INBOUND 2016: Christopher O'Donnell, HubSpot Product Spotlight

Wow, this is amazing. Welcome, Everybody, to the 2016 HubSpot product spotlight. My name is Christopher. I am representing the product team today. We are the group of software developers, developing designers and product managers, user researchers. And our job is to take this ambitious vision that you've seen over the course of the afternoon and to bring it to reality, to bring it to today. I'd love to start with a question, and it's less of a question, actually, as a group exercise. Now, I wasn't a huge fan of group exercises when I was in school, really, any kind of exercise. But this is a good way for you guys. You're here to meet some new people, make some friends. So you're gonna make some friends here. Very simple. I want you to think of one word if you've ever used the HubSpot product. Just one word. It could be something you like about it, a feature, an app, a characteristic of the product. Just one word. Everybody got the word. And on three, we're going to say it out loud. I'm going to do 1, 2, 3, and then you're going to say it out loud. Okay, after three. Sometimes people get a little anxious about that. Got your word. 1, 2, 3. I have no plan from here on out. I honestly, I just was very curious what that would be like. That was very cool. That was very cool. How often do you have 4,000 people in a room you can do something silly? It shows us something. Though I did have a reason for doing shows us that the HubSpot product is massive. Our community is huge. It's many things to many people. So I just discussed what our team's job is. To take the future vision and make it reality. But how do we do it when it is so many things to so many people? Brian and Dharmesh set us up really nicely here to talk about that process, recognize the future, productize it, bring it to today and democratizing it by bringing it to as many people in the world as possible. Today is mostly about the productized piece. And I have a fun fact for you, which is anybody who just said something out loud, anybody who has so much as signed up for the free CRM or logged in, anything, any action in the product, you have helped us make a better product. Millions of actions in the product over the course of the last year have helped us make a better product. Every time you send an email, it helps us build a better email tool. Every time you close a deal, it helps us build a better CRM. So we take these millions of touch points throughout the year. And it's not just your actions, it's also your words. I was amazed to learn, and you may be as well, that we have at HubSpot over 1000 human conversations a day about marketing, about sales, about the HubSpot product. Over a thousand a day. So it's hundreds of thousands of human conversations over the course of the year. Millions of touch points. So many thousands of conversations. And then we condense that down into ideas. We have a few hundred ideas that everybody in this room helps us focus on and prioritize. That's where we get started building the product. Before we get into a handful of those ideas that stand out from the rest, I'd like to celebrate the product team in this community delivering 137 of these ideas to reality this year. Let's hear it for everybody who submitted an idea. We're going to keep condensing it down. So hundreds of ideas. And we condense that, as you might imagine, into themes. We talk to customers all day. We must see some themes. We do see themes. Two themes for 2016. Two themes that forced us to develop an entirely new concept, an entirely new approach to growth technology. The first theme is power. Why? Power. Power. Because you have all gotten better at what you do. I've been working on these products for six or seven years. When I started, most folks that I spoke with were just trying to get into this new world, just learning about Inbound for the first time, trying to do content marketing, turn their site and their voice into a magnet. And happily, the world has grown up a lot in the last 10 years. And it's not enough to do something. You have to do everything that matters. We understand that. We're with you. We hear you. You need deeper functionality. Okay, here's where it gets interesting. Guess what the second theme is. Simplicity. Okay, yes, the plot thickens. So you want deeper power, but you also want the products to be more intuitive. You want it to be easier to get started. You want it to be easier to see results. And our personal favorite on the product team. You want more reasons to invite folks at your companies into the growth effort. Wonderful things happen when you do that. So we've taken these two themes and boiled them into a new concept, a whole new way of looking at this. We needed a new perspective that would help us deliver this added power while simplifying your user experience. We see a connected foundation of tools and services that get stronger and easier. The more we build it out, the more we add to it. Introducing the Growth Stack. The Growth Stack is a Simple and powerful technology foundation that helps you drive accelerated growth for your company. Here's why it's cool. It's not just cool because everything we add is integrated with