YouSaid · the spoken record

Christopher Miller

lines on the record: 104
first: 2023-08-10
most recent: 2023-08-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, it's a great role with a fantastic team in a space that might be a little important these days. And so if you go to the HubSpot job site, that role should be there by the time this podcast is live, that role should definitely be up there.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There'll definitely be more roles opening up in the fall, but I think most immediately I'll be looking for like a group product manager to work on the AI platform team that I'm leading in.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely do a bit of angel investing and advising companies on the side. And I really enjoy it. I think there's something really cool and awesome about getting to see fresh problems all the time and not necessarily being so laser focused on the sort of categories or verticals or target customers that you're dealing with for 40 plus hours a week. And so it's kind of refreshing to spend time with founders who are working on products in different categories and having different challenges at different stages of growth and being able to figure out how I can be a resource to them. And so if you're looking for that sounds interesting to you, you're a founder or had a product out there, definitely reach out and maybe opportunities for us to collaborate. And maybe that can be a resource.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can neck with me on LinkedIn, shoot me a message, Christopher Miller. There's a lot of Christopher Miller's one that looks like me, who works for HubSpot. I have a Twitter out and spent a ton of time an X account, but I don't spend a lot of time on the app formerly known as the Bird But I'm on Instagram at Milsie Joe Young, which is a nod to one of my favorite old monster films, Mighty Joe Young. And so, yeah, I'm on Instagram a bunch too. So yeah, that's where you can find me.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Argentina, I don't know, it's definitely a country that that's a thing. My wife has been really into really high quality margaritas, like made it home, and we're big into apparel spritz in the summer. So I would say that that's usually what dominates the happy hour rotation these days.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the nightcap is always a shot of format. Sometimes he might mix a little Coca Cola with that. I think where do they do that? Is that Spain? I have not heard of that.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My gosh, if you're some of the guys that I go with, a couple of them had one recently. And I just was like enthralled by it. And I literally went home and ordered it that same day. And it's been like the coolest product or gadget that I bought in a while.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of really embracing that and like. Waiting in it for a while, knowing that it's just going to take cycles and time to get better and better was something I got really addicted to. And so I try to play golf whenever I can. And most recently, I bought a Garmin watch. And that thing is just magical. Like you roll up to the first T-box, you look at your watch. It knows exactly where you are, which golf course. Sometimes it'll even tell you which T's you're at because golf sometimes are further back and sometimes you're further ahead and it tracks your swings. It tells you distances and reads the greens for you.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fell in love with golf right before the pandemic, but the pandemic really is when I lost my mind and was like obsessed with golf, right? It was like one of the few safe things that you could do outside that was social and less dangerous than getting a drink with your buddy at the bar. What's the joke? It's like men invented golf so they could go on walks with each other. That's essentially what kind of drove the interest in golf. And I'm also horrible at it when I first started. And so I think also as like you get older and maybe you get more established in your career or I've been in the product led growth sort of like lane for a while you almost forget what it's like to be really bad at something until you have a kid and then everything's new and you're failing every day. But like golf was like you know a refreshing consistent experience of frustration and inadequacy and just like”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and that's how they defined it. And they were almost ambivalent to what that thing that was, what the subject was, but having taste, something that you were passionate about that you have spent enough time learning and understanding and appreciating and critiquing and being frustrated with that you have like a point of view that is potentially even polarizing its taste. Like riding the fence is usually not taste, right? And so when I think about the details matter, that's almost like a nod to taste, right? Like obsess over the details of something, right? Whether that be art, music, product, film, whatever is, I care a lot about that.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The details matter. The details matter. And one of the. I read a cool interview with the product leadership team at Stripe. And one of the things they talk about is Their product managers, they want you to have taste. And like, it was a really kind of controversial thing to say because it was like, oh, that is so subjective. Who gets to decide what taste is? Maybe that's even biased to some extent. And I think they had a super defensible answer About how they define taste and tastes, in their opinion, was to Be so interested in something. It doesn't matter what that thing is where you can go deep enough in it to have a strong set of informed opinions.