Eric Greene

Design, Product & Engineering

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Scaling HubSpot Mobile

Company: HubSpot
Role: Product Design Manager → Senior Design Manager
Product: HubSpot Mobile (iOS & Android)
Team: Scaled from 2 → 6 Product Designers

TL;DR

When I joined, HubSpot mobile was effectively a lightweight CRM contacts app. I led the shift to make mobile a first-class surface for sales reps in the field. By anchoring strategy in top-tasks research, using a signal-driven roadmap, scaling a senior design team, and investing early in accessibility and quality, we grew weekly active usage 8x, achieved the highest NPS in the company, and made mobile a meaningful driver of customer value and revenue.

Context

When I joined as Design Manager, the mobile team consisted of two designers and the app primarily supported basic CRM viewing. At the same time, HubSpot's fastest-growing customers were Pro and Enterprise accounts with large sales teams operating in the field, creating a clear gap between how the product was designed and how customers actually worked.

Why Mobile Mattered Strategically

Mobile mattered strategically for reasons directly tied to customer behaviour and business value:

  • Sales reps spend much of their day away from desks, making calls, sending emails, preparing for meetings, and logging activity between locations.
  • Customers active on both desktop and mobile consistently showed higher engagement and higher annual recurring revenue.
  • With calling, email, calendar, and CRM integrated, the HubSpot mobile app had the potential to become a rep's primary work device rather than a companion app.

The opportunity was not to mirror desktop on mobile, but to design explicitly for how sales reps actually work in the field.

Defining the Vision: Solving for Sales Reps First

The first major initiative I led was a top-tasks research programme focused on mobile users who identified as sales reps. We surveyed hundreds of customers and asked what they actually needed to do on mobile. Clear patterns emerged around calling, email follow-ups, meeting preparation, and immediate post-meeting note capture.

This research became the foundation of the mobile vision: design mobile first and foremost for sales reps, then expand deliberately into marketing and service.

Deciding What to Ship (and What Not To)

To avoid building a smaller, unfocused version of desktop, I introduced a simple decision framework we used consistently, called STAR:

  • Signal: Is the feature highly used on desktop and frequently requested on mobile?
  • Target: Who is the primary mobile user, sales, marketing, or service?
  • Assess results: Does the shipped feature actually drive usage, retention, or NPS?

I led the creation of inbound customer feedback loops including mobile NPS, feature-level CSAT, and requests surfaced via Customer Success and Support. These inputs were aggregated into a single dashboard, giving the team a shared source of truth and the confidence to say no.

We also learned the value of this discipline through failure. In one case, we shipped mobile forecasting based largely on executive intuition rather than user signal. It attracted only a few hundred users and reinforced the need to prioritise signal over opinion.

Operating Model and Team Cadence

As mobile scaled, the work required a tighter operating system to maintain focus and execution quality across multiple teams. We established a clear product and design cadence built around quarterly planning, quarterly kick-offs, and two-week delivery sprints.

Each quarter began with a cross-functional kick-off to align on priorities, success metrics, and trade-offs, grounded in the same signal framework used for roadmap decisions. Teams then executed in two-week sprints with regular design critique and product reviews to maintain quality and coherence across the app.

At peak scale, mobile operated across six full cross-functional pods with a total group size of approximately fifty-five people spanning product, design, and engineering. The operating model allowed teams to move independently while staying aligned to a single mobile strategy, and it created the leverage needed to focus on quality, talent, and long-term direction rather than day-to-day coordination.

Growing and Structuring the Team

I grew the design team from two to six designers, structuring ownership around workflows rather than product areas, and hiring for autonomy, system thinking, and judgment within a clearly defined operating model.

Ownership aligned to how customers actually worked, with designers focused on sales communications, core CRM workflows, and later expansion into marketing and service based on top-tasks research and mobile fit.

During one period, a senior designer was on extended leave while I was actively recruiting another senior role. I temporarily filled in on the team we were hiring for, while two other senior designers covered for the role on leave. In that environment, strong performers took ownership and moved quickly, while mid-level performers did not meaningfully help fill the gaps. In practice, they became a net detractor, requiring attention rather than acting as a catalyst for solving problems and giving time back to the team. This reinforced the importance of team composition and autonomy, particularly at scale.

Enforcing Quality at Scale

Quality was defined by usage and Voice of the Customer signals, including CSAT and NPS, rather than polish alone. The biggest gains came from shipping the "brilliant basics" sales reps consistently asked for, including call recording, phone number masking, meeting preparation, and fast post-meeting note capture.

After my first year, another quality gap became clear around accessibility. Mobile platforms offer strong native accessibility features, but the existing mobile design system did not support them properly. I led a full redesign of the mobile design system, rebuilding components to meet WCAG AA standards and shipping dark mode on mobile years before desktop. This work improved usability for all users and set a new internal quality bar for mobile experiences.

Measuring Success

We measured success through weekly active usage and cross-surface adoption, both of which strongly correlated with increased customer value and annual recurring revenue. Mobile weekly active usage grew 8x, establishing mobile as a core product surface rather than a secondary companion.

Impact

  • Repositioned HubSpot mobile as a primary sales work surface
  • Scaled a senior design team with clear ownership and autonomy
  • Delivered the highest NPS in the company
  • Shipped a fully AA-accessible mobile design system, including dark mode
  • Increased mobile usage 8x while strengthening multi-surface adoption

Reflection

Mobile success came from repeatedly choosing the right problems to solve, enforcing quality, and protecting focus rather than shipping more. Treating mobile as a first-class product required discipline, strong signal, and an operating model that could scale without losing coherence.