Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI)

1. Embrace Radical Ownership

View every problem as your own and embrace radical accountability to find and solve opportunities the business isn’t explicitly asking for. This demonstrates hunger and earns more responsibility.

2. Cultivate Relentless Curiosity

Develop an insatiable desire to understand things, without fear of admitting ignorance, and be uncompromising in seeking answers. This trait enables outsized impact in any role.

3. Find Sponsors, Not Just Mentors

Actively seek out sponsors and advocates who are willing to invest their professional or social capital to bet on your career growth. These relationships are crucial for accelerating your career.

4. Put Ego Aside

Embrace not knowing or being good at things, and welcome hard feedback without self-consciousness. This mindset helps build strong relationships and accelerates personal and professional growth.

5. Prioritize Customer Obsession

Make decisions with a long-term (2-4 year) time horizon, prioritizing what’s best for the customer. Avoid short-term, customer-hostile choices, as they are unsustainable and will eventually hinder growth.

6. Talk to Customers Regularly

Consistently talk to customers, including non-users or churned users, to uncover the emotional ‘why’ behind their decisions. This reveals unintuitive insights missed by quantitative data alone.

7. Adopt Hybrid PLG Approach

Implement a modular, hybrid approach to Product-Led Growth, identifying specific points in the customer journey where human intervention is genuinely needed as a backstop. Avoid forcing self-service where customers have legitimate reasons to interact with a person.

8. Diversify Growth Channels

Aggressively experiment with and diversify your growth channels to avoid over-reliance on one or two. Algorithm changes or new technologies can disrupt single-channel funnels overnight.

9. Develop Resilience in Growth

Cultivate resilience, especially in growth roles, as 70-80% of experiments may fail. This prevents grasping for small wins and encourages ambitious, high-impact bets.

10. Be Proactive & Think Ahead

As a PM, be proactive by thinking ahead, suggesting great ideas, and having answers ready, rather than waiting to be asked or invited. This demonstrates leadership and importance.

11. Widen Your Strategic Aperture

Drive strategy beyond your immediate team’s focus by understanding how other business parts function (e.g., sitting with sales, casual conversations). This helps discover larger, unassigned opportunities.

12. Specify Problem Type

When defining problems, qualify whether it’s a business, customer, or efficiency problem to avoid solving business issues in ways that harm customer outcomes. Ask ‘why’ the business problem exists to find the root customer problem.

13. Call Out Assumptions

Create a system for PMs to explicitly call out assumptions, asking ‘why’ repeatedly to justify direction and ‘what’ to understand the downstream impact and blast radius of decisions.

14. Cultivate Creativity for Simplicity

Value simple solutions over complex ones, prioritizing outcomes for the business and customers. The best growth leaders are ambivalent to solution complexity.

15. Embrace ‘Scraping Your Knees’

Embrace making mistakes (‘scraping your knees’) as a crucial part of learning product management. Navigating relationships, changing plans, and leadership challenges is best learned through trial and error.

16. Be Useful to Your Team

The bare minimum job of a PM is to be useful to your team and help them do better work. This fundamental approach builds goodwill and makes you invaluable.

17. Choose Structured PM Entry

When breaking into PM, prioritize structured environments with battle-tested leaders over smaller shops, as academic learning has diminishing returns. Think five years ahead and work backward when choosing where to start.

18. Volunteer/Shadow for PM

If already at a company, reach out to a PM and offer to make their day easier by volunteering or shadowing. This provides hands-on experience, builds understanding of team dynamics, and can gain you an advocate for breaking into PM.

19. Define PLG Clearly

Before pursuing Product-Led Growth (PLG), define what PLG means to your company (product grows revenue, humans are a backstop) and articulate why you want to be product-led, including assumptions about positive business or customer outcomes.

20. Resource Growth Teams Adequately

Avoid the common mistake of hiring a Head of Growth without providing adequate resources (tooling, engineering cycles, designers, data access). Expecting results without support is unrealistic and sets them up for failure.

21. Be Patient with PLG

Have patience with Product-Led Growth (PLG) investments, as it’s R&D that yields durable, efficient growth over time, not immediate liquidity like hiring sales staff. Avoid cutting bait too early.

22. Prioritize Data Hygiene

Prioritize good data hygiene by properly instrumenting your product and ensuring self-service data access. If you lack robust quantitative data, leverage qualitative research by talking to customers to understand the ‘why.’

23. Implement Attract-Engage-Delight Loop

Implement an ‘Attract, Engage, Delight’ growth loop by giving value before extracting it. Offer free, non-gimmicky software or content that provides sustainable value, leading to organic advocacy and new customer acquisition.

24. Explore Micro-Apps for Growth

Explore developing free ‘micro-apps’ (e.g., website graders, generators) as a growth channel. These tools provide immediate value, create a conversation, and can lead users to your core product.

25. Never Waste a Crisis

During a crisis, lean into goodwill pricing or temporary leniency to remove friction. This can create significant tailwinds for your business by meeting urgent customer needs.

26. Re-evaluate Legacy Culture

Regularly take inventory of legacy cultural elements and pressure-test if they still serve the company, especially after significant changes like remote work or growth. Be comfortable letting go of traditions that no longer contribute positively.

27. Stay Mid-Market Focused

Consider staying in the mid-market/SMB space to avoid the pitfalls of enterprise software, where a few large customers can dictate product development and lead to bespoke, non-scalable solutions. This ensures decisions benefit the largest customer base.

28. Publish Transparent Culture Code

Publish and regularly pressure-test a transparent culture code, both internally and externally. This creates alignment, attracts suitable candidates, and ensures the culture remains relevant as the company grows.

29. Cultivate ‘Taste’ in Work

Cultivate ’taste’ by obsessing over details and going deep enough into a subject to form strong, informed opinions. This demonstrates passion and a valuable point of view.