Thought Leadership

Remote Work as A Growth Lever: Kieran Flanagan of HubSpot

2023-12-1446 min readWritten by Arc Team

hubspot kieran flanagan remote work talk

Summary:

Hubspot’s VP of Marketing Kieran Flanagan talked about leading a remote growth team and avoiding the “goldfish face.”

What I love about remote work is that I hate the fact that location has to be such a big component of what makes someone successful.

Welcome back to Outside The Valley! For our first episode in 2020, we have Kieran Flanagan, VP of Marketing at HubSpot and host of the Growth TL;DR podcast!

In this episode, Kieran talked about how remote work had helped him in his life, why he thinks career opportunities should not be limited by geographical location, and one of the hardest parts of being a distributed team leader.

Kieran also shares his insights on why remote hiring is one of the best things you can do for growth, avoiding too many processes in distributed teams, and the “goldfish face” problem in remote meetings.

If you’re enjoying the podcast, please consider leaving a review on iTunes!

The podcast is also available on your favourite players: iTunes, Google Podcast, Castro, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, Player.fm, and Tune In.

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Topics also covered on the podcast episode:

How remote work helped Kieran in his career and personal life
Why geographical boundaries shouldn’t limit career opportunities
The hardest part of remote leadership
Why remote hiring is one of the best things you can do for company growth
Using “squads” in distributed teams
Avoiding too many processes in distributed teams
The “goldfish face” problem in meetings
How presenting on Zoom can be awkward
Things HubSpot do to recreate the “watercooler feeling”
Kieran’s advice to companies who want to hire remotely

Mentioned resources:

Full transcript:

Jovian: Hello, 2020, and welcome to this year’s first episode of “Outside the Valley.” The podcast we’re interviewing remote startup leaders, remote working advocates, and thought leaders who thrive outside of Silicon Valley. These people will share insight on what works and what doesn’t, so you can learn to do it right. “Outside the Valley” is brought to you by Arc, remote hiring platform that helps you to hire remote software engineers and teams easily. And I’m your host, Jovian Gautama. For our very first episode in 2020, we have Kieran Flanagan, the VP of Marketing at HubSpot, and the host of the amazing growth marketing podcast, “GrowthTLDR.”

Now, in this episode, Kieran talks about how remote work has helped him in his career, in his life in general, why he thinks great opportunity should not be limited by geographic location, and one of the hardest parts of being a leader of a [inaudible 00:01:43] team. Kieran also shared some insights on why remote hiring or hiring remotely is one of the best things that you can do for your company growth, how you can avoid [inaudible 00:01:54] processes in distributing, and the so-called goldfish face problem in the most meetings.

This is our first episode in 2020 and I promise you we will have more great things coming [inaudible 00:02:09] insights and knowledge to gain experience about leading remote teams and remote work in general. So, if you’re enjoying the podcast, please do consider leaving a review on iTunes. Again, go to your iTunes or Apple Podcasts and then search for “Outside the Valley,” leave five stars if you like the show, and if you have any comments or feedback, please email me at jovian@arc.dev. It’s Jovian, jovian@arc.dev. Also, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @arcdotdev.

Now, without further ado, let’s get to our conversation with Kieran Flanagan. Here we go. Hey, Kieran, welcome to the show.

Kieran: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be on.

Jovian: Yes, awesome. So, Kieran, just like I mentioned before the call, I’m super excited to call you today because you are one of the few people in the marketing field, digital marketing and growth marketing field that is super passionate about remote work. So just to start a bit, can we go through a quick history about your career and about your, you know, digital marketing career or growth marketing career, and how you ended up in HubSpot?

Kieran: Yeah. So, my background is actually in computer science, so I was a software engineer. I was not very good at being a software engineer. I transitioned to become a marketer because my brain is just better. Although when I first went into marketing, I really did a combination of, like, development and marketing, so I started in search, which can be very technical role. And so I did that for some amount of time and then got into SaaS through working for Salesforce. I went to work at Salesforce, Marketo, fast forward to HubSpot. And I’ve done three things in HubSpot, which is how to grow the international business and then changed roles within HubSpot to help to grow our freemium business. And then today, the older the teams…I manage a group of teams that generate HubSpot’s demand across the globe, helps to generate all the customers.

Jovian: And how long have you been working remotely? Is it since even before HubSpot?

Kieran: No. So, like, I guess one good thing is because I’ve been thinking a lot about…like, I talk a lot about remote, write about remote, post about remote. And one thing I would say is what I’m more passionate about and the way I think about my role and the role of other people I work with is like distributed teams. And so, what I mean by distributed is because when people think remote, they always think, “Hey, someone’s sitting in their house and working from their home.”

