Project Object

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Welcome to another event of the HubSpot admins hug. We're here every Tuesday at this time. Great to have you here. This is our homepage. This is your source of truth for all of our weekly events. Be sure to bookmark this, keep an eye on it especially as we're heading into the new year. Make sure this is this is a part of your plan for 2026. You are here. We've got Mark with us. He's going to talk about the new projects object inside of HubSpot. Very excited for that. Next week will be our last session for the year. We're going to do a little bit of admin networking and before that Deanna and I will give some awards to various people and do a readout of some of the stats. Just interesting fun facts about what the what the admin hug has been like in 2025. So encourage you all to come see if your name gets read on a slide of fame or something. We have a couple of weeks, we're taking off for the end of the year and then January we've got booked already. We're going to talk about HubSpot AI connectors, going to dive deep in help desk, talk about the new flexible CRM views are exciting and then this Goodbye Data Gaps the team that works on HubSpot's data model tools. So the data model overview, data model builder properties, all that stuff is going to talk about how they're closing the gaps of how different objects have had different functionalities and we're getting to parody.

It's very exciting.

So keep an eye on this page to know what's coming. This is our YouTube channel where you can find recordings of our previous sessions. This one I guess will make 180. Very exciting milestone. So if you ever want to rewatch or if you miss a session or if you want to share it with someone, this is your best place to do that. We have show and tells occasionally. We are going to schedule one probably for February. We'll let you know when that date is fixed. We still have room in that one and we are going to do these regularly throughout 2026. So if you ever build anything you're proud of, if you ever crack a puzzle inside of HubSpot, puzzles aren't cracked. Solve a puzzle, let us know. Fill out this, this form and we would love to have you share that with with everyone else here so we can all learn from each other. These are some of the best events we run in my opinion and we really want to have them Happen Quarterly in 2026. So that's the goal. We have a space on HubSpot Community. If you want a forum experience, you can do that. We also have a Group on LinkedIn and company page also. So you follow that, connect with with people here and then if you ever have suggestions for an upcoming hug, we are here every week. We love your suggestions. We want to make sure the content we're providing is as valuable and relevant as possible. You can fill out this form or you can always just reach out to me or Deanna directly. We're very active on LinkedIn and we'd love to hear from you. And then if you want to see any of these links I just shared and several others, Deanna's put together this little resource page where you can see everything on a single spot. So that's all for me. Two minutes of housekeeping. Not bad. Mark in San Diego handed over to you. Oh wait, hold on. You got to unmute yourself.

There we go. Unmuted. There we go. Everyone can see this.

Yep, perfect.

