HubSpot Canvas
Head of Product Design, Research & Content — reported to the CPO
Turning a market-leading CRM's fractured product identity into a brand people actually wanted to use.
I joined HubSpot in a period of significant transition, right after a newly-departed CPO had dramatically reshaped the org into small, autonomous teams shipping continuously. Each pillar of the product suite had been acquired or built with its own tech stack and style guide, which was rapidly decaying as new decisions were made. I now led design, research, and content across all of it, reporting directly to the new CPO.
This is the story of how we turned five disconnected products into one.
The warning signs were there. Our biannual engineering survey kept surfacing the same complaint: ambiguity over which component or pattern to use. Product metrics and customer sentiment were sliding in the same direction, and the market's bar for B2B software climbed as people expected the same level of polish as the apps on their phones.
An existing report screen from one of the five product lines
An audit I requested made it stark:
Customers described the product as dense, dated, "uninteresting." But none of it came from carelessness. It simply came from team autonomy without visibility, and an unclear path to unification.
So many buttons
Multiple modal styles
I pitched it to my boss over pad thai: a unified system that would wipe out the pervasive friction (internally and externally), and head off the tech debt growing with every new, inconsistent component. From there I took it to the founders and got an agreement that teams would set roadmap work aside to bring this to life.
I ensured everyone that we'd hold two critical lines:
Visual refresh only
no new functionality, or 40+ teams' timelines would drag out indefinitely
One product area at a time
no single "big reveal," because that would have meant a level of roadmap timing, feature-gating, and risk nobody had an appetite for
I then led the team to benchmark the product against our corporate marketing and the mismatch was clear (and painful): HubSpot's brand was warm and a bit irreverent, and the product looked, as one designer put it… like Salesforce. From there we established 5 (ranked) design principles: Clear, Human, Inbound, Integrated, Collaborative. These became our North Star (I even had them printed on desk cards) and we used them to settle our difficult trade-offs.
We design for clarity and focus. Our work helps users do the next right thing through feature prioritization, visual hierarchy, and contextual awareness.
We foster a sense of joy by humanizing the experience in ways that resonate across cultures. Our work provides users with a playful and personable interaction every time.
We reinforce the message and meaning of the Inbound methodology. Our work makes the Inbound path clear to our users and helps them understand why it's the right thing to do.
We simplify the user's experience by creating a unified system that solves for their needs. Our work helps users achieve great things by offering a streamlined, efficient approach.
We devise powerful systems that encourage people to work seamlessly together. Our work helps people create and collaborate with each other in natural, intuitive ways.
We validated the direction with customers before committing to it. The response told us we'd found it.
"I feel capable. I feel like I know exactly what to do."
"Doesn't look like business software."
"This is fun. This is what I would expect from HubSpot."
Getting the visual language right required holding my team to an extremely high bar and ensuring they believed in themselves. But that was the easy part… getting 40+ autonomous teams to adopt it was the real work.
I built a rotating design system team and pushed for co-ownership with our "Front-End as a Service" dev team instead of simply handing specs off to engineering. We established GitHub as the single source of truth, open to anyone, not gatekept by any single team.
At one point, exec leadership wanted our original brand orange (think Home Depot) splashed across the product. I made the unpopular case that it would fight the calm, focused feeling we needed, pitching the product and marketing style guides as cousins, not siblings. It took real convincing, but we got approval for a new, modern shade and marketing eventually adopted our system for the brand itself.
Five product lines became one living design language.
The team grew from 7 to 35, with a management layer added to support the scale.
Marketing fully adopted our visual system for the HubSpot brand itself.
And the system outlived my tenure, still active and referenced in HubSpot's engineering culture years after I moved on.
Chasing uniform consistency is often tempting. But what matters is coherence, which leaves room for real variation, like the CRM density option built for one persona's specific day. The system itself wasn't the hard part. Governance was. Without the rotating team and the constant, unglamorous work of reminding people why any of it mattered, Canvas would have decayed like every style guide before it.