Jovian: Yeah.

Kieran: But, actually, the thing that I am passionate about is, like, that can be part of a distributed team, but actually, teams you can be either in offices, across the globe, or fully remote. And so when you expand and your company starts to build sub-offices, you can have groups of people across those offices who are all in the same team, or they could be a fully remote at-home. So, for me, when I joined HubSpot’s freemium group to grow our market and growth engine for our freemium business, I had changed roles to do that. I was meant to move to Boston, could not move to Boston for personal reasons, and they said, “Okay, well, try to make it work from Dublin,” knowing that most of my group is gonna be based in the States. And so I was the only person in Dublin. At that time, there was three…

Our team was, like, five. It was very small because we have just started freemium, and four of them were in the U.S., I was in Dublin. And we kept on growing that to about 25 or 30 people. And about the three of us were in Dublin, everyone else was in the States or other places. And then today, there’s about 55 to 60 people in my group, and about 5 or 6 of them are in the Dublin office, everyone else is spread out across the States, Berlin, France. And so, the way I kind of structure my week is I usually spend about three days at home and I come into the Dublin office for two days.

Jovian: Got it. Yeah, it resonates what…so, I’ve talked to Andreas Klinger, the Head of Remote at AngelList. And he actually had a similar viewpoint as you’ve mentioned. Basically, sees remote work as more of a spectrum. It doesn’t have to be like 100% distributed, it doesn’t have to be, like, 100% percent collocate, but there’s that area in between. We actually had also, like, hybrid team, so I think that’s kind of a popular term nowadays. So, most of us are co-located and some of us are, you know, based in the other countries in the United States or Mexico or Canada.

Going back to about you. I read this article where you mentioned a couple of times, I forget it’s a couple times or what, that remote work has helped you so much. Can you share a bit more, like how, you know, having this flexibility and working the remote setting has helped you? It can be you know, career-wise or personal-wise.

Kieran: Yeah. So, I’m trying to build, like, a little framework for this, and this may not come out right because I’ve only just thought of it in the bath last week, and I haven’t like articulated it or put it down.

Jovian: Shower thoughts. Yeah.

Kieran: Yeah, shower thoughts. So, I was trying to help my people in my group and some other people outside of my group that I try to help on how, like, they should think about career, right? And if you think about your career, there’s four pillars to your career, which is basically your own ability, which most people think it’s like all based upon their own ability and it’s actually not. It’s like, some might be your own ability. Some of it might be your ability to choose the right company to work for. A large part of your growth is actually dependent upon the person you work for, like, directly your manager.

Jovian: I agree.

Kieran: And then there’s some amount of luck, which people don’t like to talk about, but it’s true. Because if I have very great, like, really great ability, but I picked the wrong company and a bad manager, it doesn’t really matter what I do, I’m stuck. If I had really great ability and I pick the right manager but the company stagnates, like, it doesn’t grow, then I’m stuck because my manager is not gonna move up, I’m not gonna move up, and I don’t have more opportunities. So there’s the luck in that that a company starts to grow, your managers are great managers, so they have other opportunities and they can take you with them. So that’s four pillars, but traditionally, there’s been five, and the other big one has been location.

Jovian: I see. Yeah.

Kieran: And you have all of these great people that can do great work, but for one reason or the other, they can’t move to San Francisco, Boston, New York, London, Berlin, or wherever the other… Like, that’s primarily the biggest kind of cities for tech. There’s others in other industries, and maybe other cities.

And so what I love about remote work is that I hate the fact that location has to be such a big component of what makes someone successful.

I think you should be able to be based in a city of your choice because you want to be close to your family, or you have a partner that can’t move, or you have someone within your family who’s sick and you wanna be near them. Or, in my case, I could have moved for a personal reason, and I couldn’t go to Boston.

So, in another world where remote work was not possible or HubSpot were not a good enough company that they would allow me to try to build something really great from Dublin, even though all of my team and the core company is based in the States, then I could not have done the freemium role. And the freemium role for me was a huge opportunity. It had a big impact on my career. I feel like I’m a way better leader because of that role.

And that’s what I love about remote work because it helps to reduce the reliance on opportunity for you to have a really great and successful career.