everything we've made. That's a given. It's a given that this all snaps together perfectly. It's pre integrated and seamless. That's a given. What's cool is every time we add power, everything else in the stack gets simpler. Steps in your process start to disappear. Very cool. And on a personal level, I love the growth stack because at its heart, it is about people. It is about contacts and about the unified contact database and building and delivering a remarkable buying experience. So let's get started. A simpler, more powerful foundation. This is the first section of product improvements. We're going to look at three areas. These are sweeping areas across the entire product. This lays the groundwork for us to add power while simplifying the experience. We have an amazing team of user experience professionals and designers. We're very blessed. In addition to the very demanding job that our designers have, they took it upon themselves this year to redesign the entire product. So one theme across everything we see today is we've redesigned the entire product. Very, very exciting. Here's the first area. The unified contact database is the heart of the growth stack. Automation HubSpot Workflows is the brain. It's that automation engine that delivers a remarkable customer experience while saving you time and saving you resources. As all of you have become more sophisticated over the years, we've added an enormous amount of power to workflows. Workflows is a beast. There's a ton you can do with workflows. Today, we'll celebrate a huge step forward towards simplifying the app. Introducing the HubSpot Visual Workflow Editor. It's absolutely beautiful. It has this new look and feel we're going to see throughout the day. It's like having the best whiteboard in the world to lay your campaigns out on. Except you have perfect penmanship. Just absolutely perfect. Look at you go. And you can branch, of course. We talked about branching last year. You can branch on all the criteria that you would expect. Very powerful, very sophisticated. And all of the actions that we've built over the years. You can operate on contacts, you can manipulate lists, you can do internal notifications, of course you can send emails. We've added a little bit more power too. We've added a little bit more power this year. In addition to simplifying it, we've added a number of sales actions. More and more of you using The CRM in our sales tools. Look what just happened. We just built a lead rotator in 10 seconds. I've heard of lead rotators taking more than 10 seconds to build. I've heard it occasionally happens. And now what we're going to do, we're going to do a new lead notification email, but totally custom. We're gonna use our own email template. These are powerful things. You guys didn't talk about this stuff 10 years ago. You talk about it every day on the phone with us these days. Power delivered in a very, very simple vehicle. HubSpot, visual workflows. Alright. The next area, a great place if you're gonna redesign the product. Great place to invest is in data visualization and analytics. We have rebuilt not just the visualization layer, but the entire innards, the entire engine of reporting across marketing, CRM and sales. Let's take a look at some of the reporting enhancements. First of all, it's beautiful. You can see it's the same gorgeous typography and consistent fonts, consistent colors and new metrics. We've moved to a more industry standard sessions metrics metric for web analytics which is very exciting for us. And when we did that, we added more breakdowns. So it's simpler visually but a lot more powerful. You can click in and see new versus returning visitor. You can see session length by source, pages by source. Very deep content analytics device type. This is a huge one. This was an idea that you guys kept bringing to us. We did it. You can see geography breakdowns, a deep rethinking and polish of reporting across the entire product line. This guy likes it. So design is a terrific place to raise the bar. We've seen that across the whole product in a couple of places here. But I want to share how our team thinks about user experience as a whole. The term that is associated with success for a product team like ours is usually enterprise grade. Most folks want to build an enterprise grade product, an enterprise grade experience. For us, that's not good enough. We want to deliver a consumer grade experience. The growth stack should be as intuitive, as satisfying and even as fun to use as the things that you use in your personal life. All those apps and tools and where do you use most of those apps and tools on your mobile device? This is an exciting one. We have a brand new mobile app. You can see that that new look and feel extends of course to the new mobile app. And we've taken the best of what you have used in the marketing iOS app, the sales one and the CRM. We had three. We've combined them, simplified those use cases that are really valuable to you, made it much more elegant, and put the growth stack in your pocket. This is my favorite little feature here. You can actually ask for deal updates with one click. So this is great for CEOs, sales managers who want to stay involved. If you have a few extra