Hey everyone, my name is Mark. I work on the product management team at HubSpot. I'm excited to talk to you more about the Project Object today. So just to get started, I can start by I'll introduce myself a little bit. I've been on HubSpot for a little over two years. I've worked on two other teams before projects. I started out working on Permissions, then I was working on Multi Account Management and brands. And for those that aren't aware, Multi Account Management is is a set of features that help some of our larger customers with complex organizations to use separate HubSpot accounts. And now I'm working on projects. So it's actually only been a few months, probably about three or four months since I started working on projects. And actually HubSpot itself hasn't really been thinking about projects for too much longer than that. Some fun facts about Me I have a one year old daughter, I live in San Diego and some of my favorite things when I have any free time outside of parenting and working, I like to do yoga and I love to cook. All right, so let's get moving for some context. For those that aren't aware. HubSpot launched the project object at Inbound of 2025. Inbound was in September of this past year and is HubSpot's large one of our large events where this is the in person conference where we announced some of our major project announcements. So when we launched the Project Object that was paired with a new Gantt View type as well. And just to define some things for people that aren't as familiar with everything, with HubSpot we say project object because basically HubSpot has these different data objects that you store data within the platform. So for example, contacts, companies, deals, those are some of the classic objects that HubSpot has that refers to them being on what we call the HubSpot framework. And what we try to do is then have a consistent experience with a lot of out of the box capabilities, which I'll show some of them for projects that come with being an object within HubSpot. And when I talk about the Gantt view type, what I'm referring to on the screen here, next to the search bar, there's this dropdown where you can view the data that you're seeing in different ways. So for a while HubSpot's main view type was a table. And as part of the recent launch we've incorporated a Gantt view, which is obviously an important capability when it comes to project management. So before I go too much into demoing the feature or talk about the roadmap, I wanted to just talk a little bit more around what are the use cases that we've been seeing from customers as they start to do project management within HubSpot? And then why have we been seeing that customers want to do project management within HubSpot? So we've seen three main use cases for project management. The first is service delivery, the second is marketing campaign, project management, and then the third is around sales and account management. And the theme that you'll see that carries through all of these is that it relates to project management for go to market teams, which isn't too surprising because HubSpot's main users are go to market users across sales, service and marketing. And they have project management needs that it makes sense that they would want to do within HubSpot. So let me just go through these each one by one. Service delivery has been the most common use case that we've been seeing from customers for project management. And I break this down into three subcategories. So the first is software onboarding, the second is professional services. So shout out to all the I saw some solution partners on the call who have been really great at giving us feedback on projects. And the third is around physical good and production and delivery. And I put a fun fact here. So we look at who, what seats, seat types that customers have who are using projects, and about 50% of the active users of HubSpot have a service seat. So this has been the most common use case that we've been seeing. And I'll talk a little bit more around why that's so common. The second is around marketing campaign project management. So campaigns and the new marketing studio today offer tasks, but they fall short in true project management. And what we've been hearing is that customers want to have a more complete campaign project management software within HubSpot, the third category is sales and account management. And this has been a couple of different types of sub use cases. So when it comes to sales, we've been seeing some businesses that want to have a more structured container for tasks for their sales process. So for example, like an enterprise sales motion where you have a group of people who are involved, you might have a task for getting an executive involved, a task for creating a PowerPoint, et cetera. And the second is around account plans. So say you're an account manager thinking about an account and you're coming up with what's the goal for this account for next year? Year. And one of those goals might be let's up, we want to try to upsell this customer to a new tier or we want to cross sell them to a separate product. Those have a collection of tasks that you want to track progress on. And we've seen some customers want to use those projects. A lot of this relates to how can a project be associated to some of the other objects that exist within HubSpot for context. So now let's go, why use projects now? It varies a little bit by the use case, but there have been three main themes that we're hearing around. What are the benefits of bringing these types of use cases into HubSpot for project management? The first is customer data and that is that HubSpot has the context on your customer inside of the platform. This is really relevant, particularly for a service delivery. A sales account management use case where you're creating projects that relate to the associated CRM data. So for example, if we think about service delivery, when you're creating a project for onboarding a customer or delivering a service, there's some really useful context that exists on the deal that can help figure out what are the right tasks for that project. The second is having the complete lead to revenue journey within HubSpot from both a ease of collaboration and usability. And the other is from a reporting perspective. We've consistently heard from customers that they're doing their marketing in HubSpot, they're doing their sales process in HubSpot and, and that they're frustrated that once the deal closes, they have to move away into another software to manage that onboarding process. Now you can do that end to end process in one place and now you can do reporting that thinks about what's the complete revenue reporting of this entire journey. And the final one is around planning and executing in one place. This is particularly relevant on the marketing campaign side. So we've heard from customers is that they come to HubSpot's marketing hub. They, they're planning, they're creating their assets, they're running their campaigns, they're doing their reporting. But a lot of the times when it comes to creating the assets for a campaign, there's different people involved, it takes time. There's these planning process to doing that and there's a planning process to running a campaign. You have to go speak to finance and figure out the budget for your campaign, et cetera. And what's happening is that none of that could be really tracked effectively within HubSpot. And so we were hearing from customers that they have to log into HubSpot to do that, to do some of their campaign work, then they log into another software to do some of their planning process and they really just want to do it all within one place. So those are the top three reasons that we're seeing from customers for why they want to use projects inside of HubSpot. I think one thing that I would call out that you would explicitly see that we're not focused on. So we're focused on how can we help these existing go to market teams do their job processes better within HubSpot. What we are not really focused on is, for example, take myself. I'm a product manager, I do project management for my roadmap for the features that we build. And we're not really saying that I'm a target Persona to come into HubSpot. That may change in the future, but for the time being we're really focused on how can we take the existing types of users for HubSpot and provide them more value. Now let's do a demo of how projects works within HubSpot to start out. What I'll just share with you all to start is that when you first want to use Projects, you have to come to the data model, which is a feature that allows you to turn on and off objects within HubSpot. So we'll go to edit the data model and within it you can see that I have here that Projects is already activated. But if you hadn't yet turned on Projects, you would see a little box, a card Here where you have to click activate the object. This is just for context. Projects is available to all customers on all plans, so everyone is able to do this. Now. Once you activate the object, projects will appear in the CRM section of the navigation. This is what we call a project index page, and this is where you'll see the projects that you create. It follows similar patterns to contacts, companies, deals, etc. So hopefully people are familiar with it. You can see the different view types here. So a table view is a pretty classic experience that customers have for managing objects within HubSpot. But now new with the release of projects is the Gantt view. For context, the Gantt view requires you to have a starter plan at least. So once you actually create a project, we'll click into these are all just fake projects that I have. You'll be taken into the project record. Something that we recently released about a month ago as a follow up is this task card. We felt that viewing tasks within the activity section, which is another way that you can view tasks within a project, wasn't quite as effective or front and center. So we created this task card that shows the task really right in front of you. You can expand here to manage some of the associations between the project and other CRM data, just to show some of the other platform concepts that come with having a new CRM object. There is now a settings page. So to access that you come to settings, you scroll down to objects, you click on projects. What you'll see here is here you can get access to then go manage the project properties. Projects have both default properties as well as custom properties. You are now in the properties page where you can click Create property and that's a standard custom property. We also