Jovian: Yeah. I 100% agree with that. It’s actually the same premise that we have on Arc, right? As a remote software hiring platform, we actually have the same idea. It’s, “Oh, we have these great software developers from around the world. They can be based in Asia. They can be based in Africa or Europe. And they are super skillful and almost like, this so-called Silicon Valley talent skillful,” right? And just like you mentioned, like, the fifth pillar, it’s like, we don’t think it’s fair that they are only restricted by the regional limitation of that because for the other pillars, like in terms of ability…well, probably on luck, they are not the same, but in terms of ability and knowledge, they are able to go out there.

So, I wanna move on a bit to remote leadership. So, Kieran, you’ve been the VP of Marketing at HubSpot for how long again?

Kieran: Since 2016. Yeah, I started 2016. Before that, I was helping HubSpot to build [inaudible 00:11:39]. So, I was kind of like heading up international marketing. So for just my two and a half years, I kind of helped to build that, the international markets. And so I did some [inaudible 00:11:49] work, but actually, most of my team were based in the office in Dublin with me.

Jovian: Got it. So, I wanted to ask this question. I think a lot of people have different answers. But in your own opinion, why is leading a remote team especially hard? I know you’ve talked a couple of times with other remote leaders, like, Kevan Lee from Buffer or even Nicholas Holden from your own company. But for you personally, why do you think the one thing, or two things, that make leading a remote team especially hard?

Kieran: Yeah. You know, the hardest part is relationships actually. Like, if you are a leader, one of the core things to be a great leader is to care about your team beyond metrics, right? So if you are just a, “Hey, these are people, and these people make my numbers go up or down, and that’s how I look at these people.” Then, you know, that shines through and it’s not a great way to lead a team. And so you do want to care…you don’t need to, like, go visit everyone in your team’s house, every single night, have dinner with them.

But there needs to be some amount of empathy for the things that go on in those people’s lives. Understand a little bit about them beyond just the things they’re accountable to at work, which means basically just like, you have to want to have a relationship beyond just the metrics or the things they’re accountable to.

The thing that’s really difficult with remote is building relationships over Zoom. It’s actually really hard, right? Like, we, as humans, still connect best when we are in person, right? There’s just no amount of awesome technology or online collaboration tools, you know, take away the fact that we, like, primarily people who like to build relationships with all the people that are in the same place as us, and we can kind of connect with. And so that’s why you see most of the best remote companies all have retreats.

So, they have things quarterly retreats, or retreats where everyone can get together and they can actually get to know each other, spend some time with each other. And so a big part of being a remote leader I think is definitely traveling to the places where your employees are.

If you are fully kind of redistributed team and that you have no offices, and you are all over the globe, then you’re not gonna go and visit everyone’s house, so you are relying on, like, these retreats. But I think that’s the thing.

I mean, some of the people, you talk…that I talk to about this, and you just mentioned with Nicholas Holland, who has some really great insights in this and calls that collecting gold coins, and you store employees’ gold coins in your bank when you’re building relationships with people, and that’s how he sees his time with his team. It’s, like he collects those gold coins, which is like all of the good stuff in terms of building those relationships. And then, you can use that throughout the next period of time where people are just connecting with each other over Zoom.

Jovian: Yeah. And by the way, we’ll put. You know, the interviews that I mentioned just now are on the show notes, so everyone can check it out. So, since you’ve been a remote leader for a while now, have you ever had the situation that you feel like, one of your team members, “Oh, this person…” Let me see how to phrase this. He or she is somehow “not used to work remotely.” You know, like, need more guidance in communication. My question is, have you ever had that situation or the HubSpot or you usually are able to mitigate this on the interview process?

Kieran: So we try not to distinguish between, like, being a good communicator if you’re a remote versus being a good communicator within the office in that if you’re in an office or remote, we expect you to be good at communication. [Crosstalk 00:15:37].

Jovian: It makes sense.

Kieran: There’s a ton of different things that go into that. Like, it’s if you are a person that is very comfortable doing the role that you’re doing, what you really need is someone to remove blockers for you and just to make sure that you’re going down the correct path. Your communication style is very different from someone who’s come into something, who’s doing something quite new and needs a lot of help to get up to speed on the thing you’re accountable to, and then your communication style needs to be more proactive and asking a bunch of questions.

So, I don’t think we’ve ever had a case where we’re like…I’ve certainly never personally had a case where I’m, like, looking at this person’s communication style and thinking, “Oh, well, the reason that this is going wrong is because they’re remote.” It’s more I try to focus on, like, their communication style agnostic of being remote or in an office and how we can help them to communicate in a way that’s gonna make them more successful.