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One, it's because, like, sometimes I will reach out and get references on it. Right. And so the extent to which that might actually be part of the interview process is very legitimate, but also I think it's usually very clear whether the person is taking an honest and introspective and self-aware approach to answering that question. And I like to see people being really self-aware. The EQ of a candidate and their self awareness is really important for me because at the end of the day, if you're in product, you can be the smartest person in the room, but if people don't want to work with you, you're probably not going to go very far.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A week. And I could not care less what the actual number they arrived at was, but it's more for me to observe like what's the array of data points that they can kind of Start to collect in their mind to inform their calculus and how close can they get to ballpark and like what's their like what's their defense behind their thinking? And then, you know, it's just like the process of watching people's brains move in those moments is, you learn a lot about how they might operate as a product manager, I think, in those scenarios. I try not to overdo them because I do think there's a lot of inherent bias in some of those types of questions. And so trying to think of things that are kind of really relatable to anybody who might be looking to work on a team that I'm leading is, I think, a requirement there. But I would say the other question I really like to ask is if the people that you most recently worked with were in a room and you weren't there, like how would they talk about you?”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it depends on what level of role that they're interviewing for. I don't really interview as many frontline PMs anymore, but I used to really like doing case study questions. Really random ones, too. I'd be like, tell me how many people cross the Longfellow Bridge.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is a really cheeky way of touching on a lot of really important topics, but often hard to talk about topics and themes. And it's kind of delightful to get through it. So I'm a Virgo. I just binged Barry from season one through four, Harry Winkler was spectacular. And then just came off of succession too. The theme here is I like really dark comedies. Yeah, really, really dark comedies are kind of my thing.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, man, on Amazon Prime, I'm a Virgo. And it's a Boost Riley show. Boots Riley directed, sorry to bother you. It just blew my mind. It's super surreal and funny and dark. And it stars Gerrell Jerome, who I think he played one of the characters in the Netflix Central Park VI won a couple awards for that too. And that was a show I watched recently where I didn't had no expectations going into it other than I knew it was a Boots Riley show and was just like enthralled because it touches on”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it's transactional. If I lied to Google, I'm not going to get what I want. And so it kind of really explores what it means to tell the truth and how honest we are with ourselves and with the internet. And so I really love that book. The other book I really love is Shopwood Carry Water, which it's like a parable about a young boy who wants to become a samurai, but the sort of message of the book is about falling in love with the process, especially the most mundane parts of the process of becoming great at something. And that's something I kind of, it's a good reminder about patience, humility, and sort of taking things one step at a time. And I often like reference chopplet carry water a lot.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Truthfully, I don't read a ton of books. Got a one and a half year old. I also probably didn't read a ton of books before, but it's a nice excuse to have. That's why I don't have time to read today. But when I think of books that I think about a lot still, there's a book called Everybody Lies. And it's a book, I believe the guy who wrote it was a data scientist at Google. And part of the message is that everybody's a data scientist and really trying to democratize the idea of using data in your everyday lives to make decisions and like demystifying the idea of data science. But the way he kind of does this is through comparing Google search data and like, you know, what we know people to be actively looking for answers for with sort of qualitative survey data. And people lie on surveys all the time for a variety of different reasons. But no one lies to Google.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Companies who never had to think about digital marketing all of a sudden had to. And it was urgent, right? It was a burning need for them to figure out how they were going to weather the storm. And I think one of the things that HubSpot did, and this is one of the sort of phrases we use internally, is like never waste a good crisis. And so one of the things we leaned into was sort of like goodwill pricing and we lowered the price on some of our tools and created some temporary leniency around certain things. And just the removal of that friction ended up being like a really interesting tailwinds for the business and specifically for the business that I run, which is our starter business, our free and starter business. We really accelerated growth during that period, which was not like I think if I think if you would have looked at my bingo card in March of 2020, I don't know that I had that on the bingo card.