At HubSpot, we believe that how you sell is why you win⁠—disruptive, exceptional customer experiences are the key to growing better for the millions of organizations that HubSpot seeks to serve. And we know that extraordinary customer experiences are built by teams of people and connected software applications working together with a common understanding. The data proves it out—organizations of all sizes are using more SaaS apps than ever before to run their businesses, and they are feeling the pain of integrating and managing it all. They need a clear, orchestrated tech stack that makes their lives easier, not harder. 

Here’s something I think everyone can relate to: you fix a problem, only to discover later on that it’s still happening. Why is that? Sometimes we’re in a rush, or are a little careless. I believe it’s often because we did not understand the problem well enough to actually address it. By being a little more deliberate we can avoid this, and reliably fix problems once and for all. And it’s not a particularly technical skill. We need to start by asking “why” more, and looking for the answers to understand the problem well enough to confidently solve it.

Unless you work on a very small Product team—anything less than 10 people—you’ve experienced the need for cross-team collaboration. Here at HubSpot, our Product team is growing rapidly. This growth provides an immeasurable amount of benefits, but as these hundreds of small autonomous teams (2-10 people) build software, a challenge is introduced: how can we collaborate effectively across teams?

Many of us can identify with using business software that has a robust feature set but is painful to use. Or perhaps it’s easy to set up and configure with the help of a support team but becomes a guessing game when you’re actually trying to get the job done. Either way, setting up a business’ tech stack can seem like a no-win game of “or” where you have to choose either power or usability, but rarely both.

Name Dropping is a Q&A series that aims to elevate the stories of women leading in the tech space. The idea came from Angela DeFranco, a Director of Product at HubSpot, who said one way to be better allies is to name drop more women in discussions of achievement, inspiration, and disruptors in tech, instead of referencing, time and again, the same set of (often male) leaders.