I do think when you’re remote, there are some things that do matter. I know Wade Foster from Zapier has talked about this a lot. I do agree with him, which is you do have to be…there is some amount of accountability on you to be proactive, and I’ve always thought that. And actually, Nicholas, again, who maybe is a good person to get on your show at some point, countered me and didn’t agree with that.

It’s, like, some people if they’re remote need to be proactive, other people don’t. They just know their shit and don’t need help. But I think what really matters in terms of being…what we mean by being proactive is it’s easy to kind of forget there’s other people, like, on your team and just like get into a place where you’re not reaching out to help when you need to because you can’t physically see them.

And then the other thing I kind of do agree with is, like, you do need to be good at written communication. Because when you’re in a remote team, you’re documenting a lot more things, a lot of your back-and-forth is through Slack comments and docs. And so you don’t need to be, you know, the best writer in the world, but you need to have a good communication style via writing. And even so, we create a lot of videos through an app called Loom. So, there’s, you know, getting good at those kind of tools does matter.

Jovian: Yeah. You mentioned that in another article. I actually need to just take all of these articles and put on the show notes. You mentioned that team structure will have more impact in growth than any marketing tactic. I totally agree with this. I’ll give you an anecdote about my team for a while.

So, my coworker, Paul, he’s in Canada. So he’s joining us for like, a year or two right now. And on the interview, I asked him, like, “Why are you interested in this hiring space?” Right? And he gave me an answer I will never forget, because I found it interesting. I’ve never looked at it that way. Because, basically, any problems that you have in your company, you can solve it by hiring, by hiring the right people. It doesn’t mean it’s going to be cheap, right?

Kieran: Right.

Jovian: But that’s kind of, like, almost on the idea where it’s all cure for everything, assuming you’re hiring right. And [inaudible 00:18:46] also remind me of that. Actually, when it comes to growth team, I like that you also think it’s about team structure will have more impact on growth. My question will be, can you elaborate more on this with any examples or anecdotes from HubSpot that you feel team structure or having remotely impact the growth directly?

Kieran: Yeah. I think at a company of any size, there’s two important things beyond all of the marketing tactics, sales tactic, customer success, and support. So you touched on the first one, which is how do I hire talent, right? And there’s a lot of things that can go into that. That’s a whole other podcast. But when you’ve got the talent, you know, it doesn’t mean that they’re guaranteed to be successful.

You can hire talented people and because you have set them up in an incorrect way and have not set them up for success, then those people are going to fail, and then that’s gonna be just be a circular thing where you’re like, “Oh, we’ll just hire another person because it’s obviously a talent thing.” And it’s actually because you’ve set these people up in your team structure in an incorrect way.

And so, on the growth side of things, I get pretty exasperated because when we were going into this kind of product-led model, when we have these growth setups, for the most part, there’s like cross-functional teams that…there’s teams that have to work cross functionally that have traditionally not had to work so closely. And so, a good example of that is, like in a lot of product-led companies, freemium businesses, you have product, marketing, and sales, engineering, all kind of thrown in to go-to market. And so these teams are trying to figure out, you know, who owns what? How do we work together? And a lot of time gets wasted in reporting structure, right? I own this.

But what tends to happen is you have these people in teams who own metrics. And when you actually ask them, “How do you hold yourself accountable to that metric? What are the things you can do to shift that number?” They’re relying on these other teams who have a totally different metric, a totally different North Star, and so there’s just friction because I am asking the product team to do something for me.

They have a totally different metric and are motivated by something different. The product team are asking marketing to create some stuff for them. They are motivated by a different metric. That’s way down their priorities.

And so one of the most impactful things you can do is say, “Okay. If we are gonna be successful over the next 3, 6, 12 months,” and your timeline is really dependent on the company size you are. Smaller companies have a shorter timeline. Larger companies will have a larger timeline.

But, let’s say, I’m thinking, “How do I be successful for the next six months?” And I place the things that I need to do to be successful across those six months. And I think about who are the people that are accountable for this? And I have a collection of people generally cross-functional and growth, and they are the people best placed to move this metric. And I ask myself, “Okay, do these people fully own this metric, or are they relying on other teams who are motivated by other things?” And we try to solve those problems.

And what you end up with is a pod of people, people call them pod squads, whatever you wanna call them, around a metric. And that team are fully accountable to that metric, they are not reliant on the other teams, so then you can hold them directly accountable and say, “Hey, are you hitting your number? If not, why not?” And the answer they give you will not be, “Well, this person won’t do this for me. Or this person won’t do this for me. I can’t do this because this person isn’t gonna do this for me.”