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“COVID. I mean, COVID was obviously challenging and awful on so many levels, but it was scary. Like it was super scary, right? We were all terrified. We didn't know what it meant for our jobs. My own sister, who also works at HubSpot now, she at the time was transitioning into hospitality and was two months into her job when she got furloughed because of COVID. So who knew what the world was going to look like and sort of how it was going to impact businesses? I think we were prepared for the worst. And we actually caught a bit of the COVID tailwind and a lot of other businesses did because”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But again, it was something that we kind of put out in the universe to see what happens. An interesting amount of sign ups every month. Like, who would have guessed that, right? I don't think that definitely wasn't on the roadmap a year ago, right? And I think being a 17-year-old SaaS company that can still operate with that sense of urgency and pace helps a lot to why wait to get consensus on a decision when we can kind of put something out there and then see what happens and see what the data says.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very related to micro wraps. You know, we have the, I would say chat spot is actually, and for those who don't know what chat spot is, chatspot is a bit of an AI co-pilot that Darmesh built that has sort of been very positively received by both HubSpot customers and non HubSpot customers alike. And so that's something that we're wearing my AI hat, spending a lot of time thinking about sort of what direction we want to go in the chat spot.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, some will be successes, some will flop, and we'll probably sunset them. But being willing to fail in the pursuit of finding new distribution channels is also really important.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you put in your domain and it crawled your site and then gave you a set of sort of recommendations for how you would optimize your site. And it was free, right? It was definitely a one-trick pony. But what it did was it created an interesting conversation, which is like, okay, cool. Now that you have this information, what are you going to do about it? And one of the things you could do is you could become a HubSpot customer. You can use our product to fix a lot of this stuff, right? And that worked for us. It worked really, really well. And so we've done that play a few times and it's something that we'll probably continue to do. Like we have a bunch of these micro apps. We have like a brand kit generator. We have an email signature generator. We've experimented with like a build my persona generator. There's a couple of ones that I can't talk about right now, but we'll learn a little bit about in a few weeks at Inbound. But yeah, Micro Rapps are an exciting new channel for us.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can have a massive impact if you're reliant on app store optimization, a change in Apple's algorithm might have a massive impact. I mean, what we're seeing with generative AI, I think there's a lot of people losing sleep at night because it's unclear how this is going to impact SEO writ large, right? Like if that's what fuels your entire business is being on Google's search result page, then what's going to happen in this new sort of world we're about to enter? And so I think to the extent that you can not have your funnel be relying on a single or a couple of channels is really important. We're always testing new channels. One of the channels that we're spending some time experimenting with is this concept of micro apps. And it's actually not a new concept for HubSpot. One of the first micro apps you ever built was, maybe Darmesh built this, the original one, but it was called Website Grader, right?”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll admit I'm definitely not an SEO expert. I've been fortunate to work with some of the best marketers in the world who I think are bona fide legends at this point in terms of what they've been able to achieve at UpSpot and building that lead and sign up machine. What I will say is being really aggressive about experimenting with new channels is so important and diversifying your channel mix is so important because Things can change overnight and that might disrupt your entire funnel, right? Like a Google algorithm change.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't give a specific number, but a large percentage of our revenue flows through the product, and it's not necessarily maybe where people ultimately purchased, but that's their sort of first conversion event with us, right? Like they were in the product, they liked what they saw. They spoke to somebody and then eventually became a customer. And that is like now a pretty robust top of the funnel for the company.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and sometimes that's a digital community, sometimes that's not. And so anytime we win an advocate through delivering like an excellent customer experience, they bring more people into the top of the funnel. And so it's a really honest, and I would say an honest macro loop in the sense, but like that's the way we think about our flywheel.