Successful and growing businesses run on tools that do their job so well that the boundary between product offering and operations is seamless. That is why in HubSpot Product and Engineering, we know a top-down end user experience needs to be paired with a bottom-up platform to support scaling businesses' unique needs. We're putting this philosophy into action with our continued focus on extensibility and customization.
My name is Sejal. I am a Sr. Product Manager in HubSpot’s developer product group. We wake up every day thinking about enabling external developers to build more and better without sacrificing the user experience.
In a word - “Connected”
During INBOUND 2022, Yamini Rangan, the CEO of HubSpot, emphasized the significance of connected customers and platforms. As we approach INBOUND 2023, this necessity is even more crucial. Many companies face challenges in their growth due to disconnected systems and applications. However, it is possible to overcome this obstacle.
Most businesses spend a lot of time and money juggling multiple systems, inadvertently using the “swivel chair approach” among apps just to complete a single task. Industry leaders focus on operations that adapt as they scale, are driven by data, and are integrated. Sales, service, and marketing teams cut through the chaos and view their entire customer journey through a single pane of glass. In a word, they are connected. They have connected operations, connected offerings, and connected customers.
Technology that complements instead of complicates
This is only possible by integrating systems at multiple levels, starting by getting the data in one place and orchestrating automation based on changes in this data, and finally, a unified user interface. Businesses need platform capabilities to mold their datasets and processes because each business's data is unique to its products or services. For us, this poses a unique challenge. Our goal is to provide developers with all the levers they need to customize HubSpot without sacrificing product quality, security, look, or feel. This is what a genuinely extensible platform looks like.
Extensible platforms offer the core components to build customizations to save users time, and make solving for unique business needs possible. Allowing businesses to take their operations beyond the day-to-day and into supporting new use cases, new offerings, and better customer visibility and metrics. HubSpot has always focused on ease of use with crafted experiences. So the best way to support extensibility is by building out immersive & dynamic UI customization capabilities, starting with the surfaces that Marketers, Sales, and Service reps use most - the CRM record pages.
This year at INBOUND, developers will see a robust and familiar interface for building flexible custom user interfaces to solve unique business challenges. This allows end-users to view & interact with data from everywhere without ever stepping outside HubSpot. You can easily envision a future where we add more surfaces to customize, at the same time expanding how data synchronization and automation capabilities are built out.
Culture and Approach contribute to customization
But we also understand that extensibility is about more than just features. HubSpot’s culture, thriving developer ecosystem, and approach are key to helping developers action these capabilities for their end-users. HubSpot Product and Engineering are also “connected.” We move fast, and that velocity requires real-time communication between engineering teams. We also maintain a unified experience by embedding UI/UX teams in each product group so the crafted experience shows up even in our APIs. Finally, our DevRel team is the glue between features and acts as the voice of the developer. They bring programming, and best practices, to inspire and enable developers to make the most of our new capabilities.
INBOUND Your Way
Our commitment to extensibility has never been more clear. At INBOUND 2023, developers will encounter a dedicated developer booth, four sessions on extensibility, and dedicated developer events. SJ, our Sr. Manager of Developer Community, has prepared this handy guide.
Whether at INBOUND or not, I invite you to pay close attention to the deep commitment to customization through extensibility and how we support developers and their customers to grow better.