Their answer should be, “Oh, well, we thought this would work, this experiment would work, and they’re not working like we thought we would.” And you can actually try to start to solve those things. And that’s why I’m a huge, huge advocate for team structure, cross-team alignment, and making sure that you have the correct accountability being a massive growth lever beyond all the kind of tactics, experiments, hacks you to run.

Jovian: Yeah, that’s a great answer. I’ve heard about the concept of squads before, but I think this is the first time I’ve heard it being explained so thoroughly. Like, you mentioned, like, you need to figure out the metrics of each squad and from there, try to figure out how do you work with them and how do you structure their process around it. Amazing.

So, in the remote teams and silhouetted [inaudible 00:23:11] the team structure, right, having a process is important. But in one of your articles, you also wrote that it’s possible to create an excessive number of process, like, the management FOMO kind of thing. How can we find a balance between this too much or too little, just the right amount of balance in managing distributed or remote teams?

Kieran: Yeah, I don’t think there’s a perfect answer to that because it’s so kind of textual based on how things work. I think the thing that you can…you wanna have a very clear system of operation without making that system of operation the core part of someone’s job. And so, like, in a growth team, like, one of their core things of operation is documenting experiments beforehand and then documenting their results in a central repository that other people can kind of learn from, but there’s like lots of other things that go on. But there’s just certain processes that certain teams need to have. But, like, and we kind of pulling that thread a little bit. The reason why a lot of teams over-document things become too process driven.

And I’m actually a big believer in processes, it’s super important. But why some teams become overly indexed in processes is because you have a manager or you have someone who’s in charge of something and they don’t trust their team, right?

They’re trying to make that team document everything and send them everything because they just don’t trust that they’re doing the things that they want them to do, or that they just have a problem with letting go of responsibility. The other thing you need to be good at as a manager is if you’re gonna hire someone onto your team, then you have to be okay with giving them some level of autonomy because you think that…you’ve hired them, you think that this person is good.

If you hire that person on the team and then you spend most of your time questioning the work they do and needing updates every couple of hours on what they’re doing, then you’ve either hired the wrong person or you, as a manager, really need to figure out how to be okay with giving more autonomy to people on your team.

Jovian: I think the best practice is try to have a really good hiring process up front, just to avoid this kind of problem is, like, in the middle, because when it’s there, it’s really hard to figure out, especially when you’re remote, like, you cannot just sit down with people on the same room.

Kieran: Right.

Jovian: You also wrote about the goldfish face. I find is really hilarious. I’ll let you explain this better. So what is the goldfish face?

Kieran: Yeah, so I think one of the things that remote work is really good for is to teach people how to communicate better, regardless of if you’re in a remote role or you go into an office.

And I think one of the great things about spending some time remote is even if you decide to work in an office because that’s the best environment for you, you’ll actually be a better communicator for having to work with people who are remote. So, the remote fish face is basically, if you try to think about this in two different worlds.

In the remote world what that is, is, like, when you are in a group, a team, and there’s a group of people in an office, and then you work with a couple of people remote, what tends to happen is you’re like, a goldfish constantly opening and closing your mouth, because you’re trying to get into the conversation and everyone is having the conversation in the room and they’re not paying attention to the screens.

They’re just in the zone, like, they’re chatting. They’re getting some things done and they completely forget to, like, acknowledge the fact that there’s people remote who are trying to participate in that meeting.

And if you think about that, that actually happens in the real world, regardless of if you’re remote because you actually have people who just have dominated…just dominate conversations because their communication style, it’s very like domineering.

Jovian: Dominant. Yeah.

Kieran: Yeah, they’re very dominant when they’re in the room. And then you have other people who are not like that, but they’re just as intelligent, have just as good as ideas, but they’re naturally just not…that’s not their communication style. And what we traditionally do is we just allow that to happen within the meeting, and the people who have very dominant communication styles overrun that meeting and they leave thinking it’s a great meeting. Everyone who kind of gravitates towards that communication style like even think it’s a great meeting. And then you have a small group of people who are trying to participate and feel like very undervalued.

Jovian: Yeah.

Kieran: And what remote teaches you is to try to, like, again, if you’re a manager or you’re holding a meeting and you’re the person who instigated the meeting, then part of your role is to be a facilitator, right? Part of your role is to say, “Hey, you know, such…do you have…would you like to…do you have a thought there? Do you have a question? Any ideas?” Trying to get all people involved in the discussion.

And I think one of the things that remote work can help do is help make you more empathetic to different communication styles because they just become so much more visible because they’re on a big screen and you can clearly see that these people are struggling to get into the conversation.

