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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“Worked right, like it actually was actually like a step function change in the way that the physics of the business in the funnel really looked. And I think that was probably a catalyst moment of everyone saying, oh, whoa, there might actually be something here. And so that attitude of sort of saying that every problem is our problem and sort of being willing to really take a mentality of like, I think like radical accountability and like ownership mentality helped us find opportunities that maybe the business wasn't explicitly asking us to solve, but we were able to try and be important for the business for us to solve it. And when you do that, I think the business, a business may get more comfortable putting more on your plate, right? And so it's like we look hungry, so let's keep feeding us, right? And so, you know, over time, our remit expands. And there's other things that we think our opportunities 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
“Working on this, right? Like, is this an active development? And they were like, nah, we're working on a bunch of other stuff. We were like, can we take this? And they were like, sure, if you want it, take it. Like, it's one less code base for us to maintain. And so we took it and immediately blew it up. We redesigned the whole thing, focused on discoverability, like how are people getting on this page, focusing on desirability, like how are we talking about the value props of the things that we're wanting to sell to customers to help them grow better and then thinking about doability or usability? Like, how do we actually just remove the friction that's standing in the way? And so we did like a mad dash towards this outcome we wanted to drive. And when we released it.”
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 looked like at the time, a very small percentage of, I think, HubSpot's subscription revenue would be described as like self-service, like people putting in their credit card and buying something. It was predominantly product-driven leads, like PQLs. And so we were literally sending everything to the sales team, which was bring revenue. But certainly opportunities for efficiency because it was the first time we had really had a product at a price point that could be transactional and not a highly considered purchase. And so we were thinking about this and we were like, well, how does this work? Is there even a pricing page in the product that people could actually buy something? And we found it, but it had been neglected. It was sort of like, I think no one was sort of committing any code to that repository. So we approached a team who owned it and we were like, are y'all?”
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
“Boutique mission and remit compared to like, I think, a lot of the other teams at HubSpot's missions and remit at the time. But even though that's what we were supposed to be working on on paper, we were sort of like, if we find something that looks like an opportunity and no one else in the business is thinking about it, we're just going to try to fix it. We're going to ask for forgiveness rather than permission and start to call some plays.”
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 so, you know, After Brian had left HubSpot, it was a bit start and stop. And so when I joined and we sort of took another stab at it. Think there are a few things we did. One in the beginning is we really had an aggressive mentality, an aggressive approach. I think, and by we, I mean the team, like the actual really small initial growth team. We tried not to be pedantic about where we were spending our time. And so we sort of tossed our mission and charter out of the window. We said, cool, maybe on paper, we were, I think, like the sales tool activation team. It was a very 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
“Would say the early years of doing freemium. And for the record, there's definitely an iteration of the growth team before I joined that really like Brian Balfour was the person who I would say injected that first dose of PLG DNA into HubSpot. So shout out to Brian. I want to make sure he gets the credit that he's owed.”
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
“Pandemic year is really fogged the brain that we've done it, and it's like one of the things I look most forward to every year is getting everybody in the same city to just hang out”
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
“Of letting it go. But one of the things that I think is like super dope that we do is we do this thing called Peer Week, which was something that popped up during the pandemic. And the TLDR is that it's kind of like an event for product and engineering where travel kind of changed with the pandemic and people don't get to see each other in person as much in the summer in June where we fly everybody in either if you're in North America we fly you to Cambridge if you were in Europe somewhere then we fly you to Dublin and we kind of spend a week together and there's there's not a ton of focus on just like classic productivity there's like a ton of focus on building connections and like safety and just like getting to know people and who they are is like as human beings but also like damn like I forgot how much I miss whiteboarding it's just like actually being able to get in a room with a physical whiteboard of people and work on some stuff and so this I think the second year in a row or second or third”
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, there's a ton. But, you know, I think there's definitely a very legitimate. School of thought around how, like Culture can both contribute to Inclusion, but also be a headwind to inclusion, right? Like, I think a lot of the things that I might associate with HubSpot culture are very much rooted in a specific period of HubSpot, right? It was probably a pre-pandemic period. It was probably a period where we were all sort of working in the same physical space. And so there's a lot of like inside jokes. And sometimes the things are rooted in very specific quirks of specific individuals who may not even be at the company anymore. And so if you're someone who's joined the company in the past like two or three years and that flies over your head, I think we have to ask ourselves, like, what's the value of continuing to embrace these things, right? And so I think what we've been doing over the years is sort of taking inventory of the things that like might have been considered part of HubSpot legacy culture and really trying to, again, pressure test it. Like, does this continue to serve us today? And if not, like, we should be really comfortable.”