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is just taken another form with PLG. And so we intentionally put out a lot of free software. And the idea is that this software is not sort of gimmicky. It's not designed to run out of value on day one. It's actually designed so that our smallest customers can get some value out of it in a sustainable way. But if they're engaging with it deeply enough, they're going to run into the limits of what that value is. And if we've done our jobs and delivered what we believe we were supposed to deliver, then the decision to purchase becomes a no-brainer. And if they're delighted with the experience of being a customer, they're going to become advocates and they're going to become promoters and they're going to tell their peers because what we also know is that a lot of small business owners and even medium-sized business owners take a lot of guidance from their community of peers.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Asking for something from customers or prospects before giving anything. And so it's core. It's like, okay, yeah, if you give a little for free, people who are interested in sort of hearing the rest of. That album sounds are going to come and stick around for more. And so in our pre PLG days, it was content marketing and white papers and listicles and e-books and things that people had to download that were really filling the top of the funnel.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our loops are less tactical. In fact, if I'm being brutally honest, right? Like, I think loops are kind of hard to achieve in B2B SaaS, right? Like, I think there's some examples of that. But I think some of the best loops come from UGC, user-generated content. I think a lot of B2C community focused platforms can do loops really well. I think if it's like B2B SaaS, it's hard to find things that get loopy. And this is me going. I think all my reforge homies are going to be upset that I said that. But I think that's the truth. When I think about the flywheel of Ubspot, I think it's more of a macro flywheel, right? And like just to kind of lean into our own lingo, it's really attract engagement. And so one of the principles that guides our thinking and our strategy is like give value before you extract value. And I think that was at the core of inbound marketing at its inception of like outbound marketing was.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can still talk to 10 customers that probably get a clear sense of what's happening and why it's happening, which you wouldn't even get from the quant data. So people sort of like getting demotivated or companies getting demotivated because they think they're too early to do PLG. It's like you can still do PLG. PLG at its core is just having your product sell the value prop of what your business does, right? And you can still deliver on that without being able to stand up a very robust and sophisticated experimentation practice.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Properly instrument their product, messy data, no real self service way for people to access that data. Like having analyst bottlenecks can be a terrible position to be in. And so eating your veggies and like getting your house in order from a data standpoint, I think is a crucial first step because if you can't actually measure what's happening and like why. And then maybe the last one is people giving up because they don't have enough data, right? Like we can't do PLG because we don't have this massive data set the way that UBSpot has or the way that Airbnb, Airbnb has. And it's like, you can still do PLG. You just need to use different data. The way we think about data is that quant data is just another form of data. The same way experiment results are just another data point. You can learn a ton from just talking to customers. Like quality research is super duper important, right? And so if you don't have data to tell you exactly what every single person is doing in your product.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But when you're doing PLG at its core, it's still RD, right? Like you're still sort of planning seeds with the hope that over time this is going to play out in the form of durable high-efficient growth. But if you're expecting, you put a team on something and then you want that team to sort of have outsize impact. And sure, there's going to be low-hanging fruit. But I think just not having the patience to see the investment through and cutting bait too early is another I think mistake. Companies make, and then I also think that. Bad data hygiene is the other one. So not having taken a beat to”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the number one mistake is like hiring ahead of growth, giving them no resources, and expecting them to pull rabbit out of their hat. Like every PLG veteran has some joke that they tell about the poor head of growth who has no tooling, no engineering cycles, no designer, no access to data, and then are handed a really scary big number and told to go move it. I think that's a common mistake that I stood the test of time. Another one is expecting really quick turnaround and thinking of it the same way you might think about hiring a sales, like an incremental sales headcount, which is that you're expecting near-term liquidity from that investment.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you want to drive, it helps triangulate where to begin, right? So if you are really focused on top of the funnel demand, trying to do self-service checkout is a silly place to start, right? And so just like really doing the thought exercise of articulating, like why do you care about this? Like, why are you actually interested in this in the first place? If you do this, what would change about your business? What assumptions are you making? And when you can actually list those, you can map them to parts of the customer journey where there may be opportunity to be more product-led at the company isn't there yet.