minutes, you can drop a note in on a deal. I've never actually heard of a sales rep being forgetful or letting things fall through the cracks, but if it were to ever happen for the first time, hypothetically, this would be the coolest thing ever. This is the new unified HubSpot mobile app. Search HubSpot on the iTunes app store. It's live today. Live Today replaces the three apps we had before. And Android is coming in early 2017. We have heard thousands of you wanting the growth stack on Android. We're right there with you. Unified mobile app. Very, very exciting. Okay. That was the foundation of the growth stack. Little discussion of the redesign we did. It was fun. I want you to meet a few of my friends. We're going to meet three of my friends. Over the course of the rest of the talk here, I want to introduce you to Matt. Matt is a Hubspotter, actually, and a bit of a legend. He joined and within a few months, people were whispering his name in the hallways because he had accomplished this feat of magic. He came in to run our SEO efforts, and within about two or three months, he had taken all of these assets that we've had for a long time, the new wonderful content we were producing, and added millions and millions of organic visits out of thin air. No additional budget, no additional headcount, no additional resources, no new campaigns. It just started working in this transformational way. It wasn't a trick. Spent a bunch of time with Matt. The product team got to know Matt very quickly. And it wasn't a magic trick. Matt realized that there was a massive shift underway in search. Brian and Dharmesh talked about how search is changing writing for humans as opposed to machines. Well, that's this part of the talk here. So Matt had a new approach. He had the secret. He had the key. You guys want to hear what Matt's I can't tell you the secret. Not yet. Not yet. Gotta build up a little tension, get to know each other a little bit. Two things have changed. Matt said. We sat with Matt and we were scared that this giant shift was happening. Matt seemed to know the secret. No one else knew the secret. He said, I'm going to break it Down. Two things have changed. Fundamentally, how people search in search engines has changed. That was really scary. They said, don't worry, I got you, I got you. It's very simple. Second thing that's changed is what the search engines show. Okay, that seems like basically everything in the world of search. They said, don't worry about it, don't worry about it. I have some tips for you guys. Here's how to think about it. Brian and Dharmesh talked about 10 years ago and today a couple things have changed the way that we like to. We talk about jobs to be done right. We talk about on the product team the roles and responsibilities that each actor in a system has. So that's sort of a lens we use. Ten years ago, the searcher's job was to use the right terms. Do you guys remember this? You remember when some people were better at googling things than other people? Do you remember searching something and then searching differently to try to say it in the right way that would get you the thing you were looking for? You remember that it's not that way anymore. And then the search engine's job was to take that exact string and say, ah, yes, this search. And to go to its huge index and look at the link graph that Dharmesh was so beautifully describing and explaining and kind of come up with an authoritative match for that exact query. So the marketer was left with a million good ideas. I mean, we have a lot of problems. We do not have problems coming up with ideas, taking ideas, picking some to write about, and then trying to kind of take this keyword research and dovetail it in and get these keywords in so that it was going to show up. And that was the job 10 years ago. Today, massive shift. The searcher's job is to be themselves. One out of five searches that happens today will happen on a mobile device by voice. One out of five already. So this isn't something that's happening five years, ten years from now. This is already happening in. The engine's job is to discover the true intent. This is like being a wonderful romantic partner. It's not just the words, it's what someone's really asking, right? And so trying to understand that that's what the search engines are getting really good at now. And they are getting very good at it. Matt explained to me they see the following two searches very differently. On a mobile device on 3G. Walking slowly down Newbury street is a different search for Italian food than the same device on WI Fi in downtown Boston, in an office building not moving. In the latter case, they're more likely to recommend a dinner restaurant to make a reservation at. Mind blowing shift. It's already happened. So what the heck are we supposed to do as marketers? Scary kind of moment. All right, now I get to tell you the secret. It's nice, it's elegant, it's a shift from terms to topics. A shift from long tail keyword research, massive spreadsheets down to just a half a dozen topic areas that you as a business can own authoritatively, top to bottom. You want to take that, we call it a topic cluster and you want to take that topic cluster and you want to