Growing leads into prospects

HubSpot

Jan 27

As Director of Design in HubSpot's 300-person Marketing department, I led a six-designer team through a service-provider-to-strategic-partnership transformation. Over two years, I codified the design process, merged the team's design system into HubSpot's Canvas, and built a team culture that measured 4.1/5 on team health.

    
      6
    
      designers
    
    4.1/5
    
       team health
    
      1
    
      design partnership model

Five months in, I led the team through the most important change of my tenure: a shift from a fully centralized service model to what Peter Merholz calls centralized partnership. Instead of working alone on tickets pulled from a queue, each designer became embedded with a key strategic team within Marketing and paired long-term with marketing managers, engineers, and video editors.

The change was structural. Designers were now included in strategic planning, goal-setting, and roadmap conversations from the start. Rich context produced higher-quality design outcomes, and the long-term partnerships built trust across disciplines that the ticket model had never made room for.

Alongside the model change, I codified a shared design process—adapted from IDEO and the Stanford d.school but rewritten in HubSpot's terminology with a lightweight responsibility matrix—so the team could ship consistently across partner teams. And I redirected the team's internal design system effort toward a merger with Canvas, HubSpot's product-side system, so audience experiences stayed coherent even when org boundaries shifted.

Setting the vision

Collaboration with others starts with a clear understanding of one’s own role. I led several design team workshops to refine our SLAs (service-level agreements):

Purpose: How do we define our work?
Scope: Where does our work end, and others’ begin?
Reporting: What information does our team need to communicate up the chain?
Desired result: What’s our highest goal?
Deliverables: What should we produce?

This document was reviewed, evolved, and finalized in partnership with cross-functional teams and their leads.

Safety in our team

Based on Edmondson's framework, a senior team member ran a baseline survey of our team across five dimensions: psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact. We averaged 4.1/5 across them, with psychological safety as our lowest score and meaning as our highest. The data gave us a baseline for growth and opened important space for dialogue about where we needed work.

Inclusion

Fostering a sense of inclusion requires a commitment to visibility and vulnerability on the part of leaders. In addition to our organization’s adoption of the DiSC behavior assessment protocol, I wrote and distributed my own “user guide” to help my team and colleagues understand more about my background and how best to collaborate with me.

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Color swatches from HubSpot’s Canvas design system, which my team' merged into during my tenure

Senior leadership keynotes

As the most senior designer in Marketing, I partnered with HubSpot's cofounders and CPO to design the visuals for their INBOUND keynote addresses (Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah, and Christopher O'Donnell) projected on the 120-foot main stage screen. The work was high-stakes production design under tight timelines, requiring careful coordination across Brand, Video, and the speakers themselves.