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting, it's like how different the sort of array of answers are when you ask that question. Some are like, oh, it's about top of the funnel demand, right? Like we want to be more product led because we want more leads, we want more signups. You're like, oh, okay. And that's like a very defensible reason, right? There's a lot of data that shows that freemium products attract a lot more top of the funnel demand than sales led go-to-market products do, right? Some it might be a matter of like constrained resources. Like we need, we absolutely need to be more product-led in the stage of the company because we simply cannot hire an army of implementation specialists and folks on the customer success side of house to help every single customer at scale, which is generally a byproduct of having a really large top of the funnel. And then there are others that are, it's about revenue efficiency, right? And so when you can kind of articulate the outcome.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think the key thing is that humans can be a backstop. There are moments where it's going to make sense for humans to be a backstop, right? One example that I think is really normal. A hardship circumstance where a customer needs to end their relationship, right? Every SaaS company deals with this. Some take a fully automated approach, but most usually have some sort of escalation path that will result in a human having to resolve this. doesn't make them any less product led. I think every company at its core is having some humans behind the scenes interface with customers on things related to go to market, right? But I think once defining that and getting on the same page about that, I think you can learn a lot. And by the way, these are the normal conversations that I have with founders all the time. I'm actually an operator in residence at OpenView. And so I speak to a lot of their poor codes. And this is usually the conversation that we end up having. And I think what's”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, at the highest level, it's like taking a go-to-market approach where your product's job is to grow revenue and you use humans as a backstop and not the other way around, right?”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What assumptions are you making in terms of why being product led are going to be net positive for either the business or for your customers? And I might even ask them to define what product led means to them. We can kind of get on the same page of what we're even talking about.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are able to get help. See if the solutions we offer are a good fit for them and there are instances where people just don't want to talk to somebody, and our job is to make sure that there's a friction free way for them to make that decision on their own.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The deal pipeline, the real old school way, and that was sort of their locus of control for their sales team, right? And so. Use cases like that if you're a smaller team, you kind of have an acute understanding of the pain points that are like today's buyers that you need to put out. You don't have to deal with the burden of a huge data migration and the person who's going to be in the CRM day in and day out is also the person who gets to make the final call on what CRM they're going to use. There's a ton of those customers that we never talk to in person, right? And like that's awesome too. And so being comfortable with things not necessarily fitting into like clean boxes and having conviction that a modular approach or a more hybrid approach is actually the way to optimize for the customer and the business at the end of the day is something that I think we embraced really early on. But it was also how much demand am I sending to the sales team. And there was no like turf war about that, right? It's like, oh, that's net positive for people.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fear they have, and that's not something that's easy to do in a self service environment yet. I think that's going to change over time, but today it's still kind of painful when you're doing rip and replaces. And so to try to like brute force that into a sort of self-service motion for every customer writ large would be solving for your business's desires and not necessarily solving for the customer at the end of the day. But we also sell into different segments of customers that are maybe digital natives, but not familiar with products in our category. And maybe they're coming from not a competing product, but they're coming from a more rudimentary system like spreadsheets. I mean, I've seen customers using post-sit notes to manage their”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a human involved in that process at all, or as a backstop. If the answer is yes, then maybe figure out ways to have humans involved where your cost structure is durable or at least defensible if that's not the case, then go take a PLG approach to it. And so across our entire business, we've never taken sort of like a very pure, everything here for this line of business or this product line is going to be self-service without sort of being able to defend and contextualize why across the entire customer journey this makes sense. And so, yeah, we have customers who come in through the product led front door and kick the tires on the product on their own and activate on the product on their own. But then when it comes time to buy the product, they want to talk to somebody and there's legitimate reasons why, right? Like there are maybe IT and security concerns that they need to get somebody on the phone for. Maybe they're coming for a platform where data migration is a huge.