Comprehensive product management: how HubSpot Academy is saving 30 hours of work a week

As the Principal Program Strategist, Julien Clement manages HubSpot Academy's growth, ensuring timely results and identifying opportunities for improvement. A typical day for Clement involves three to four hours of meetings, running status checks on the multitude of ongoing projects, tracking impact, and brainstorming future offerings.

“We had been using Google Docs to have some visibility into what our professors were working on. Are they doing scripting for video A?” Clement explains, “Our video editors need to know, 'When is that supposed to be done so that I can take the video and edit it?' And then, once the video's edited, when can we launch it? There's a lot of moving parts in there, and it became unworkable because we weren't able to be efficient. We weren't able to clearly see what people needed to do, and when, and it resulted in us missing a lot of deadlines–I mean, with thousands of rows in Google Docs...”

Demand for a more flexible way of working

Clement's manager directed him to Airtable as a means of managing their information in a more customizable, "HubSpot-ian" way. Airtable provided all of the previous functionality they'd grown accustomed to, particularly the cloud collaboration capabilities, but provided the streamlined features the team had been clamoring for. Clement's team now has the ability to effectively collaborate with several internal and external teams on a single platform.

“The golden ticket for us is, because we have so many different teams, we have all these dependent activities where if a script doesn't get done by X date, then they can't film, and if they can't film by X date, then they can't video edit and a lot can get lost in translation. We save a lot of time and headaches by having a holistic project management model: storing all of our content, knowing what needs to be updated or what needs to be localized, because we have hundreds of videos and thousands of knowledge docs referencing the same things. We can actually do real product management now!” Clement said.

Unique views make a huge difference

Each person (or team) has the ability to leverage their own custom, filtered views in order to ascertain what demands their attention, whether at the task or project level. His team was able to further customize this system by writing formulas to automate their processes, thus building a truly proprietary workflow for HubSpot. Everyone with an activity associated with a project could already be tagged to the project, and anyone on the team can see how many activities exist within the project, but now, they can also see the percentage to completion, how projects are pacing based on deadlines, and more.

"Within the first few months, we'd already saved close to 300 hours of manual data entry–labor of copying information over, double checking things that shouldn't need double checking. Now, we can be much more scientific.”