Growing leads into prospects

Jan 27

Workforce

Strategy

Production

Key result

Grew a 6-person design team through a departmental reo-rg.

As Director of Design in HubSpot’s 300-person international Marketing department, I led a team of six designers and worked with the Directors of Engineering, Project Management and Video to attract, engage and delight customers.

HubSpot’s Make My Persona micro-site was the result of strong collaboration between Design and Engineering, which was the goal of our 18-month re-org. Design by team member David Carberry.

I helped the company grow, quickly and sustainably. For design, that meant building new ways to deliver value and structuring the transformations that take us there. Connecting with, attracting, and retaining top talent were important, as was creating an environment of psychological safety crucial for experimenting and learning.

Workforce

Repairing an undeserved reputation

In the years before I joined, the design team was improperly situated within the Marketing department’s brand team, acting as a service provider and receiving work requests via low-context tickets. I reconfigured the team’ as part of a re-org of the entire brand team.

Setting the vision

Collaboration with others starts with a clear understanding of one’s own role. I led several design team workshops to refine our SLAs (service-level agreements):

Purpose: How do we define our work?
Scope: Where does our work end, and others’ begin?
Reporting: What information does our team need to communicate up the chain?
Desired result: What’s our highest goal?
Deliverables: What should we produce?

This document was reviewed, evolved, and finalized in partnership with cross-functional teams and their leads.

Safety Measures on Our Team

HBS professor Amy Edmondson spoke at HubSpot about psychological safety – the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Based on those criteria, a senior team member conducted a survey of our safety (4.1/5 average), creating a baseline for growth and opening up important space for dialogue.

Inclusion

Fostering a sense of inclusion requires a commitment to visibility and vulnerability on the part of leaders. In addition to our organization’s adoption of the DiSC behavior assessment protocol, I wrote and distributed my own “user guide” to help my team and colleagues understand more about my background and how best to collaborate with me.

View PDF

Organizational transformation

Five months in, the creative team shifted from a fully centralized model to centralized partnership – instead of working alone on tickets, each designer became partnered to a key strategic team within the department.

Designers are included in strategic planning and goal-setting; rich context results in the highest quality design outcomes. This also allowed designers to build strong-longer-term partnerships with engineers and video editors.

With design deployed across the org, I codified a shared design process, to speed projects and create interoperability across teams. I adapted IDEO’s and the Stanford d.school’s processes for our organization, rewriting them with preexisting HubSpot terminology and a lightweight responsibility matrix.

Strategy

Unifying the customer experience

When I arrived in late 2017, the team was developing their own design system, separate from the Product’s recently-built Canvas system. I redirected that effort towards a merger into Canvas, to ensure coherent audience experiences that transcend the underlying organizational structure.

Production

Supporting massive growth

Senior leadership keynotes

HubSpot hosts INBOUND, an annual digital marketing conference, where cofounders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah delivered the keynote addresses and CPO gave a preview of new products and features. As the most senior marketing designer, I partnered with them to build their presentations, which were projected on a massive 120’-wide screen!