have the ability to have pipelines here for context. With pipelines, what the idea here is that if you have different types of use cases for projects. For example, say you have a project for service delivery. Another set of use cases of projects for marketing campaigns, you might want to adjust what the process is for that project, which you can do with different pipelines. Next, moving along, projects now also exist within workflows. So if you come to create a workflow to give two different types of examples, one of them that you can do is to have a workflow that triggers off of a project. So when a project is created, you could then do things on top of that. So right now we don't yet have project templates, which is something that we're investing in, where you would have the ability to automatically create a set of Tasks when a project's created. But in the short term, you could use workflows to be able to, for example, create a set of tasks every time a project is created. Another good use case for using workflows is from a service delivery perspective, every time a deal is closed, one, let's just try to do this. If I could do this quickly. We want to do deal, Deal properties is closed one is equal to true. Now what this is going to do is have a workflow where every time a deal is closed one, we then want to create a new corresponding project. So you can see that we have actions like create record. We also have another one that is around editing a record. But in this case, we would be creating a record for creating a project. Now, right now it's just creating a project. It's not then creating the associated tasks. You could do subsequent actions to create tasks over time, which I'll speak about a little bit more later. We're going to have the ability to have project templates where this can be a simpler process to create the right set of tasks when you create a project. So this is how workflows works with projects. And finally we'll pop over to Reports. So projects is now an object that's available in both single object reports and custom reports that follow similar patterns to every other object within HubSpot. So if you come to create a custom report, you'll now see Projects are available here. So a lot of customers, what they'll do is they'll take projects, they'll join it with tasks and then create reports on top of that. I won't go through the process of showing you all the reports, but you, you can get the idea. All right, so this is how Projects is currently existing within HubSpot. Everyone is welcome to use it. It functions really similar to other other objects like contacts, companies and deals. So hopefully it's not intimidating for people and you all. I would encourage you all to get started and so just try it out. Now let's go in and talk a little bit more about the roadmap. Where we're heading is that we are really focused on the top two use cases that we've heard from customers. The first is service delivery and the second is marketing campaign project management. And in order for us to effectively solve for those two use cases, we're investing in two categories of improvements. And you'll have to excuse me, I'm going to walk upstairs. I was trying to be quiet while my daughter was asleep upstairs. So give me a second while I Move up to my desk upstairs. Some live parenting and remote work environment. Cool. So just to keep talking. So the two categories of improvements that we're investing in are core capabilities and core experiences, so to speak. To core capabilities, that's really the biggest area that we have to do better in. So for those of you have tried out projects since it was launched at Inbound, I think what your experience will be, which is what we've consistently heard, is that customers are excited to bring projects into HubSpot, but that we're missing a lot of core project management capabilities that are required for them to be willing to do so. So I'm going to go through some of these we have designs for, so I'm going to show you what some of those designs look like, others we won't. I'm happy in the Q and A to speak to any timelines, any ideas that we have of the requirements, etc. For these features. So for core capabilities, the first is subtasks. The second are task dependencies. The third are project templates so that when you create a project, it automatically creates an associated set of tasks. The fourth is status updates so you can post an update for what's going on with your project. You could notify your other HubSpot users, you could send an email to customers if you're doing a service delivery use case. The next is custom properties for tasks, just to make sure that that's clear. Right now, projects have default and custom properties, but tasks only have default properties. There's no ability to have a custom property for a task just to give my own use case. I use Hub projects for my own product planning just to use the product myself. I can't put a custom property on a task like which engineer is responsible for that task. In addition to saying, like, I'm running a project, but I want to say who is the designer for this, who is the engineer? And we can't define those things well today. The next is projects in the customer portal. This is really relevant for a service delivery use case. Right now, how projects works is it's really just inside of your HubSpot account. So you create a project, you have tasks that you can only assign to HubSpot users, and this isn't really good enough for a service delivery use case. When it comes to service delivery, you need to be able to share a project externally with the customer that you're working with and be able to assign certain tasks to be completed by those customers or clients. So what we're doing is we're collaborating with HubSpot's customer portal concepts so that for every customer you can have a unique URL where they will be able to log into that URL and see a project and certain tasks that are assigned to them. Complete those tasks that doesn't require them to be invited to your own HubSpot account. Next we have time tracking, which will allow you to track the estimated and actual time for tasks and have that roll up to the project level. And then finally, for core capabilities is a workload view so that you'll be able to visualize across your users within HubSpot what is the work that's assigned to them relative to their capacity and are they at their allocation or not. So these are all the core capabilities. And when it comes to the core experiences, what we're saying is what I demoed for you was that Projects exists within the project navigation section. What we want to do for the two use cases is also bring projects into the contextual experiences that these users have when they use Marketing Hub and Service Hub. So for projects being in the CS workspace, this was actually something that I didn't demo, but I can jump in and just show you quickly actually that it would be good to call out. This is actually already live in our production environments right now. So if you come over to the CS workspace, you can now see that Projects, let's hide. This project is now actually a tab within the Customer success workspace and is the default recommended object for customer success when it comes to onboarding. So we're expecting that for many Customer success and onboarding professionals, they will live out of this customer success workspace. And it's important that Projects integrates into here effectively. The other one that is listed here is Marketing Studio. So for those that aren't familiar, Marketing Studio is a redesigned new version of campaigns within HubSpot. And we are working to bring projects into that experience for customers that wanted to take their project management to the next level within Marketing, within Marketing Studio. Okay, only five minutes or so more. I just want to show you some screenshots and some details of things that I do have available. So what you're seeing here is Subtasks, which we're building right now. Subtasks will be entering into a beta in January. What you're seeing here is in our gantt view, you'll have the ability to create subtasks and you can see how there's this third level of subtasks that are. It goes projects, tasks and subtasks. You'll also be able to create and edit subtasks within the task creation and other places as well over time. Next, we have status updates. This is also going to have a beta in January. And you can see here we're creating a new CRM card. This is what you're seeing here is a project preview. The project status card would also be available within a project record and you can see how a user has posted a status update here. I'm not showing the whole process. We are going to allow you to manually enter a project status update as well as have AI help you generate it and have you review it. You'll then also be able to share this with external users such as your customers, as well as notify other people within your company that are working on this project. Here you're seeing dependencies. We're aiming for a beta for this in about April of next year. What you're seeing is that you can see these lines between the different tasks, which is a pretty standard way to visualize a dependency between tasks as a drag and drop environment. What this is saying is that task A is blocking the work of task C. You can see how this task is currently blocked. The subtask is blocked, this task is blocked. So these are some of the ways that we're going to visualize dependencies for our customers. Next, we have templates. So what you're seeing here is within the settings page of projects, we're going to have a new tab for project templates where users can create templates. And within that you'll be able to predefined tasks for a given project template so that when that template is then used either manually or in a workflow, we will auto generate the set of tasks that you would expect. These tasks will also have a concept of a relative due date based off of things like the project start date. So instead of having to enter 50 task due dates, you can just say, oh, this task will start about a week after the project's created and will finish two weeks after the project created, which can automate some of that work that you might have to do to set up a new project. This I just demoed so I won't go too much more detail. Projects is now the default object within the customer success workspace instead of the service object for customers to handle their service delivery onboarding process. All right, that was everything that I have to go through. I'm happy to go through a Q and A process now with everyone and answer any questions that I might be able to.

