Day in the Life: Katie Koenig, Product Lead

Meet Katie Koenig, Product Lead at HubSpot. She started her career in monetizing digital real estate ads for publishers before moving to San Francisco where she was introduced to the world of Product Management. In discovering her passion for Product, she attended Product School to grow her skills, get certified, and land a product position at a Boston-based tech company. We're lucky to have her here with us now at HubSpot, where she has continued to grow into Product Lead. Here’s what Katie's up to now...

Can you tell us a little about your background and journey to HubSpot?

I started my career monetizing digital real estate with ads for publishers. I mostly worked at large websites until 2014 when I joined an online news startup. It was there that I first started working with engineers to optimize our page load speeds, move/add ad units, etc. I then moved to San Francisco and started monetizing ad space for Zoosk. That was my first introduction to a "tech" company and met Product Managers.

It was at this point that I realized my current position was too niche and would require me to live in either New York City or San Francisco (these were pre-covid times when remote work was few and far between) and I wanted location flexibility in my life. Product Management seemed to check that box and would still allow me to work in the ad space and with engineers which I really enjoyed. I decided to attend the Product School after work while living in San Francisco to learn the basics of product management.

Once that was complete, I think I applied to over a hundred companies, and after many many interviews (it was really hard to convince companies that I had transferable skills), I finally landed a Senior Product Manager role at DraftKings in Boston. After working there for about a year and a half, HubSpot reached out to me about a Senior Product Manager role on the Ads team.  I really loved the emphasis on the customer and the opportunity to learn from so many smart, experienced PMs. The rest as they say is history!

Describe a typical day in your role.

I am now a Product Lead which means I still manage three teams but I also oversee our Social teams and the PMs on those teams. A typical day usually includes meeting with my Ads team to discuss projects in flight and upcoming projects that still need to be scoped, and conversations with my group level triad to ensure group health and investigate the next areas our group needs to be focused on.

What technical challenges are you currently working on?

A key value proposition of HubSpot is that we are “crafted and not cobbled”. One of the huge investments we've made to be crafted is to get all of our data on a shared framework so it's easily accessible. My Ads team is now trying to figure out how best to leverage this framework to power our various reporting needs to speed up our page load times, reduce engineering overhead, and help our customers more easily access ads data in custom reports and throughout HubSpot.

Are there any industry trends or topics that are exciting to you right now?

The ads industry is going through a tectonic shift right now due to government privacy regulations and the industry being forced to put privacy ahead of data and profits. This means that the way our customers advertise is going to fundamentally change because they will need to leverage their first party CRM data and get consent from end users to utilize this. HubSpot is in a unique position to not only help our customers during this shift, but also make it an easy experience.

How are you solving for the customer?

Well, hopefully everything my team is building is solving for the customer! My team recently released LinkedIn Offline Events into beta, so now our customers can sync post ad click (offline data) back to all three supported ad networks (Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn). This will help our customers better optimize their ad spend because the ad networks will be able to feed this conversion data (which ad clicks produced what revenue results) into their ad buying algorithms. Making these ad buying algorithms more intelligent for our customers means their ad dollars will go farther and they will get better leads from their advertising.

In your own words, what makes working in tech at HubSpot unique?

Everyone (and I mean every. one.) that works at HubSpot is a kind, motivated, smart human, and that makes coming to  work every day extremely rewarding.

Outside of work, what do you like to do in your free time?

I am obsessed with golfing. My husband and I golf at least three to four times a week. Last year, HubSpot introduced Global Week of Rest, where HubSpot (almost fully) shuts down for a full week around the time of the July 4th holiday in the US to collectively hit pause and unplug. This year, my husband, dog and I are taking a road trip to North & South Dakota to get us closer to our goal of going to all 50 states (only a few left!) and we hope to golf along the way!

Interested in joining HubSpot to work with talented techies like Katie? Check out our open positions and apply.