Building a Great Product Starts with Building a Great Culture ⁠— and the Best UX Leaders Know It

When I greet HubSpot’s new hire classes each month, I tell them we’re known for having big, ambitious goals in service of our customers. Then I talk about how we as leaders help our teams succeed. 

It’s one of the things that drew me to HubSpot three years ago – the promise of working on a team with really ambitious goals to solve for our customers and employees in remarkable ways. As a product team, we build products that help our customers grow their businesses and build their careers. And as a company, we build a culture that supports people as individuals with wonderfully diverse backgrounds so they can do their best work. We believe building a remarkable culture fuels our ability to deliver the most value to customers, and I loved the way HubSpot saw these two goals as inextricably connected. Create a product that helps a global community of users grow better, and create a culture that helps a global workforce of humans grow better, too. 

Leaders at HubSpot play an important role here because it’s our job to weave them together – especially in challenging, unpredictable, uncharted circumstances much like this year has been. It’s the most interesting UX challenge I’ve faced in my career, living in the intersection between customers and our people in every moment. And these twin challenges still get me fired up to get to work every day. 

We build a remarkable product...

The way we develop products at HubSpot is unique, and marked by how much we value and invest in the work of small teams that include engineers, PMs, and UXers. These teams are highly autonomous and empowered to solve big, thorny problems in transformative ways. As a UX team whose members are embedded on these small teams, our job is to help our users get the most out of the powerful HubSpot product by keeping it easy to use. While a lot of business software is known for sub-par usability that costs valuable time to set up, HubSpot aims to make our product easy for anyone, in order to accelerate customers’ time-to-value. Our team takes this challenge seriously and our leaders play a key role in helping teams strategize how to achieve it.

Here’s an example of how this challenge takes shape. We’re expanding on our vision of delivering a world-class platform experience by building new products for people in highly technical roles: developers, operations professionals, and data analysts. It’s a wide-open space that carries deep, far-ranging, even philosophical UX implications about how to best serve these users and extend the HubSpot platform in a usable, scalable, and ethical way. HubSpot is powerful, and becoming more so every day. How can we also make it remarkably simple, equitable, human, and inclusive? 

Solving for equity and inclusion is where our cultural values drive our work as UX leaders. We see it, celebrate it, and invest it in our product work, and in the culture we’re building at HubSpot, too.

...and a remarkable culture

Each HubSpotter is also deeply engaged in the work of building a culture we all can be proud of. For a HubSpot UX leader, this carries its own set of unique opportunities that sets us up to deliver better results for our customers.

This year we’ve stepped out and said the future of work is hybrid, and we’ve updated our approach to everything from hiring, to collaboration, to recognition and rewards, so each employee can choose how and where they’ll do their best work. 

UX team members can choose to be fully remote, fully in-office, or somewhere in between. Distributed teamwork isn’t a new thing at HubSpot, but we’re still learning and adapting as we lean into the change, and we’re looking for leaders who will help us grow better at evolving how we collaborate, communicate, and celebrate with our team members in a fully hybrid workplace.

And we’re all responsible for creating an inclusive workplace culture, too. We want HubSpot to be a company where everyone can do their best work and be fully seen as the humans they are. That’s why we’re standing up for anti-racism at HubSpot, committing to confronting systemic racism, and reaffirming our commitment to build a more diverse workforce. I’m proud to say our senior UX leaders are running projects to remove bias from our recruiting practices, learning more from and listening to Black-owned businesses, and facilitating conversations with our team about race. 

The leaders on the UX team are deeply engaged in this work, lending their voices and passions to the employee resource groups, book clubs, mentoring programs, and internal trainings, while also working to establish more inclusive design practices, and cultivating the next generation of UX talent with our associate UX program. As we deepen our learnings, we are mindful that creating a diverse and inclusive culture is right for our team, and taking care of our team means we’ll have a better shot taking care of our customers. 

The road goes on...

We’re only scratching the surface of how the UX team can advance the cause of building a better product and culture at HubSpot. We care deeply about helping our customers, colleagues, and communities grow better — as much as we care about learning and growing into better humans ourselves. As the best UX leaders know so well, the toughest and most rewarding UX problems are really about finding more ways to be more fully human and helpful to each other, whether it’s by building great software, creating a great company culture, or reaching for a brighter future for all humans. It’s what keeps me coming back and loving my work at HubSpot, every day.

If that sounds like the kind of work that would energize you, too, we’d love to talk to you. We're currently looking for a Director of UX (based in Cambridge, MA or Remote), as well as several other UX roles. 

Interested in working with a team who cares just as much about the culture we build as the product we build? Check out our open positions and apply.