Chris Miller: preference

Transcript context

…One thing I took away from what you just shared is that you are given these two teams to lead, which aren't necessarily connected, but I think it tells me that you're doing a great job at HubSpot and I'm going to try to pierce through your modesty and I'm curious, what is it that you think you've done really well or been successful at that got the leaders at HubSpot to decide to give you this other team that feels like an incredibly important initiative in this time of AI? So when I joined HubSpot in 2016, it was definitely an element of timing that really worked in my favor. It was maybe like a year or so after HubSpot had launched their free CRM, which was a big strategic play for them and for us, excuse me, at the time, and it was meant to be disruptive, but I don't think that there was a fully formed perspective on what was going to happen after that. How are we actually going to get leverage and enterprise value out of this sort of big, enormous piece of free software we just put into the universe? And I think the pedigree of product manager at HubSpot at that time was also a bit different. There were folks who maybe started their time at HubSpot in support, and so intimately familiar with the product and with customers. Some of these people had closed thousands of support tickets and my background was a bit different. I was actually less of a feature PM and I was sort of more of a growth PM in my DNA, and so I sort of looked at this through a completely different lens and I guess I understood that what we were trying to actually do was product-led growth, but we didn't really have the shared vocabulary to call it that. And so I think to answer your question, I think I was just willing to take some risks and really push for the things that I believed made sense even though maybe based on the titles that I had at the time, I wasn't sort of inherently given a seat at the table and really pushed my away into some of these conversations and then was eventually invited to them. And so, just always had an interest in driving a strategy that was a click or two higher than maybe what my immediate team was focused on and was always curious about how other parts of the business functioned. I used to spend a lot of time sitting on the sales floor, just going into the other buildings and talking to other folks, working on different parts of the business, and that's part of maybe the serendipity that I miss about being in person, which is that you might just discover something from having a casual conversation with someone at the water cooler. You're like, "Oh, that's an interesting problem. I think my team can help with that," so you absorb a bunch of context around how pieces of the business are connected and you can start to really widen your aperture in terms of the size of opportunities that might be in front of you that maybe you would've missed if you would've been so heads down on execution work. And so, if I had to guess how people might talk about that, if I wasn't in the room, maybe they would cite that, but it's tough to say. Hard to do those serendipitous watercolor chats in these remote hybrid times, huh?…

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