Love it. Amazing. I imagine you were not able to see the chat during that, just given the nature of a web based webinar, but mostly, lots of love. People are so excited about projects being here and everything. Everything they want is on your list for next year. So you, you are all, all, all your, your plans are validated by this particular group. So we're gonna do Q and A now. Hop over into that panel, drop your questions in, look through the questions, quickly upvote the ones you most want to hear about. We will go most upvoted to least upvoted and get through as many as we possibly can. I'll give you like 10 seconds here, then I'll sort it. I used to promise a minute and that I could never ever wait that long. Are you telling me I can't even wait 10 seconds? Oh, it's killing me. All right, most voted question with 13 upvotes from Dale. We really need subtasks and custom properties in both tasks and subtasks to make it a viable solution for us. Is there a timeline on these pieces making it to the beta environment? Well, Dale. Yes. This question came in right at the beginning, 1105. So you just, just answered that. I don't know if there's more color you want to add, we can move.

On to the next one. Subtasks we are closer, as I mentioned, is going to be ready in January. It's what our team's working on right now. Custom properties is something that we're still figuring out, a timeline and we're hoping that custom properties will be at some point in the first half of next year. But we don't have a precise timeline when we have custom properties. They would work on both tasks and subtasks, though.

Awesome subtasks from a creation view and with task queues and that thing. Will they behave just like a normal task but in the hierarchy of a project?

Yeah. Subtasks are a task for people that are familiar with our object concepts. As we were talking about. Subtasks are a task object. So they will be manifested in the product in a way that's cohesive with how tasks work. And I can actually, just for the sake of a live experience, just show you something that we're working on right now, which is just help you understand that concept a little better. We right now are currently building subtasks and you're seeing this within our test environment. Just to help make that clear, when I edit this, I'll add a subtask here. You can just see I didn't show this in the, in the PowerPoint but you can see right here there's now this subtask component within editing a task, and we're going to save that. And what's going to happen here is you can start to see how there's this. What we're doing is we're starting to flatten the subtasks into the task. So like when you see tasks represented elsewhere in the product with a list of tasks over time, you'll start to see this experience of where they're sort of consolidated into the parent task that you're seeing. And we will be figuring out how these elegantly get handled through things like task queues as well over time.

Amazing. That's awesome. Thanks for showing that. Love to see something in the building development stages. Michelle asks do you plan to incorporate time tracking into projects? We track projects by hourly billing retainers which also function based on hours, either native time tracking built in or integrations with existing time tracking apps. We of course want to take it a step further and manage invoicing as well.