Jovian: Yeah, I agree. So I talked to Help Scout’s VP of Engineering, Megan Chinburg, a while ago. It’s funny that she mentioned that remote work actually made her a better person because the exact same thing that you mentioned, like, you care about the other party more and, “Okay, do you feel hurt or something like that?” And it kind of like transpires to her daily life.

What I want to add on that, though, I think the goldfish face can be cured when it comes to like a serious meeting. But I think one thing that is really hard is on a fun setting. Like, a couple of times I tried to crack a joke with [inaudible 00:29:04] that are co-located and some of them are on Zoom. And then the goldfish face happened like, “Oh, what just happened?” Now this is really hard because if I repeat the joke, then it’s not funny. So, I think that’s where the retreat comes in play, right? This is where you…

Kieran: Right. They get to know your personality. They get to spend some time with you. The other thing is, like, here’s an interesting question for you because you obviously work remotely with people who are based remotely. When people are presenting, does everyone on the call mute their mic?

Jovian: That’s actually a good question. We actually struggled with that a bit a while ago. So, we do that now. We do that now. So whenever someone is presenting and everyone will be on Zoom. And then, even though, like, five people in the same room, like, one people remote, right? And the five people will open up their camera and then just pretend that we are all in the different places. But it’s still tricky because, you know, when in Zoom if five people are in the same place, “Okay, whose mic should be on now?” So, it’s kind of awkward.

Kieran: And so that’s the typical…? Like, we would have always said, “Hey, you need to mute your mic,” and it’s good practice to mute your mic. And that’s basically what everyone who…if you’re talking about remote work, that’s the advice we would give.

There’s an opposing view to that that I have, which is, “How horrible is it to present to people with their mics off?” Because to your point on the joke side of things where you’re trying to make a joke, it’s hard set and then everyone is just, like, stone-faced because they haven’t heard you properly or they don’t know you that well. Maybe they haven’t spent time with you. How bad is it when you’re presenting to like 10 people and 9 of them have their mics off? Like, you’re trying to do a presentation, have some fun stuff in there?

Jovian: Oh, God.

Kieran: You can hear no feedback at all because everyone has muted their mic, and they’re doing the right thing because they don’t want to interrupt someone. But it’s not a…you know, it’s a very alien environment to have present people who have just complete silence, they’re not even like, you know, “Oh, yeah. That’s a good idea.” Or giving you any kind of, like, little nudges of like encouragement. And so you have to really…you have to be thoughtful about those things. I started to. I think you should mute your mic if you’re in a noisy location, but for the most part, I actually prefer people start to…

I’ve started to prefer my team and group to unmute themselves so we can give people who are presenting something, like, noises of encouragement, laugh to their jokes if there’s jokes in the presentation. And so I think there’s just like all those nuances when you’re remote that you have to kind of think about.

Jovian: So, in terms of communication procedure between remote teams, right, some teams they prefer to work asynchronously, which means they…ideally, you don’t need to have any meetings or overlap. You use app like Twist or Basecamp, or that optimized set of Slack. But like for companies like Balsamiq, for example, they have this golden hour where ideally, most of the company have one hour where they just synchronously and they just have meeting.

Kieran: So, we have a variety of…there’s just a variety of different things because there’s so many people. Like, we have periods of time where people overlap and have meetings. We definitely have meetings. There’s, like, definitely people in my group who are very anti-meeting and I have to sit and have meetings sometimes.

But we do have a bunch of different things, to be honest. Depending on where people are based, they can have very little time where they overlap, so they’re using Airtable and different tools to run their projects and leaving each other messages. But I think every group, for the most part, will have some period of time where there’s overlapping hours where they can kind of work together, have some meetings, have somebody to, like, chat.

It’s really hard to…I’ve talked to people who’ve been [asynch]. I was in it for a little bit at a previous company when I was in Dublin and that company was in the West Coast. I think it’s really hard to be productive if you have no hours of overlap with each other, where it’s just…it makes work a lot more complicated if you have no periods of time that overlap with each other, and everything is being done [opposite ends…]. And you know, you have your day at work, you do your stuff, and then you hand that on for the next person and they’re trying to pick it up. I think that that can be a little bit tricky.

Jovian: Yeah. Yeah. The next level in that is our situation where most of them are in North America and Asia. Like, almost if you go with the East Coast, like 12 hours difference.

Kieran: Right. [Crosstalk 00:33:47].

Jovian: Right. So that’s like next level of shit. So, okay, let’s go to team culture thing. Any practical things that you do or HubSpot do to maintain and improve the culture for remote teams, you know, both fun stuff, serious stuff?