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
“Transparency are sort of all things I think people take quite seriously. And so being really open and honest about that and being willing to sort of pressure test it on a regular basis, is this still the company we want to be? We're growing really fast. What has changed? What conditions are still able to be supported with the culture we have codified today? What amendments might we need to make in terms of who we want to represent ourselves to be to our customers and how we want to work with each other and investing in that? Hiring really good people that can help us scale that, I think, is something that makes HubSpot really special.”
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, Darmesh, you know, our co-founder, one of our fearless leaders, Darmesh, one of the things he most famously did early on is he published the HubSpot Culture Code externally. You can Google it and find it anywhere. I think a lot of companies sort of replicated that over the years. But by being sort of like really open and transparent about the culture, both internally and externally, I think one, internally, it creates alignment and it gives everyone something to point to sort of enforce like why do we choose to work with each other the way that we work with each other, right? I think it also helps in attracting the right type of candidates because we put it out there. We're sort of really open about it. If you don't like that culture, chances are you probably won't be super excited to work here. But if that's something that you're craving and I think a lot of quality people crave a lot of the things that are sort of codified in our culture, humility, empathy, adaptability, the market.”
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
“Enjoy that modality of work. I'm not one of them. And so by playing in the mid-market, it means our revenue is distributed more evenly across our entire install base, which means that there's no single customer who can hold us hostage, really. But what that does is, you know, with great power comes great responsibility. I think what that does is the forcing function of ensuring that the decisions that we make are a net benefit for the largest swath of customers possible. And I think it really is a guiding light behind some of our decisions around like connected experience and usability and user experience. And so playing in the mid-market, I think affords us to be able to do that. So I think that's another thing that makes us special for a company like of our size. Culture is another one. And I won't get into the culture code. I think a lot of folks have probably read it. If not, go check it out.”
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, so we were talking about the things that make HubSpot special. So, customer obsession is definitely one. I think where we play in the market too, like, you know, being a company that has been comfortable sort of staying in the mid-market SMB midmarket space and like resisting the temptation to try to crawl up into enterprise software, I think makes us special. And one of the things is actually really straightforward, which is that a lot of enterprise software companies, a lot of your revenue is tied up in a small subset of customers. And I think what can happen there is that those customers decide that they want you to build something and they're willing to sort of threaten their business over it, then you'll end up building it. And is that necessarily the thing that is going to serve all your customers best? Probably not. Are you going to end up having to build and maintain the spoke software for one customer? Probably. And don't get me wrong. I think there's a lot of product folks out there who”
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
“Call out assumptions that they might be making. So if we do this, what would you predict to be some of the derivative sort of downstream things? And if we can kind of like call those things out and just kind of keep asking why, why, why to sort of justify some of the direction you want to go in and then keep asking what, what, what in terms of what's the sort of like true glass radius and domino effect of these decisions is the approach that we take at HubSpot in my teams at least.”
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 don't know that we even talk about problems without a qualifier. Like, are we talking about a business problem? Are we talking about a customer problem? Are we talking about an efficiency problem? Describe the nature of the problem and parse it out. Because if there's, generally, like speaking, if there's a business problem, right, you might do the thought exercise of asking like, well, why hasn't that problem solved itself? What's the actual customer problem that is leading to the downstream negative thing that's happening to the business? And if we can actually create some daylight between those two things conceptually, we can avoid making them a mistake of trying to solve a business problem in a way that leads to a bad outcome for the customer at the end of the day. And I think also creating a system that makes it easy for PMs 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
“There's definitely structure you could put around customer centricity. And I think a lot of it for growth at HubSpot and the teams that I lead, it's around forcing specificity of language. So for example, you look at like a lot of standard documentation for features or experiments, whatever. And one of the first things it's like outline the problem.”
