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.

Infrastructure upgrades, improving user flows, a backlog of support issues, bugs, security work, improving latency, refactoring old code, building new features. If you’ve ever worked on a Product team, I’m sure you’re very familiar with this list. And I’m sure you’ve asked yourself, “How do I prioritize all of these things I care deeply about?”

Every organization holds certain values and beliefs that shape their culture. In the HubSpot Product org, we believe in moving quickly and iterating to constantly evolve with our customers’ needs. We’ve found, for example, that a small team empowered to make decisions and relentlessly drive toward their goals will deliver results and insights much more quickly than a larger group. That said, we also know that any organizational decision — like having these small, autonomous teams — will both solve problems and introduce new ones that require effort to solve. The primary challenge in this small team model is continually driving design and technical consistency across the organization for a quality customer experience and efficient development cycles. Conway's Law poses an obstacle that requires teams to collaborate and communicate effectively to avoid silos and diverging user experiences.

What's the best way to organize the information in your company's main website menu?

Over the past few years, HubSpot has continued to rapidly grow its engineering team. We've seen corresponding growth in terms of lines of code, number of services, and volume of data. To help support this growth, we have a group of engineering teams called Platform Infrastructure. These teams are dedicated to making HubSpot engineers more efficient while also improving the security, reliability, and performance of our product. This includes focus areas like build and deploy, monitoring and alerting, and database operations.

Over the past few months we’ve been planning our yearly internal conference, affectionately named EPIC Week (Engineering & Product Internal Conference Week). Each year, the team gathers together to run our own set of talks, programs and events that tie back to one goal: to learn from each other.