of channels is really important. We're always testing new channels.

1:13:25One of the channels that we're spending some time experimenting with is this concept of micro -wraps. It's actually not a new concept for HubSpot. One of the first micro -wraps you ever built was a maybe Dartmouth built this, the original one, but it was called Website Grader. It was put in your domain and it crawled your site and then gave you a set of recommendations for how you would optimize your site. It was free. 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 you're going to do about it.

1:13:59One 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. That works for us. It worked really, really well. We've done that play a few times and it's something that we're probably continuing to do. We have a bunch of these micro -wraps. You have a brand kit generator. We have an email signature generator. We've experimented with a build -my -personnel 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. Micro -wraps are an exciting new channel for us.

1:14:32Some will be successes, some will flop, and we'll probably sunset them. Being willing to fail in the pursuit of finding new distribution channels is also really important. That's an awesome insight. Is there a place people can go to find these micro -wraps that you all have built? There will be soon. I'm mysterious. I also noticed Darmesh tweeting about some AI projects he's working on. Is that related to these micro -wraps? Is that just him on his own time just to do info and stuff? Very related to micro -wraps. I would say ChatSpot is actually, and for those, we don't know what ChatSpot is, ChatSpot is a bit of an AI co -pilot that Darmesh built that has been very positively received by both HubSpot customers and not HubSpot customers alike.

1:15:17That's something that's where my AI hat is spending a lot of time thinking about what direction we want to go in ChatSpot. But again, it was something that we put out in the universe to see what happens. It's like getting an interesting amount of synopses every month. Who would have guessed that? That definitely wasn't on the roadmap a year ago. I think being a 17 -year -old SaaS company that can still operate with that sense of urgency and pace helps a lot to get consensus on a decision when we can put something out there and then see what happens and see what the data says. Yeah, it's just going to say that it feels like it's 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 just launch a new product.

1:16:08Yeah, 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. COVID was obviously challenging in all four, so many levels. But it was scary. It was super scary. We were all terrified. We didn't know what it meant for our jobs. My own sister, who also works at HubSpot now, she at the time was transitioning into hospitality and was two months into her job when she got furloughed because of COVID. Who knew what the world was going to look like and how it was going to impact businesses?

1:16:45I think we were prepared for the worst. We actually caught a bit of the COVID tailwind and a lot of other businesses did because companies who never had to think about digital marketing all of a sudden had to. It was urgent. It was a burning need for them to figure out how they were going to weather this storm. I think one of the things that HubSpot did, and this is one of the phrases we use internally is like, never waste a good crisis. One of the things we leaned into was goodwill pricing. We wore the price on some of our tools and created some temporary leniency around certain things. Just the removal of that friction ended up being a really interesting tailwind for the business.

1:17:32Specifically for the business that I run, which is our starter business, our free and starter business, we really accelerated growth during that period. You would have looked at my bingo card in March of 2020. I don't know that I had that on the bingo card. I'm looking at the stock price in another window here and I could see what I had. That went great. It came down with the whole market, but it's coming right back up. We reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got six questions for you. Are you ready? Yeah. What are two or three books that you recommended most to other people? Truthfully, I don't read a ton of books.

1:18:12I've 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 us why I don't have time to read today. When I think of books that I think about a lot, still there's a book called Everybody Lies. I believe the guy who wrote it was a data scientist at Google. Part of the message is that everybody's a data scientist and really trying to democratize the idea of using data in your everyday lives to make decisions and de -mystifying the idea of data science. The way he does this is through comparing Google search data and what we know people to be actively looking for answers for with qualitative survey data.

1:18:59People lie on surveys all the time for a variety of different reasons. No one lies to Google because it's transactional. If I lie to Google, I'm not going to get what I want. It explores what it means to tell the truth and how honest we are with ourselves and with the internet. I really love that book. The other book I really love is Chop Wood Carrey Water, which is, it's like a parable about 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. That's something I it's a good reminder about patience, humility, and sort of taking things one step at a time, and I often like reference Chop Wood Carrey Water a lot.

1:19:47Reminds me of the score takes care of itself, I think, is the name of the book? Yeah, yeah, I've heard of it. 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 a Boots Riley show. Boots Riley directed, sorry to bother you, it's just, blew my mind. It's super surreal and funny and dark, and it stars Jarelle Jerome, who I think he played one of the characters in the Netflix Central Park 5. I think he won a couple of awards for that too, and that was a show I watched recently where I didn't have no expectations going into it other than I knew it was a Boots Riley show and was just enthralled because it touches on.

1:20:32It's a really cheeky way of touching on a lot of really important topics, but often hard to talk about topics and themes, and it's delightful to get through it. I'm a Virgo. I just banished Barry from Season 1 through 4. Harry Winkler was spectacular, and then just came off with succession too. The theme here is I like really dark comedies. Really, really dark comedy is a kind of my thing. And that first one was called I Am a Virgo because I thought you were just saying you're a Virgo. No, no, the name was a style. I'm a Virgo, yeah. Amazing. I will check that out. Okay. What's a favorite interview question you like to ask candidates?