Got it. Yes, we are. That is one of the top projects that we're going to be working on and actually our designer is currently working on how time tracking will function within HubSpot. Right now. The general way that we're thinking about this is that on the tasks there will be an estimated time and an actual time spent property. Those properties can allow multiple time entries, either in the form of hours or minutes. And then the idea is that that time would then be rolled up at the project level. And then what we're planning to do is to pair that, as I mentioned, with a workload view where you'll be able to say for a given user what's the both count of tasks, the time that's being assigned to that user over time, you can enter in their capacity and then we'll be telling you are they at capacity or not. In general, we agree with all of you that this category of resource management is equally critical to the core project management use cases as far as how it connects into invoicing. So we actually just built the enabled and association between projects and line items. We are very interested in figuring out how to further the connection between projects and billing. Like as we mentioned, the number one use case that we're solving for is service delivery. So time tracking, resource allocation, the billing process of those tasks, we understand how important those are and are looking forward to making them work really well over the next year.

That's amazing. It makes a lot of sense because HubSpot has that stuff in there.

Already.

Sarah also asked about time tracking. You answered that Lindsey wants time tracking. So answered that uh, Ali says would like to be able to set up recurring tasks. Is that something you're thinking about?

So recurring tasks are a concept that already exists within HubSpot. Um, so today on a task there's a button that you can click that makes it a recurring task. That concept still exists within projects for when you're creating a task. So I think that I would just say like that feature already exists. I'd be happy if you want to like email me and share where it's working or not working for you to hear more from you.

Great. Charlene says can you trigger transactional emails from projects similar to tickets I. E. Thank you slash onboarding email to the client?

I I think that's a one that I would say I don't have the an exact off the top of my head knowledge of exactly how transition transactional emails work in HubSpot. Conceptually the use case that you want to do is something that we want to enable. So if it's not enabled effectively you should follow up with me. Like I certainly know that you can have a workflow triggered off of a project that then has an action of a marketing email. But I will admit I have not studied transactional email specifically enough to say if there's something else that's missing like you can just to continue forward. Like you could create contact lists of contacts based off of the associated project data. So I think the answer to this should be yes, but if you run into any challenges you can let me know.

Great. Charlene asks is the plan with projects to compete with other PM softwares like teamwork with the ability to see team members capacity on projects? You mentioned capacity a little bit in passing.

Yes, we will provide capacity planning capabilities in terms of how we think about our our competition with other project management softwares. The way I would personally think about is that there are benefits to doing certain use cases within HubSpot without leaving HubSpot. And there will be some businesses that only need a certain standard set of capabilities for project management and they will find the value in using HubSpot's projects for that purpose and not having to use another software. There will be other businesses that have more advanced project management capability needs that we are not going to deliver upon. The idea is that we want to have both a native solution and a bi directional integration with major project management software. So there's flexibility for you to choose what the right option is for you. So just to play that Example out the Marketing Studio team is both planning to offer native project management through HubSpot as well as having integrations with softwares like Asana Monday, et cetera. So if you prefer to do your project management outside of HubSpot, you'll be able to do so as well.

I love that. That to me just feels like classic HubSpot technique. We have a meeting scheduling tool. We also have an integration with Calendly. If our native solution gets you where you need to go, great. Use that. There's a lot of advantages to that. But if you need a point solution that out features us, we're not offended and we want your data to flow through. That's great. Valerie says Additional Template Use Case Developing a project template for the business development and scoping process, ie connect tasks, playbooks, etc. Template is helpful from a repeatability standpoint. It's not question, but more of feedback.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I would just say templates has been one of the top three or four features that customers have been asking us for. It's very understandable that people have repeatable business processes that they want to ensure are both repeated by their users. Like a CSM director wants to ensure that their CSMs follow a standard process for onboarding a customer. And it's just a huge efficiency thing of needing to have to recreate tasks every time you create a project. So we very much understand the importance of project templates. The Playbooks piece is not something that is connected into it right now. It's more so creating a project with the associated tasks. But it's something we're working on actively and really care about as well.

Yeah, that's really interesting because I know Playbooks, I'm trying to do this quickly on the fly. Can trigger certain you can insert assets or actions. Yeah, there's a create a record action. Looks like projects isn't currently in the list. I wonder what it would take to unlock that. That's really interesting. All right, if I create a project. This is from Jeanette. If I create a project and I clone it as an almost template, can I clone it as an almost template before templates are released?

That is a good question. I would need to test the cloning functionality because what I'm not sure about is when you clone a project, will it also clone the associated tasks that are part of the project or does it just clone the property data of the project? So I'd say that's what I would go test. With that said, I could see it being frustrating to clone if you want to use the templates of the tasks, but you don't necessarily want all of the things that are within the task from the previous project to be cloned over. So if it's possible, it might not be a very great experience to do it. What we've been seeing more commonly as a workaround is the use of workflows as the workaround, where basically when a new project is created, you then have a process that creates all the associated tasks that you want. That is what I've been seeing more commonly as the workaround, as opposed to manual cloning.

