One of the best things about tech is the sheer number of people who just want to build things, and build them well. This means that there's a lot of sharing in the tech world — we share how we're building with new technologies, how we redesign our products, how we structure our teams.

User Experience (UX) teams have existed at software companies for a long time. But as the field of UX continues to grow and develop, more specialized roles, like UX writers, have been steadily growing and developing in importance, too, taking their place alongside more established roles like UX (product) designers and UX researchers. UX writers (also sometimes known as content strategists) are the folks responsible for crafting the words you see on the screen in the software you use.

In our recent post about how we do engineering leadership here at HubSpot, we shared our philosophy about what engineering leaders should focus on. 

We encourage our engineering leaders to be primarily product-focused (and, to a somewhat lesser degree, people-focused) rather than spending most of their time driving a process or managing people. This kind of leadership stands in stark contrast to the kinds of leaders who primarily care about administering and health-checking teams, or are on the hook for making sure their employees did the things they were supposed to do. 

HubSpot has been an Amazon Web Services (or AWS) customer for ten years now. Our footprint includes almost 2,500 EC2 instances, many petabytes of data on EBS and S3, and over a petabyte of web traffic flowing through over a hundred different ELBs each month. AWS’s offerings have been a huge driver of our growth because it has allowed us to easily scale up or down our infrastructure as our needs have changed. Furthermore, running our infrastructure in the cloud allows our engineers to focus on building HubSpot instead of building a data center.

Using documentation to cultivate co-ownership between design and development

This post is the second in a series about HubSpot Canvas, our new Design Language. Read the first here. 

I came to HubSpot as a software engineering co-op just as a movement was growing. The design team had, over the previous months, created a gorgeous set of new typography, colors, and basic components that would become the cornerstone of a major redesign of our entire platform.