own 10%, 15%, 20% of that cluster. So if you know what these clusters are, you don't have to worry about keywords as much. You just write the best content that you can for that topic. And Matt showed us an example that blew our minds. We've been talking about inbound marketing for years and years. Inbound sales is a little bit newer, so we watch this closely. We would love to dominate and be the authority at HubSpot on this idea of inbound sales and all of what we call the subtopics. So this is a real world example. Google autocomplete for the term inbound sales and we crushed that inbound Sales day is HubSpot certification, is HubSpot methodology. Is HubSpot definition. Is HubSpot. HubSpot sure is HubSpot. On down the list, he illustrated to us that we had managed to surround this entire topic area and just dominate it and that this, that was his trick, that was this feat of magic that got him all of this new traffic. So we have some great news. We've taken Matt and installed him into the HubSpot. Cos we have a brand new content strategy tool that is this secret and only this secret. We are the only technology company doing this. This is the HubSpot content strategy tool. You put a topic in and then the tool will coach you on the subtopics. It'll say, don't worry so much about this. Ah, yeah, here's a good one over here under the covers. It's very, very powerful, very complex. We're using machine learning, natural language processing, all kinds of cool kind of voodoo and surfacing those learnings about competitiveness, popularity, relevance. We can even tie a topic all the way through to what's generating actual customers. No one can do that. Very powerful and very simple. Even though we're adding power, we're simplifying your world, much less keyword research. More topic cluster discovery and writing for humans. What's really nice about this is that you get to write for people and not machines. So the first step toward that exciting vision that Dharmesh laid out, Human Enjoyment Optimization. At the end of the day, it makes a lot of sense. We're all humans. I'm not sure about Matt. I saw him plug himself in in that meeting the other day. But that's cool. We'll take it. So it's very satisfying, very powerful and very simple to focus on writing for humans, continuing this theme with content and continuing this theme of taking complex technological power and hiding it away underneath the growth stack so you never have to think about it. You guys are starting to see this lightning bolt in social media. I swear, over the course of even working on this deck the last month, I see it twice as often. Now I see it in Google, I see it in Facebook. So I'm going to tell you what this thing is. This is a big, big deal. Most links, when you click them on your mobile device, kind of takes a second and then it takes a second and then you hit the back button. Like, what am I, on vacation? We're very, very impatient on our mobile devices for whatever reason. And this little magic lightning bolt, when it's next to a link, there's none of that. You hit that link and you know it's going to load instantly. Could be any different content publisher. It loads instantly. Great for engagement. Okay, so this is called AMP Accelerated Mobile Pages. And it's a format, so it's relatively easy. It's at least straightforward to get started with amp. And so when you write a blog post, you guys are going to want to take a couple notes here. When you write a blog post, what you want to do is pull up your favorite code editor. If you don't have a favorite code editor, you can ask Dharmesh, any IDE of your choice and write an HTML version of that. Sort of a different flavor of HTML though you got to put a. I am not making this up. You have to put a lightning bolt in the HTML tag. I don't know how to type a lightning bolt. Personally, I think Matt has a lightning bolt on his keyboard, but the rest of us don't. And then you got to include JavaScript, their JavaScript, but none of your JavaScript and analytics. JavaScript is a really interesting question. If you flip through the docs, you're going to find the part where you actually have to do a special JavaScript tag include, and then make sure you do your tokenized canonical URL. It's a mess and you're obviously not going to do that. You want to spend your time writing for humans. We've taken care of it for you. Moving forward, all you have to do is write content. Every new post in the HubSpot Cos is automatically AMP enabled. It's going to load instantly on mobile devices. It's going to work just killer in Google and Facebook in these new hot formats. Here's why Matt loves this doesn't seem like an SEO thing, but it is. Why? Because people are more likely to click it when they see the lightning bolt in search results. It's a ranking signal. People are less likely to hit the back button. People are more likely to read the content, they're more likely to share the content. It amplifies itself and you climb in the search rankings as a result. Very powerful aspect of content tools in the growth stack. Simple, because you have to do absolutely nothing. Oh boy. Let's pull this thread a little more. Brian had a great sequence in his talk where when you have a piece of content.