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
“We need to do in the short term to survive versus long term, like where are we going? What's the chart? What's the path that we're actually charting is I think the true tension. But if you're making decisions that might have like lasting impact that our customer hostile, like I think that's a really dangerous path to kind of go down. And so having, I think the discipline or the bravery or the courage, whatever, to, I think, focus on not necessarily tomorrow or the day after. And what are the decisions we need to make in the interim that are going to lead to that outcome? If you stick to that sort of framework or first principle is a better way to describe it, then I think you'll often end up arriving at the conclusion that doing the thing that's right for customers at the end of the day is the right decision.”
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, I think that's a really fantastic, maybe not counterpoint, but thing to call out. My point of view here is that oftentimes it's a function of what's the time horizon that the company uses as their sort of baseline for assessing decisions, right? And typically when you're making decisions that could be described as like hostile towards your customers, but a net positive for the business, you're probably not thinking long term enough, right? Because there's no possible way unless you are completely corner to market and there is no competition whatsoever that you could continually be hostile towards your customers and grow, right? Like at some point that's going to catch up. And so oftentimes I think it's the tension of”
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's a lot in there. I can speak to the things that have resonated most deeply with me in my time there. The first is. Legitimate customer obsession It's not marketing, it's legitimate, right? Like I've witnessed fierce and passionate debates internally that the root of what the people in the debate were really trying to unpack was what was the best thing for the customer. And so really having that be central to our dogma and how we think about the business and why the company exists in the first place, like really walking the walk there is something that I don't, I don't know that that's true everywhere, right? I mean, I've certainly worked at places where that hasn't been true. And there's a lot of factors that can lead to those trade-off decisions at times. Like, is this the right thing for the business, the right thing for the customer being really challenging? I think just sort of having that customer centricity really baked into the DNA of the company makes those decisions maybe not easier, but at least you can have more”
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, shout out Jules. Jules is also someone who has been generous with me in the past in terms of giving time when I've needed help with stuff. Also great episode you did with Jules.”
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 the calculus that goes on in folks' brains, but at least that's what's within my control is how I can show up in the context of those relationships and sort of really embrace even the hardest ugliest feedback and hope that I can extract something from it that'll make me better at the end of the day.”
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
“Something I think I certainly continue to work on, but really. Putting ego aside and embracing not knowing stuff and embracing not being good at stuff and not feeling self-conscious about that and letting the desire to be the best at something or at least be great at something overpower the fear of being inadequate at something and I played sports growing up and so I like being coached like I can take hard feedback and I like it because if I get better feedback then the people I'm competing against I think I can beat them right over time if I work hard enough and so I think just like taking that mentality with me into product management I think has helped me build bridges with people who don't owe me anything right people who don't necessarily need to be invested in me at all but who might get delight out of it somehow you know and I don't know exactly how that works”
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 imagine that there was something in there where the decision maker who was freed said, I think I can make something out of this, right? And I think being willing to invest in someone and finding people who are willing to invest in you is what really matters. And finding people who are willing to, again, put something up for you, whether that be Whatever kind of capital it is, when I think about true gasoline on the career fire, it's finding Mentors, but it's also finding sponsors and advocates.”
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
“Calling them mentors, I think, sells what they were very short. And I would actually describe those folks as being sponsors and advocates, people who were willing to put up capital, right? Whether that's professional, social capital to bet on you. I mean, truth be told, when I interviewed with Farid that first time, I think back to that interview, and I think I bombed it. I don't think I actually don't think I would have hired me back then. I actually think And I remember the answers I gave to some of those questions and I don't think that I think they were good, but I don't think they were certainly great.”