Kieran: Yeah, there’s others. So, maybe I’m not the most fun because I don’t always know all the things that are going on for remote employees. We have like specific Slack channels where we hang out and talk about…just like talk about the latest TV shows, talk about anything you want that’s outside of work. Like, trying to recreate that water cooler feel where you’re talking about the latest show or a sports game or something. And so we have…

Jovian: Sorry. And who initiates this conversation? Is there any some kind of like people ops, or it’s mostly like the group leader?

Kieran: I think it’s a variety but we have a really great people ops team that are very invested in remote work and are constantly trying to…

Jovian: That’s awesome.

Kieran: Yeah, consistently trying to make the environment and culture better for remote workers, and I think they do an incredible job. And so they set up a lot of these things. They’re very thoughtful about how to ensure that remote work feels…workers feel…like, an inclusive environment for people who work remotely. So we have kind of all the things you would typically see in a distributed company where we have those fun Slack channels, we have the Donut app [crosstalk 00:35:14]. Yeah, everyone uses that app.

Teams also do their own things. Like to be honest with you, like all of my teams, it’s fully remote, like, I was on my first ever baby shower I attended for one of my team members and everyone was remote. And they do coffee, like remote coffees, remote lunches. There’s always things going on across the different teams.

So we have a people ops team that are very thoughtful about how to build a good culture for remote employees. And then their remote managers and leaders are very, very thoughtful about how to build a really great environment for their team and team members who are remote, because we just see this as such an important part of our future growth.

Jovian: That’s amazing. So I think there’s a…I saw on Twitter the other day, there’s this notion saying that, like, in the future, they’ll be a title called the VP of Remote or something like that. That’s basically just help, you know, work on the process for remote teams, the culture and whatnot. Like, who knows about [crosstalk 00:36:21].

Kieran: Yeah, I think there could be someone. It depends, like, who knows what new made up titles will be? But I think primarily in companies, your people ops team are the team who are accountable to culture, it’s part of how they build the culture.

Jovian: True. So, I wanna move on on the hiring process a little bit, so we don’t need to touch all of them. But I know as a remote leader, when you’re hiring, you put a lot of emphasis on this particular hire to be is…as having a self-starter characteristic, right? I’m just curious, like, on the interview process, what kind of questions or what kind of project that you kind of use to evaluate if this person is self-starter or not?

Kieran: Yeah, just I guess to be…maybe to come back to that, because I don’t know if I was overly clear. I think that being a self-starter helps you build in office and remote. I think with remote, I think I more talked about proactive around communication and that remote sometimes you can get into your bubble and forget that you have a team there that can help you. That’s just like learning that you need to be cool when reaching out to people and start setting up meetings in Zoom. We do not like go, “Hey, you know. How does…?” You know, we don’t have a set of characteristics that are remote instead of characteristics that are in an office, so we don’t look to see if this person, like, is a self-starter and remote. And then, we don’t care that they’re not a self-starter if they’re in the office.

So we don’t really distinguish between someone we’re hiring remote and someone we’re hiring at the office. We look for, “Is this person gonna be great at their role,” like, all the different things that we want to have in someone who works within HubSpot. And then we don’t really give too much thought to, like, you’re gonna be remote or in an office.

It’s really…it helps if you’ve had some experience remote just because if you haven’t worked remote before, it can just be a difficult transition for you if you’ve only ever worked in an office. But we don’t, like, overly distinguish between those two things.

Jovian: So basically, it seems like, let’s say, in HubSpot, right, no matter if you’re remote or non-remote, you’re basically just looking for somebody who’s just proactive and just to be good at their role?

Kieran: Right.

Jovian: Is there any particular stage in your hiring process, it can be for the growth and marketing, that you can evaluate how proactive this person is? So, I’ll give you an example for our company for when we’re hiring a new engineer, there is this take-home project, right? And we also evaluate, like, what questions did they ask on the private Slack channel? Stuff like that. Do you have like, a similar process?

Kieran: Yeah. Yeah. Again, each department, each role, each team will have its own ways to tease these things out. But things that we do are we have some roles, would have exercises that you can bring home and then you can see the amount of work that someone has added to that exercise how proactive they need to be to get some of that information. We don’t want you spending weeks on doing something that’s part of an interview process, but we do want to [inaudible 00:39:44], you know, it does matter that you’ve kind of be proactive and really done a good job there.

