Hypergrowth

In order to scale, we needed the engineering teams to own the solutions. (Location 374)

each of those three-person teams -- as well as the PMs, designers, and PMMs -- had metrics that measured them not only on the success of their external customers, but also on the success of their internal customers (e.g. management, customer service, customer success, etc.). (Location 411)

Let’s say as part of a public roadmap we commit to creating a certain app or feature. Once stated, the completion of that app becomes the end-goal. (Location 446)

What solves for the customer is non-stop testing and a continuous improvement. (Location 453)

the CEO and I would get together once a year and come up with themes for the next year. (Location 455)

communicate those themes to the different product teams, and we would figure out goals for each of the teams on how they would try to drive toward including the themes for the year. (Location 459)

metrics day-to-day to make sure they were all talking to customers, interacting with customers, releasing frequently, and that customers were -- both from a qualitative and quantitative measure -- getting happier and using the product more frequently. (Location 461)

teams like that are not connected to the customer. (Location 490)

they tend to drift into projects and into time spans that need a lot of overhead, a lot process, and a lot of management. (Location 490)

So for us, our discipline was that we were going to be customer-focused, and everyone had to be building something that a customer could use. (Location 495)

I was saying “Just ship it” all the time because I wanted the teams to ship daily. And I eventually got to the point where our teams were shipping 500 to 600 times every single day. That was the cadence we were moving out. (Location 529)

Instead of building up a release for months, we got it into the hands of beta users immediately (often before a HubSpot executive had seen it) so that the customer could help us correct and iterate on our direction. (Location 534)

We set up all of our metrics internally -- both for the engineering and product teams, as well as across the entire company -- to be metrics that are proxies for customer success. (Location 564)

The entire team, especially the tech lead, should spend time with customers each week and shouldn’t try to offload this responsibility to the PM or designer because they are “busy.” (Location 607)

teams should be designed to be as independent as possible (e.g. they should have a dedicated, not shared, designer). (Location 617)

After accountability, this is the ingredient that most people get wrong. They interpret being customer- driven as focusing only on major improvements/ features. What I have learned is that customers appreciate an incremental approach. (Location 624)

It also turns out that most of the biggest impact items you can improve are user experience issues that are preventing a customer from using your product fully. (Location 629)