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
“Gets into sort of a conversation about the difference between a manager and a mentor versus a sponsor and an advocate. Mentors are great. Don't get me wrong. I have a ton of people that I would consider to be mentors. But when I think about the people in my life who The time that they donated to me, the time that they volunteered to me and for 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
“Yeah, that's why talking to customers Could have all the usage data in the world, that's going to tell you what's actually happening in your product, but it doesn't tell you why, right? It will never explain the why behind a behavior that you can track through events firing. And so that's why that sort of proximity to the customer and that Directing that sort of relentless curiosity towards the sort of qualitative stuff is so important because you just learn things that just sometimes really unintuitive for our blind spots because we're often not the people we're building product for.”
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 day at our core, right? And like that all rides on decisions people make in the day to day, and it doesn't change necessarily when they're engaging with your product as much as we love it to be perfect science so that we can moneyball the system, if you will.”
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
“Time management, and it feels like you need 60 hours in a day to get through your weekly checklist or 60 hours in a week, excuse me, but finding time to just talk to people, like even today, like I have a lot of friends who are entrepreneurs or small business owners and some use HubSpot, some don't, but I usually tend to really enjoy my conversations with people who decided not to use HubSpot and to really try to unpack what drove that decision. Was it as calculated as I think sometimes we can all maybe assume that some of these decisions are. And then you often learn that there's sometimes kind of emotional, like really instinctual and visceral and maybe connected to brands more than they've even connected to product. And there's a lot of things that I think when you're in the proverbial digital conference room with your team trying to understand what makes your users tick, you're just like, we're actually just, we're illogical humans at the end.”
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 customers, and we also learned a lot from talking to people who we wanted to be customers, but we're not, right? And people who had either broken up with our product or evaluated it and never fell in love with it in the first place. And so I think every PM struggles with”
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
“From Thereed and that group of folks that I worked with closely during those years. And that was, I think, the, I consider that to be when I really became a product manager.”
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 so having data at scale to drive decisions, being able to know that if we make a change, we can prove causation from like a business impact standpoint or a customer delight or engagement standpoint. And so it was almost like I didn't realize I was blind until or you didn't realize you weren't seeing in color like that scene in the Wizard of Oz where they land on Oz and all of a sudden everything's in technical color and you're like, oh my gosh, I can actually make informed decisions about what I'm shipping, right? And having like a level of rigor around that and really being forced to articulate a hypothesis and have a point of view on what the outcomes might be before you actually build something, we're all sort of, I would say, behaviors and just like a philosophy around product discipline that I learned.”
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
“Last October, shout out to Farid if you're listening. Farid is a good friend and mentor. Help me level up. And what was interesting about Those years, it was the first time I'd really gotten to work on a product where it was a freemium B2C run tracking app. And so we spent a lot of time talking to users directly. And a lot of guerrilla user research techniques. Literally sometimes going outside and just talking to runners and passing to understand sort of what were the challenges in finding motivation and sort of why do they choose running assistance, running applications in the first place. And so just that having that deep connection to the customer and not feeling like you're being kept at arm's distance was high opening. I was like, oh, I didn't know that it could be like this. And then the second thing that we had at our disposal that was changed the game for me was access to a huge user data.”
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 was working at a fitness technology company and the person who really, I would say, changed my entire paradigm of what product management is supposed to be someone I know you know, Fried Mosabot, who I believe was on the pod.”
