Platform Strategy for Product Group (HubSpot)

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

The content creation journey, or jobs to be done, are consistent regardless of what type of content users are creating. This summary journey is a result of a workshop with product groups’s UX team and socialized for feedback across Engineering, PM, and UX.

Original platform feature usage across products.

Platform features after launch of content platform after 9 months

Full content platform after 2-3 year strategy is completed

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.

Platform goals + guiding principles

Provided additional information to help guide product teams on each platform goal.

Provided focus, to narrow in what types of content the platform should solve for.

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

1 example of obstacles the team must overcome to be successful.

Outline of steps to take to ensure success.

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

Problem

HubSpot was founded on the idea of creating great content to attract users. Many products include content creation features that were built in silos.

HubSpot operates in small autonomous product teams. This org structure led to fast development time, but inconsistent and duplicative patterns and code bases

Definitions:
Content: Text and media our customers build to share with their end user.

Content Type: The type of content being created (aka the use-case). For example, website pages, blog posts, email, social post, form, etc

Structured Content Type: A content type where every instance follows the same structure or schema.  For example, blog posts always have a title, date, author, body, metadata, tags, etc

Solution

Created a content creation platform that allows product teams to easily plug into and customize an established content creation journey.

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

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