Role
Senior Manager of Design
Case 02HubSpot
Helping small business marketers grow on their own.
How I led a team to solve for customer, product, and organizational problems to help SMB marketers onboard to CMS Hub in one day, not three months.
Setting context
HubSpot helps companies grow better.
HubSpot is a suite of Hubs, each built for a different persona, each sold in Starter, Professional, and Enterprise tiers, except CMS Hub. This was our opportunity.
Many Hubs One per persona: Marketing, Sales, Service, CMS, Ops.
The promise. “The only CMS that's powerful and easy to use.” The bar the team had to actually clear.
The user
Marketing Meerah.
A small-business marketer juggling content, sales tooling, and a website she'd love to update without a developer. Everything downstream stems from one goal.
A day in Meerah's marketing life
1
A dozen tools. A hundred tabs. One marketer.
2
Her own website? She literally can't edit it.
3
So every little change means paying a developer.
The stack she juggles to get it all done
Let's move Meerah to HubSpot.
The problems
Customer problems
Meerah needs a site she can build, publish, and grow on her own. The product wasn't built for her, and neither, yet, was the internal HubSpot team.
01
3 months to onboard
Sales → Support → a HubSpot consultant ($500 fee) → Support. Many hand-offs, real cost, lost time.
02
A blog built for developers
Posts lived in HubL templates. Not Meerah's world.
03
A hard editor
Marketers couldn't ship without a developer.
3 months to onboard
Meerah would have many points of contact and pay additional fees, taking precious time to find help.
A blog built for developers
To change a post, Meerah needed to understand HubL, layouts, and partials. That's not a content tool. It's a codebase.
A hard editor
All confirmed through research.
Task-by-task grades
Select a theme
B
Change logo and navigation
D+
Inline editing
B+
Adding background image
B+
Create a folder
C
Create and add a form
F
Set up a blog
F
Org problems
A concerned GM
“How do I know the UX will be at the level I want? I want an A.”
Low UX morale
“I don't know if my designs were successful. I just do what my PM tells me.”
Invisible career bar
Designers felt they were executing, not deciding, which became an attrition risk.
A concerned GM
HubSpot couldn't agree on what “good” meant. I wrote a problem doc and partnered with the incredible Rosie Osire (UXR) to create Grading Research, a triangulated, A–F read on whether customers could actually get the value they paid for. It rolled out company-wide.
Select a theme
B
Change logo & navigation
D+
Create & add a form
F
Set up a blog
F
Low UX morale
Make one-pagers and design strategy artifacts standard to define and influence how we make product.
One-pager · standard template
User
Problem
Solution
Impact
Invisible career bar
Have regular career discussions grounded in role expectations and a documented growth framework.
Solutions
Customer solutions
Enable Meerah to build on her own, with a guided start, a marketer-friendly blog, and an editor she could actually use. Then I changed how the org works, so good decisions keep happening after I step back.
01
Easy onboarding
A theme marketplace, conversational setup, and tools to build solo, live in a day.
02
A blog set up for marketers - not developers
Drag-and-drop modules replaced HubL. Research moved the grade from F to A−.
03
An easier editor
Inline editing and content blocks let marketers ship changes without a developer.
Easy onboarding
We first bet on a website importer, then killed it; we couldn't import unstructured data. The opposite bet won: enable Meerah to build on her own, and three moves turned a three-month, multi-hand-off setup into a guided first day. A curated marketplace of themes and templates gives her a designed starting point instead of a blank page; conversational onboarding asks a few plain-language questions and tailors the setup to her industry; and guided theme and style settings let her match her brand, with no developer and no ticket.
A helpful website theme marketplace
Conversational onboarding
Help Meerah build on her own
A blog set up for marketers - not developers
Drag-and-drop blog modules and a live preview replaced HubL templates. Research moved the grade from F to A−.
An easier editor
Inline editing and content blocks let marketers change copy, images, and CTAs directly on the page.
Org solutions
Grading Research
Triangulated insights that communicate experience readiness. PMs could finally prioritize, and it was adopted company-wide.
One-pagers as standard
User · Problem · Hypothesis · Results · Conclusion. It changed how the org documents work.
Customer-Centric Team Missions
Every initiative answers three questions: who, how, and what outcome.
Performance & hiring
A clear promotion benchmark with HR, and full candidate slates with under-represented talent.
Highlighting great work
Led critiques toward feedback and questioning; pulled in external super-powers when needed.
Impact
Impact
1 day
to a live site, down from three months
+38%
activation for the CMS Hub offering
8,000
new CMS Starter portals, 3 months post-launch
10%
of CMS Starter customers upgrading to Professional, YoY
5
well-deserved promotions on the design team
1 of 25
2021 HubSpot Great Manager Award · 550 nominees
The editor, re-graded
Change logo & navigation
D+→A
Set up a blog
F→A
Create a folder
C→B
Select a theme
B→B
Design Excellence
Five promotions, HubSpot's most diverse design team, and internal talent trying to transfer in. The team nominated me for the 2021 Great Manager Award, one of 25 chosen from 550 nominees.
Teams are the work. Build them right and the product follows.
Case 03 · in flight
Zillow →