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 challenges that that created were that there was a lot of distance between us and the voice of the customer. And we ended up building a lot of things to satisfy the buyer and the customer, but not necessarily the end user. And that's challenging because you don't necessarily know whether you're building something to get a contract signed or you're building something that's going to delight the person using it at the end of the day or provide sort of like magical value. And so I think I probably shipped a lot of bad product those years, if I'm being completely honest. I don't know that I would look back at what I shipped back then or what we shipped back then and sort of say like, you know, they were the best possible solutions or best possible product. It wasn't until I got my second product management job where it really was an inflection point where I was like, oh, God, this is what this is supposed to look and feel 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
“Yeah, so my first product management sort of like Was working on a B2B to C product. And there's a lot of unique challenges that came with that. Our customer was not the end user of our product. We sold into institutions who then white labeled our product and then resold it to the end customer. So, at the end of the day, our customers only”
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
“To you and do a little bit of volunteer labor, even if that's just shadowing, right? Because I think just getting that context and understanding the sort of rhythm of how a team ideates and defines problems and prioritizes and ships software is the experience that's going to be the most important because a lot of product management is also managing personalities and figuring out how people want to work with you and figuring out how you work for them. And so just getting that hands-on hands-on experience or at least direct sightline into sort of the day-to-day of a team is really important because the extent to which you can understand their problem space and understand the things that keep them up at night can be valuable and then at the very least what you get out of it is hopefully an advocate, right? A sponsor at the end of the day who is willing to gamble some professional and political capital on you to get your”
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
“Looks different in every company. And so it is one of those functions. I do believe that taking like a truly academic approach towards upskilling has fairly diminishing returns because it's tough to field curveballs in a classroom. And so choosing where you want to break in is almost as important as choosing that you want to break in in the first place. thinking about who you're going to be reporting to, thinking about what's the track record of success for people at that company breaking into product management, trying to think five years in advance and work backwards, I think are all sort of important thought exercises along the way. I would also say that if you're already at a shop where you are working at a different function and you're sort of like product curious, right, go talk to the PN and literally what I say is like go reach out to a PM and ask how you can make their day easier. Figure out what you can do in your spare time that they can offload.”
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 few things. One, focus on structure, right? I think there's usually a lower barrier to entry to do product management at like a smaller shop, which they might not have as much access to the best talent out there, right? But I think what you may often give up in those instances is structured to your own sort of professional development and formal training and education and potentially even the opportunity to work for people who are like truly battle tested and have seen the movie several times and can actually like wisdom share because truthfully.”
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
“Least in the world that I was in, a lot more of like a standard waterfall approach to building product with a lot of middle layers of engineering managers and really no one who had the job of owning the problem from a customer's point of view. And so there wasn't a ton of content out there and weren't even a ton of people in the city at the time that I could really talk to to sort of learn. And so a lot of what I did was scrape my knees through the first years and a lot of like painful trial and error. And then, you know, eventually I think there's a lot more energy and interest around the trade craft and the function. And so I think it's much easier today for someone to learn the fundamentals of product management without necessarily needing to do it via like trial by fire. My advice to folks who are interested in breaking into product management specifically is focus”
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
“So, first, yes, that is 100% true. That is how I stumbled into product management. So I appreciate all the folks who took a shot on me back then. But yeah, I mean, this was at a time where I would say product management has been as a function was definitely not ubiquitous across tech. Like there was a lot more.”
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
“Widget is the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning. Growth might not be for you, right? I think the best growth product leaders and growth minds that I've worked with over the years or have had the privilege of learning from over the years, I think the thing that I notice about them is they are almost like Ambivalent to the solution and certainly ambivalent to how complex a solution may or may not be and sort of taking like little to no pleasure or pride in the complexity of a solution so long that it delivers the outcome that the business and your customers need, I think is a really cool trait. And I kind of like categorize that under creativity.”
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
“In the sense that I still think that the sort of subcategory of growth product management is still fledgling compared to PMs working on platform features. And so even when I'm interviewing folks, I'm not necessarily looking for 10 years of experience doing PLG. I think that's mostly an unreasonable ask, but it can certainly be taught. And even if you do have some experience doing PLG work, it's important to know that what that work is going to look like is going to potentially vary in a meaningful way from shop to shop. And so being coachable and adaptable to whatever the context is of the business or problem space that you're working on, I think is an important trait that I look for in PMs. And then creativity is so important too. Valuing simple solutions to really hard problems. I think if building the next super”
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 future. But I think if you're not resilient, what I've seen happen is you end up sort of grasping for a win, which can sometimes look like making bets that are too small and too insignificant to matter, right? If your sort of primary modality of product-led growth work is experiment driven product development and you're hitting more than like 30, 40% of the time, you're thinking too small, right? And so that resiliency piece is certainly important in my mind. I think coachability is another one.”