1:21:12I think it depends on what level of role that they're interviewing for. I don't really interview as many frontline PMs anymore, but I still really like doing case study questions and really random ones too. Tell me how many people crossed the Longfellow Bridge. I don't know. And I could not care less what the actual number they arrived at was, but it's more for me to observe what's the array of data points that they can start to collect in their mind to inform their calculus and how close can they get to ballpark and 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 you learn a lot about how they might operate as a product manager, I think in those scenarios.

1:22:07I try not to overdo them because if you think there's a lot of like inherent bias in some of those types of questions, it's so trying to think of things that are kind of like really relatable to anybody who might be looking to 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 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? Well, I mean, it's because like sometimes like I will reach out and get references, I can't write. And so like the extent to which that might actually be part of the interview process is very legitimate.

1:22:46But also I think it's usually very clear whether the person is taking like I'm honest and like introspective, it's self -aware, approach to answering that question. And 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 do with over the years. But I try to be self -aware about them. I can't do nothing else, I can't change them, at least like recognize them and do what I can to like mitigate the blast radius. And so I think just getting that, getting a sense of the EQ of a candidate and their self -awareness 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.

1:23:32Do 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 in life, I imagine. Yeah, the details matter. The details matter. And one of the I read a cool interview with 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 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.

1:24:17It 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 that 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 that you have like a point of view is that that is potentially even polarizing is taste. Like writing 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?

1:25:00Like, obsess over the details of something, right? With that the art, music, product, film, whatever 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, like you have the data, like actually having the first -hand information on what people need and what people want from your product. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, I'm just going to ask two more. And in a little while, 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?

1:25:37It was like, you know, 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 and walk with each other. And like that's essentially what kind of drove the interest in golf. And I'm also horrible at it when I first started. And so I think also is like you get older and maybe you get more established in your career, or you know, I've been in the product like 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.

1:26:18But golf was like, you know, a refreshing consistent experience of frustration and an accuracy and just like kind of really embracing that and like just waiting in it for a while knowing that like it's just going to take cycles and time to get better and better. It was something I got really addicted to. And so I try to play golf whenever I can. And most recently I bought a Garmin watch and that thing's just like magical. Like you roll up to the first T -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 your at because golf sometimes you're further back and sometimes you're playing your head and it tracks your swings, the tells you distances.

1:26:56I'm insane. It reads the greens for you and I'm like, golf just take you to that watch. Oh my gosh, if you're like, you know, some of the guys that I got with the couple that 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. It's been like the coolest product or gadget that I've bought in a while. Damn. I love it. And I was also thinking as you were talking about getting to golf, connects back to your relentless curiosity and resilience that you look for in people that you hire. So you clearly have it yourself. Final question.

1:27:27I believe you have a dog name Furny, which is short for Furnet. Yes. Okay. So on that note, what is your favorite current cocktail if it's not just a shot of Furnet? I mean, the night cap is always a shot 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'm 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 we're big into apparel spritz in the summer. It's outdated, but that's usually what dominates the the happy hour rotation these days.

1:28:05I just had an apparel is it apparel, apparel spritz, right? Yeah, I mean, I'm not good at pronunciation. I just had that for the first time. It's amazing. I that's going to be my new go -to. You had an apparel spritz for the first time recently? Yes. I didn't know what that was. That was like the zeitgeist a couple summers ago. I mean, then there's the other one too. Like the Groney Spagliados are having a moment to second Groney with Chris Echo. That sounds amazing. Yeah. There's so much knowledge to be gained in this podcast episode. Chris, this was incredible. Thank you so much for being here.

1:28:44Two final questions. Working 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 pack with me on LinkedIn, shoot me a message, Chris Vermiller. There's a lot of Chris Vermillars on the one that looks like me who looks around the spot. I have a Twitter out. It's been a ton of time. I have an ex account. I spend a lot of time on the app formerly known as the bird app. But I'm on Instagram at Mill Z. Joey Young, which is a nod to one of my favorite old monster films, Mighty Joey Young. And so, yeah, I'm on Instagram a bunch too.

1:29:18So yeah, that's where you can find me. And then I know two 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 I'll say you're hiring at Hubsbot or can people know about that? I definitely do a bit of angel investing and advising companies on the side. And I really enjoy it. I think there's 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 for four or five hours a week.

1:29:55And so it's kind of refreshing to spend time with founders who are working up products in different categories and having different challenges and different stages 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 sounds interesting to you, your founder or had a product out there, definitely reach out and maybe opportunities for us to collaborate and maybe that can be a resource. Cool. And then on the hiring front, any specific roles you want people to know about that you might be hearing? There's 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 leading.

1:30:35What a role. Yeah. It's a great role with the fantastic team in a space that might be a little important these days. And so if you go to the Hubsbot job site, that role should be there by the time this podcast is live that role should definitely be up there. Amazing Chris. Thank you again for being here. Wendy, 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 Podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.

1:31:12You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast .com. See you in the next episode.