Makes sense, Michael says. I think I saw recently that the services object might be going away in favor of Project Object. Is that correct?

We are evaluating the overlap between the Project object and the Service object with the intent of trying to reduce customer confusion over there are different options that seem similar and so how does a customer know which is the right object for them to choose? We believe that the Project object is the more extensible future direction for managing work within HubSpot. So we are leaning towards either renaming the Service object or deprecating the Service object to be something that reduces customer confusion. The renaming would be to make it something more generic that's not clearly project management oriented or to deprecate. And basically those are the two options that we're evaluating. We haven't really figured out exactly which path we're going to go. What I would share is that we are already building features for the Project object that are not available on the Service object. For example, I showed you that task card that exists now within the Project object. It doesn't exist within the Service object. Some of the features that we've been talking about, like subtasks, dependencies, will only initially be available for tasks within the Project object, although that can change over time. And then things like project templates are a templating feature for projects, not for the Service object. Like, in general, we are not taking all the features, we're building and building them on both objects with the intent of knowing that we're trying to move away from the Service object being the object that's used for service delivery in favor of the Project object. So my feedback to you would be, if you're currently using the Service object, you can think about what is the path to switch over to the Project object over time without saying, like, there's no immediate urgency that says you're that there's like a specific date where they won't be supported by any means. It's more so if you want to take advantage of of what we're doing with the project object, then you should start to figure out how that fits into your administration plan of HubSpot.

Yeah, I'll add to that for a while. The default in the CS workspace was the Services object and that tab was called Services. Now the default is Projects and it's called Projects. But if you have the CS workspace set up and Services object connected there, that will not automatically change. You can still select Services as an option for that page. We are not at a phase right now where any changes are being forced upon you.

That's correct.

So it's an important thing to keep in mind. Anna says can we start associating marketing items such as blogs and emails and sequences to a project today?

You cannot. But what we are currently evaluating right now is the ability to associate a project to a campaign. As part of that we are going to figure we will have to figure out do we want to be able to also associate the project to individual marketing assets is something that will be evaluated over time. But our first step that we're going towards is figuring out how to connect to campaigns.

Got it. Shell asks what does permissioning look like? Our end users would be expected to have more flexibility with what project properties or project related forms they can edit and create. They cannot grant the same access to other objects and tools.

Inside of HubSpot today, the permissions for projects functions the same as other CRM objects just for people who I could just quickly show it so everyone's aware of how these things work. So when you come into settings, if you come to users and teams, if I edit a user's permissions, let's start from scratch. So if we come down to projects, you can see we have view, edit and delete permissions. These follow what's called an ownership based permissions model, where for each action you can either have that set to just their own projects, which is based off of the project owner property, as well as other custom owner properties, their teams, projects or all projects. So these are how you determine access to projects. It's worth noting that we also have a separate set of permissions for tasks that are worth calling out that have already always existed for the past year or so. So for tasks you can set permissions to view and edit, which are similarly an owner based permissions model. And then the last thing I just want to mention is that we also support what's called property level permissions or controlling property access for projects. If you come to properties. If we come to Projects for every property. You can determine who are the users that can view or edit that property.

Yep. So Shel, I feel like implying your question is there may be specific CRM objects you don't want some of these users to have access to. Maybe deals or something like that. And those are managed separately and that is fine. And then one other thing I think we should call out the field level permissions. Is that enterprise feature?

Yeah, that requires enterprise, whereas the view, edit and delete permissions for projects is available across all plans.

Great. Valerie asks, I'm sure this question is coming. Is a feature similar to the legacy project template functionality coming? That is customize a template to your partner portal and deploy into customer portals. I am curious in general the status of this legacy projects tool, what its future is. There are I think a lot of pre configured templates in there just from HubSpot.

Maybe I'll share my screen because this is a niche question that a lot of people will not know what we're talking about.

That is true. Maybe not.

In this room you all might be the expert users so you'll know everything. Within this dropdown there's a feature called Projects and when you come here this looks suspiciously a lot like the feature that we are building. So this is what the feature that we're talking about. There are two use cases that we've heard for what this old. We'll call this the Legacy Project feature. We've heard two use cases. One is customers are using it for actual project management which is like heavily overlapping with the feature that we just built. The other is that they're using it to onboard. We are using it ourselves to onboard projects, onboard customers into HubSpot. And what we're planning to do here is first, it's confusing that there are two features that have the same name. We are first planning to rename this feature to not be called Projects to be something that makes a little bit of a differentiated use case. We want to encourage customers that are onboarding their customers to use the Projects feature for project management. For our own internal teams that are using projects to onboard our customers to HubSpot, we're going to migrate them more towards what our internal teams have built, which is something called growth plans. We are going to figure out there's a different team that owns this feature and we will figure out what to do more than that with this feature over time.