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, relentless curiosity is probably my number one. My number two would probably be resilience, specifically if you're working in growth, I think. You're doing growth right, like if you're doing product-led growth the right way, then you're trying to balance the science and sort of taking a somewhat hygienic approach to validating assumptions and hypotheses with being really ambitious and really pushing for the things that are going to have massive impact for your customers at the end of the day. And when you're doing that, you're going to fail more than you're going to be successful along the way, right? And if you're not resilient, that can be really demotivating, right? Like, I think there's a stat that some growth person put out there years ago, which is that on average, only 20 to 30 percent of experiments a growth team runs might be successful. So that means like 70 to 80 percent of the time you're not putting numbers on the board and you're extracting learnings, hopefully that you can apply.”
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. One of the traits that I look for in PMs that I hire onto my teams. And also when I think back to the people that I've learned a lot from working with over the years, one of the common behaviors or traits is like relentless curiosity, this like insatiable desire to understand things and a lack of fear in Admitting when they don't understand things and being uncompromising and getting the answers so that they do understand. It's much easier to have an outsized impact on whatever or you're a part of or whatever mission you're working on or whatever team you may be a member of.”
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
“Not exactly what we expected in terms of, I think, people welcoming maybe a contrarian point of view at that moment in time. And so we sort of were invited into this meeting with folks that we generally don't get to spend a lot of time with to pitch this thing that swam a little bit upstream and we ultimately didn't go full steam ahead down that path. I think a lot of elements of what we pitched have made their way over time into HubSpot's pricing and packaging. But it certainly, I think, opened the door for us and for me, speaking for myself, certainly for me to be welcome back into that room in the future and to be able to contribute ideas towards important decisions.”
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
“European headquarters, and there was a party happening at the Guinness sort of storehouse. And I don't know that we were exactly on the guest list, but we figured out a way to get into the party. And we ran into the COO at the time. And out of the blue, I think he had asked us what we thought about pricing and packaging. It was sort of one of those funny you should ask moments, right? And so we ended up kind of pitching in the midst of pints being sort of handed, you know, every which way you turn. This vision for a completely different way we might approach pricing and packaging. And he was pretty intrigued. And he said, why don't you come to the next executive meeting and pitch us on it? I think that meeting was maybe a couple weeks away. And so we looked at each other. We were like, uh oh.”
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
“This is a funny story. For anybody, it helps out listening. I apologize in retrospect for this. There was a time where we were having a lot of debates around pricing and packaging and, you know, we'll get into this, but our go-to-market model and sort of where we play in the addressable market create some complexity in the sense of we're serving different parts of the market simultaneously with the connected unified platform. And so how do you think about packaging and go to market? And we were trying to just figure out how to simplify, simplify, simplify. At the time I was in IC individual contributing PM, so who am I to sort of have a point of view of right something and packaging? But the person I was working with, my designer, her name is Mariah Moscato. She's in product master. She's excellent. We were part of a triad and we sort of both had a similar school of thought in terms of what the pricing and packaging could be. And we were over in Dublin where we have our”
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, everything's so scheduled and tightly scheduled, and you're bouncing from Zoom to Zoom. And obviously HubSpot has embraced hybrid and there's a ton of benefit to it. In fact, I was a new dad when I came back to work and my son wasn't in daycare. And so it was so cool to just be able to like pop out in between meetings and play with them for a few minutes just to go back and you don't get that when you're in the office all day. So definitely a lot of upside, but certainly you got to be a little bit more creative in terms of that serendipitous knowledge sharing, the osmosis learning and just context sharing that happens more organically when everybody's sharing the same physical space.”
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 was curious about how other parts of the business function. 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, you know, 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 content 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 have missed if you would have been so heads down on execution work. And so I think that 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.”
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