We will ask what…a good question to ask in terms of discovering someone and how proactive they are is like, “Tell me the last problem you had to solve within your company, and how did you go about solving that?” And you can see how many layers deep they went in trying to discover what that problem was versus, like, “Oh, I just handed it off to an engineer,” versus, “Oh, I read these three blog posts, discovered this thing, then went to this person, and then figured this thing out.” Like, you can kind of, like, start to tease that out. So we try to, for the most part, test for all of the characteristics that would make you successful in a role, not just being proactive, it’s like across a wide spectrum of different things.

Jovian: Fantastic. So, let’s say I am a company that kind of want to start hiring remotely. It can be for growth roles, marketing roles, probably just because time zone in Asia, for example, if you’re based in Europe and want to hire someone for a marketing role or sales from the U.S., and, let’s say, this is my first time hiring a remote team member, who are not in my office. What things do you think I should figure out first and foremost before I go about hiring someone abroad?

Kieran: Yeah, I think, you know, their success for the most part, is largely dependent upon you and the people in the office versus them. What I mean by that is, like, obviously, some of their success is still dependent upon them. But if you’re an employee, number one, there’s only so much you can do to integrate yourself into the team and the culture of the company. Most of it is dependent upon the team, the culture in the company.

And so, you wanna make sure that you’re committed to having a really great experience for whoever you hire, which means, like, even trying to think about some of those things, which is, “Hey, when we have a team-wide meeting with this person, are we all gonna be on Zoom or a bunch of us are gonna be in the office and that person is the only person on Zoom?”

Like, just making sure that you have some principles to make sure that you’ve created a good experience for anyone who works remote with your team within the company.

That’s the things I would focus on, and then you can kind of go out and make sure, “If we hire this person, their success is not gonna be inhibited or they’re not going to fail in the role because we haven’t set up the right environment for them to be successful.”

Jovian: Yeah, I love that answer because I have this hypothesis that actually if you are a co-located company, and going remote actually will force you to get your shit together in terms of internal processes, documentation and whatnot.

Kieran: Yeah, exactly.

Jovian: Because, yeah, before you’re probably kind of messy, you know, scrappy entrepreneur like 10, 20-team company where everyone knows where we are now and everyone just, you know, messages you on Slack or just verbally. But when you hire remotely, it kind of pushes you to get your things together. You know, the culture and then how to…documentation and whatnot. So I really love your answer on that.

Since you are the VP of…on the marketing team, right, I think a lot of times when you’re in marketing, especially with a great company like HubSpot, a lot of times where you can just…you just need to be creative. Like, something out of left field, something that’s never been done before. How do you guys go about finding or brainstorming creative ideas?

Kieran: So I don’t think I have a great answer because a lot of our best ideas have just come from people having ideas, and then running small, minimal viable tests and trying to figure out if they’re correct or not.

A lot of our best ideas come from customer research. Most of them come from customer research, and staying close to your customers or where your best ideas come from.

And then, a lot of it just comes from like understanding the segment and the audience that you are trying to attract attention from. And so, every team has, like, their own way to approach how they come up with, you know, these creative ideas. For me, it’s more about what you do after you have the idea that’s the important thing. I think we all have Airtables and Trellos and different documentations with countless amount of ideas.

The thing is how you turn an idea into a minimal, viable version of that idea so you can get some amount of feedback before you invest too much effort and resources in it.

Jovian: Yeah, that’s pretty good. I think it’s kind of true to the HubSpot culture is, like, you know, customer-centric. You guys even have this Service Hub, right, for you know, working with customer success and trying to call customers and whatnot, so yeah.

So, yeah. I think our time is up here. I won’t take your time more. So, Kieran, how can people find you online?

Kieran: Yeah, so at Twitter, Twitter handle is @searchbrat. On LinkedIn, you can connect with me and you can listen along to the “GrowthTLDR” podcast, if you’re interested.

Jovian: Yeah. So I’ll recommend everyone to listen to Karen’s podcasts at “GrowthTLDR,” especially if you’re an entrepreneur, or you work at the growth team, or marketing team. It’s super amazing, and yeah, have a listen. So, Kieran, thank you so much for your time today. I learned a lot. Fantastic conversation.

Kieran: Sure. Yeah, thank you, Jovian.

Jovian: Thank you.

And that’s it for another episode of “Outside the Valley” brought to you by Arc. We created this podcast with the hope that in each episode, you can learn something new from other remote startup people. So if you have any feedback or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at jovian@arc.dev. It’s jovian@arc.dev. Or, you can find us on Twitter @arcdotdev. See you next week with another episode of “Outside the Valley,” and ciao.

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