Great fun fact. When I moved to the HubSpot Academy team almost 10 years ago, one of my first jobs was populating the templates in that that feature had just released. We had a whole bunch of checklist things just like on CMS pages and we were so excited to pull them into this internal tool and we were going to change the world and then nobody ever discovered that tool existed. When is projects and customer Portal coming? Jonathan would like to know.

That is something that's an early idea that we don't have a specific timeline on. I would say the hope is that in the second half of next year.

Great. We have another question about capacity planning. Just letting you know, we've already addressed that. We have another question about the difference between the service object and project. So these are questions that are going to keep coming up. And then we have another question. Debbie is also asking about those onboarding projects. So let's see. Paul asked about permissions and limit views to projects based on owner. So yes, that's definitely a thing. You showed that will view only seats, be able to see projects.

Yes. So how things work are that you require a core seat to be able to create or edit projects, but you can. With a view only seat you can view projects and we also tested this recently. You can also comment on tasks. So one use case we heard was that you might be collaborating with somebody in your business on a project who's responsible for a task, but you might not want to pay for them to have a core seat so they can comment on the task. They wouldn't be able to mark a task complete that would require a core seat. But there are some ways that you can think about when you're collaborating on a project who needs a view only seat versus a core seat. And just to know, just to make sure it's clear, the customer success workspace requires a service seat. So you can use projects without a service seat for a service delivery use case. But if you want to take advantage of the customer success workspace and the corresponding features that are available through Service Hub that would require a service seat.

Great. Thanks for clarifying that. Hamza asks what type of work should be tracked in a project versus a ticket versus a task.

Well, that's an interesting one. So the way I think about this is that I think a ticket is meant to be a support type of issue. I think that a project is meant to be a set of work that is collab that has multiple steps, that's collaborated across different individuals and has a due date. I think a task is a unit of work where like the project is a container and a task is a unit of work. Now there is a use case for just Like a one off task. Like for example you might have a task when you're working with a cop with a company that just says like send a follow up or like I don't know, like send an email, reach out to the customer, see how they're doing or something like that that doesn't need to be contained within a project. So I think it just depends on what is the work that you're trying to manage to figure out what is the right object for you to use. We see value in like a defined onboarding process where somebody purchases something, you're trying to complete that work by certain date. It has steps like that's something that belongs in a project with associated tasks. You might just in your regular course of work have a task where you want to check in with a customer that's unrelated to an onboarding process. Maybe it's after onboarding is complete. It's just the day to day work of a CSM that doesn't need to be a project, it can just be a task that's associated to say the company object. And now a customer might write into you saying we have an issue and that makes sense to be represented as a ticket. That's my personal opinion, makes sense to me.

Corey says I think projects right now is okay for small projects, but my company does OKRs for team work plans and individual work plans which requires specific task types, milestones, projects etc and multiple subtasks, sometimes up to 10 or we use check sheets. Do you think projects will ever get to that point? Also instead of pipelines having spaces or folders or lists, again multiple teams would want to keep projects separate but may have different needs that wouldn't fit into one project pipeline.

I would say yes, our intent is to mature into that direction. As you saw from the presentation earlier, a lot of the capabilities that you're referencing like subtasks are things that we're working on. One of the ones that wasn't included in the presentation that you mentioned is milestones. Milestones is a capability that we view as important. It's not in our next nine month plan, but I would say it's on the 18 month plan. So we will get to the point point of also having milestones over time. In general we already have support for different pipelines that you can address those types of use cases. So I would say yes. In general we're building out the capabilities that you would need to do these more complicated projects. I think what we have to figure out as a business of HubSpot is where we Draw the line of like, what is the level of complexity of a project that we will accept to be managed in HubSpot versus ones where we say like, oh no, you probably should be using something like Asana, like just to give it to like talk that example through. Like. We are building subtasks with currently a single level so you can have tasks that have subtasks. We also right now have a limit of 30 subtasks for a parent task. If you go to a software like Asana, for example, like that you can have like five levels of subtasks nested within them and you could have a hundreds or thousands of subtasks. We are clearly not there. And the question is how far we will go is something that we're going to have to evaluate over time. So certainly like what you described should be a standard sophistication of project management that we want to get to, but there will be a certain point where we won't be as sophisticated as other softwares that exist.

Yeah, that makes sense. And as far as having spaces or folders, Corey, some of the permissioning stuff I think might get you there with you know, saved views and things and certainly the CS workspace is even a level or a small step above that.

We also have lists. You can also create lists of projects if you want to.

That's great. Yeah, I was going to ask that because she mentioned folders or lists. So yeah, another thing I agree.

Through permissions and views you should be able to achieve that type of separation.

Yeah, cool. Again, is it possible to factor working hours into reporting similar to ticket SLAs? How about adding working hours to time between calculated properties?

