Hypothesis: Building content types across HubSpot, regardless of the use case, are 80% the same.

New teams were coming to the content platform wanting to align to our content creation experiences. And we knew we could drive more consistency and higher quality products if we could extend these experiences to become platform components.

The content creation journey, or jobs to be done, are consistent regardless of what type of content users are creating.

Solution

There had been false starts for creating a content platform. Some teams attempted but they often were trying to balance marketers and developers, and had either had a too narrow or too broad of a scope to successfully create something that was truly extensible.

I worked with my engineering and product manager group leads to create a content creation platform strategy that helped focus our teams and build features that could be used across multiple use cases.

This strategy was presented to leadership and our platform product teams in order to

  • Get buy in

  • Drive alignment

  • Help teams make decisions that aligned with our long-term goals

Target Personas

This project didn’t only benefit our customers, who would see more consistent experiences across all of their content creation tools. A core success metric was whether internal product teams could bootstrap on the content platform, and create new content types within 1 quarter.

The tech stack was complicated and intense, and we wanted to ensure that they wouldn’t need to be involved in all of the details in standing up content types.

Platform goals + guiding principles

Results

The group created a scalable editor, management, and analytics platform. It became the baseline for the product line’s planning the following year, allowing HubSpot to pivot from a CMS to a Content Marketing Platform, and launch 2 new content types within a few months.

Starting point: How our content platform currently operated across multiple content types

9 months in: added platform features, and extended across multiple content types

Vision of our final content platform

Platform must be easy to adopt by product teams. They don't need to know how the platform was built, but rather adjust a few key settings and focus on building their 20% unique features on top of the platform. Slide created by Engineering Group Lead partner.

Outlined the impact the team will have on HubSpot, on the quality of our product, and the success of our customers and business.

Responsibilities

  • Facilitated workshop with UX team to establish our baseline content creation journey/jobs to be done

  • Collaborated with Engineering and PM Group Leads in establishing our vision for the platform

  • Created + presented strategy deck to leadership and group teams

  • Managed 3 product designers and 1 content designer who created the platform

  • Work with Engineering and PM Group Leads to steer product teams towards success metrics

1 example of obstacles we outlined for the team to focus efforts on

Definition of success helps guide teams to make decisions that will amplify the strategy.

Platform Group Strategy

Problem

HubSpot was founded on the idea of creating great content to attract users (Inbound Marketing). Many products include content creation features that were built by small autonomous product teams. This resulted in shipping our org structure, where we had inconsistent and duplicative patterns and code bases across all products.

Hubspot