S04 Ep. 10 Scott Brinker – Serving joint customer needs through a modular Platform at HubSpot

Scott Brinker takes us on a journey exploring Hubspot’s fascinating platform strategy, where competitive overlaps between Hubspot’s own hubs and products and third-party developers in the ecosystem are treated as a good thing, and where recognizing and serving the “joint customer need” is the real focus.

Scott is VP Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot, helping to grow and nurture the company's community of technology partners. He writes the chiefmartec.com blog, covering marketing technology management, and is the author of the best-selling book “Hacking Marketing”. Previously, he was the co-founder and CTO of Ion Interactive. He holds degrees in computer science from Columbia University and Harvard University and an MBA from MIT.

Serving multiple niche customer needs with modular platforms: is this possible? Hubspot’s success seems to confirm. With Scott, we take a closer look at Hubspot's approach to figuring out what makes the collaboration between a platform and its ecosystem work. We see what makes a product portfolio and an organizational structure more keen to meet complex and evolving customer needs through collaboration, all while keeping everything connected as one boundaryless ecosystem.

Key Highlights
👉 How the practice of marketing has evolved with technology in the last decades.
👉 Even if so much software is now in the cloud, customization (vs pre-packaging) is still only in the beginning.
👉 Serving joint customer needs across products.
👉 Structuring modularity inside the organization.
👉 Competitive overlaps in the ecosystem is a good thing.
👉 Building legitimacy and trust in the ecosystem requires helping partners to evolve.

Topics (Chapters)
(00:00) Scott Brinker's quote
(00:54) Introducing Scott Brinker
(02:33) How marketing has changed and its intersection with technology
(09:27) Evolution around SaaS and the fact that we live in an ecosystem world
(12:38) Approaching product design and development with customer needs and extensibility points in mind
(18:24) Balancing coherence and diversity in the “tool chain”
(35:08) Internal and external strategy - stability and change
(41:07) Boundaries are never static between platforms and partners
(44:47) Commodities become part of the core platform
(51:58) Scott Brinker's breadcrumbs

Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://boundaryless.io/podcast/scott-brinker

To find out more about Scott’s work:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/chiefmartec
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sjbrinker
- Website: https://chiefmartec.com

Other references and mentions:
- HubSpot: https://ecosystem.hubspot.com
- Wardley mapping: https://learnwardleymapping.com/introduction

Scott’s suggested breadcrumbs (things listeners should check out):
- Hacking Marketing: Agile Practices to Make Marketing Smarter, Faster, and More Innovative: https://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Marketing-Practices-Smarter-Innovative/dp/1119183170
- Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile_(book)

Recorded on 13 January 2023.

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Music
Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music