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Answer those questions. And I think it may be obvious where I'm going with this, but based on the answer to those questions, the conditions on the ground might lend themselves to be more favorable to product-led growth and be more favorable to self-service, right? It's why there are companies that the value prop is just so, like you don't need a person to sell you loom. I use Loom. It's so intuitive that I can just decide on my own whether I want to buy it. You don't need a person to teach you how to use even Slack to some example. Like Slack is extremely intuitive, right? Like you would throw someone in Slack and they've used a product in a similar paradigm and they can probably figure out the basics on their own. There are certain products that don't necessarily check those boxes. And so I think what you can do is kind of take a more modular approach to PLG and it's like based on how a customer in the best case scenario might go from zero to one when it comes to like activation and onboarding. Do we need”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Market. And it's more of a hybrid motion. And I think it's less about being sort of like myopic about your approach to PLG and sort of having it being really rooted in principles that are, I think, very kind of academic or conceptual in nature, but more sort of being pragmatic and saying, okay, cool, who is our customer? What is the product that we sell? How are our customers used to buying this thing? How would they prefer to buy it in the future that they would like to live in? What's the packaging of our product? How do our customers decide? Is it a top-down decision or a bottoms-up decision? How complex are building and subscription terms? Is something that's going to be pretty transactional or something that's going to be fairly considered? How comfortable is our target market with the technology in our category? Are we competing against non-consumption? Are we competing against competitors in the same category? And if you actually...”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, don't get me wrong, we were definitely like, we need to be more product led. And I think that's actually the nuance here, right? Like you asked, you know, would I consider what we were doing product-led growth? And I think the answer is absolutely, but that's because a fallacy that people, a lot of, I think maybe early stage founders or folks who are unfamiliar with product growth or maybe only know about it from like an academic point of view maybe fall into the trap of is assuming that like in order to be a PLG company that that's that's you can use that interchangeably with like being a fully self-service business or a fully self-service go to market i don't actually think that those things are one and the same i think that most companies at least the larger more successful ones that have sort of done amazing things and are cornering their market or category that we would consider to be plg companies have a i have a bunch of humans working on really important things when they go to”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get, right? And so I think there's an innate desire to want to be more nonlinear in our growth, right? And I think us arriving at the right place at the right time. Sort of alignment around what the path forward could look like. We want to live in that world. How might we get there? And I think that's where we really fit into the equation. It's like, oh, we invest in this team. If we invest in the type of work this team is doing, that's how we're going to build efficiencies over time. And it's also, we like that because it's in line with what our customers are already expecting from us.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The go to market motions that we were working on definitely fit under, I think, the broad umbrella of PLG, but I don't think the culture of the company was necessarily Explicit about being a PLG company. I don't think that's the way we talked about who HubSpot was. And trust me, there were a bunch of other factors in here. I definitely, I won't say that our team were like the sole driving force behind that shift in our strategy and approach, but certainly the data that we were able to collect and the experiments we were able to run and the insights we were able to surface and the research we were able to synthesize gave us conviction to double down on it for sure. And that was definitely maybe the beginning of that inflection point for the company, but there was certainly a lot of other things that led to us wanting to become more product. Again, think about it, right? Like I think any company is probably searching for ways to operate more efficiently. And if your revenue is so tied to like go to market headcount, like it gets really hard to scale the bigger you”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gain leverage for the business or deliver delight to our customers in a more efficient way. And honestly, in a way that they probably expected to engage with us at that point in time, like it was quite odd that there were so many humans involved in every stage of the customer journey. And some of our customers just like, I just want to be able to try the thing and like buy it if I want to be. I really don't want to be forced into a sales engagement, right? And so it was really kind of like meeting the expectations of the modern software buyer in many ways.”
2023-08-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source