I don't know about the last one, but working hours. So I think the how I have thought about it a little. So okay, so working hours like you're going to have a task that's assigned to a user. And I think the question of working hours comes into how we are assigning work to individuals. So what we are going to evaluate when we start to build some of our resource management capabilities, we are over time going to figure out how do we ensure that users who are assigned work have the time and capacity to be able to achieve to accomplish that work. So I think we haven't totally figured out how that will mature over time, but that yes, things like out of office working hours, your capacity for a given day and the amount of work you can do, all that will factor into us determining whether you're actually able to accomplish the work that's been assigned to you.

Great. Jennifer asks, will we be able to track budgets through projects in the future?

That's a good question. We are. As we've thought about some of the things like time tracking, we're trying to figure out what default properties we want to support. For now, the earliest ones. We're thinking about estimated time, actual time spent. We've been debating whether we should have a property property on a project, like allocated or budgeted time, for example. That would then bring up questions of like, should we start to have properties that relate to costs and billing? Like, should we have like your hourly rate, for example, should we say whether the task is billable or not? I think we're figuring that out over time and it will continue to evolve. Projects have the ability to have custom properties. I think like the general HubSpot philosophy would be like, we have default properties, but you should be able to customize the objects with custom properties however you'd like in the short term that exists for projects. There are already custom properties which I demoed. Tasks don't yet have custom properties, but it's something we want to work on. Maybe we will have default properties for budget and things like that. We're still figuring that out, but if we don't, we should be supporting the ability to set custom properties.

Great. Melissa says, how do we turn on projects? I missed the steps in HubSpot. I will share my screen real quick just because I have a portal that they're not turned on, in, which I think is valuable. So if you come to data management, go to your data model. You can see your data model here. There's this edit. Well, I'm getting on board. You can edit your data model. Projects will be listed here in CRM objects and it'll probably look like this for you. And you just click that activate object button and confirm that you want to activate it. And now you have projects, so. Oh, it looks like Deanna answered that written also. Great. Will subtasks have custom properties as well?

Subtasks will have the same custom the custom properties will only be configured at the task level, like at the task object level, and they will just carry forward into the subtask because subtasks and tasks, parent tasks are the same object. They're still task objects. So basically once we enable you to create a custom property for for tasks, it will just be the same custom property for both parent tasks and subtasks. We decided to not have separate custom proper. Basically we chose not to have separate property schemas between parent tasks and subtasks. But I Think what you're asking for is like, will we have custom properties for subtasks? Yes, we will, once they're made available for parent tasks.

Yeah, that makes sense to me. So similar to like parent and child companies, a child company isn't a different kind of object with different properties.

It's.

It's a relationship between two objects of the same type.

Exactly. That was the. The major architecture decision that we thought through when we were introducing subtasks is whether we want them to be a separate object or not from parent tasks. And we chose no. So instead the way we would articulate that is that subtasks are a same object association between tasks, meaning a subtask can only be associated to its parent tasks. And the rest of the associations of how a task relates to contacts, et cetera, is managed through a parent task.

Great. We are running short on time here. We're going to fit in a couple more. This is a feature request, not question. Overall percentage complete in the Gantt bar as tasks are being completed, or at least an option to customize between days or percent complete or both.

Nice. That makes sense.

And then will you be able to do subtasks? How many layers of subtasks? You mentioned this for now, just one. Right.

There can only be one level of subtasks beneath the tasks and our initial limit is 30 subtasks for a single parent task. We are open to feedback as the features get into beta of where that works or doesn't work for customers.

Hubstau's product team means that friends. So as these betas come available, opt into them. There will be an option to give feedback and that is, that is so helpful. It's. You can, you can opt in and you can test it out and you can let them know and that'll all be for. For Mark and his team just put in one repository. They can see all the feedback aggregated and pick up on the patterns of what people are saying.

And that's the best way to actually then get a conversation too because we, we get. We have a Slack channel that whenever you post those survey responses, we automatically see the survey and I actively review that, look at the feedback and reach out to people to schedule conversations to learn more. So if you have feedback on any of the betas or projects, I'd love to hear it.

Great. There is a long tail of questions with one or zero upvotes and I'm just kind of glancing through a lot of these we've already touched on. Oh, any news about projects API? Do you guys have Any?

Yeah, the projects. So for. For context for the group. When we launched at Inbound we did not yet have an API for projects that has since been built. Is available in our public API documentation and so it's available now. Great.

I think that is probably sufficient. I will export out the whole Q A and share it with Mark and his team. The chat also. So you guys can dig into this. There's a lot of questions here. We're just out of time so thanks so much Mark for coming. If people want to follow up with you, your team, what's. What's the best way for them to. Deanna has dropped your LinkedIn into the chat. Is that. Is there anything.

Yeah, I'll just also put my email address. You're welcome to share any feedback with me, questions you might have and I can try to help you out.

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for being here. Thanks everyone for coming. Really excited about the projects tool. So glad we were able to share it with all of you. We will see you all back next week for our last session of the year. Please come, we'll have some fun facts and stats to share. Then we'll do some networking. Mark, thanks so much for being here.

Thanks Mark. Thanks for having me. Bye friends. See you next week.

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