Christopher Miller

AI product strategy involves balancing the development of foundational infrastructure with the creation of specific user experiences that drive customer success.

"I get to help lead HubSpot in terms of how we should be thinking about building the foundational technology to create AI-powered experiences and then also lead the strategy of how we leverage those ex..."

Career acceleration depends more on finding sponsors who will bet their professional capital on you than on traditional mentors.

"Mentors are great, don't get me wrong... but when I think about the people in my life, who... the time that they donated to me... I would actually describe those folks as being sponsors and advocates,..."

Attracting high-level sponsors requires a combination of extreme humility and an intense desire to be coached.

"putting ego aside and embracing not knowing stuff and embracing not being good at stuff, and not feeling self-conscious about that and letting the desire to be the best at something or at least be gre..."

Breaking into product management often requires identifying an unmet need within your current organization and volunteering to fill it.

"the founder was just like, 'I've read that the cure to all our problems is going to be hiring product manager,' and you heard that and you googled, what is product management, and then you asked them,..."

When transitioning into PM, prioritize companies with strong mentorship structures and a history of successful internal transfers.

"choosing where you want to break in is almost as important as choosing that you want to break in the first place. Thinking about who you're going to be reporting to, thinking about what's the track re..."

Product-led growth (PLG) is a strategy where the product is the primary driver of acquisition and expansion, with humans supporting the process rather than leading it.

"At the highest level, it's like taking a go-to-market approach where your product job is to grow revenue and you use humans as a backstop and not the other way around."

A successful growth flywheel is built on providing genuine, sustainable value for free before asking for a financial commitment.

"One of the principles that guides our thinking and our strategy is give value before you extract value... we intentionally put out a lot of free software. And the idea is that this software is not sor..."

Pricing and packaging strategy should focus on radical simplification to reduce friction for the customer.

"We were trying to just figure out how to simplify, simplify, simplify. And at the time I was an IC, individual contributing PM, so who am I to have a point of view on pricing and packaging? But the pe..."

Asking candidates to simulate peer feedback reveals their level of self-awareness and emotional intelligence (EQ).

"I would say the other question I really like to ask is, if the people that you most recently worked with were in a room and you weren't there, how would they talk about you?"

Codifying and publicly sharing team values helps attract the right talent and provides a framework for internal accountability.

"Dharmesh, our co-founder... published the HubSpot culture code externally... Humility, empathy, adaptability, remarkability, transparency are sort of all things that I think people take quite seriousl..."

Successful product leaders often gain influence by proactively contributing to high-level strategy discussions before they are formally invited.

"I think I was just willing to take some risks and really push for the things that I believed made sense even though maybe based on the titles that I had at the time, I wasn't sort of inherently given..."

Serendipitous encounters with executives are opportunities to pitch forward-thinking ideas if you have already done the pre-work.

"we ran into the COO at the time and out of the blue I think he had asked us what we thought about pricing and packaging... we ended up kind of pitching in the midst of pints being sort of handed every..."

Microapps and free tools act as high-intent lead magnets that provide immediate value while demonstrating the need for the core product.

"One of the channels that we're spending some time experimenting with is this concept of microapps... Website Grader... you put in your domain, and it crawled your site, and then gave you a set of reco..."

Effective problem definition requires distinguishing between business needs and customer pain points to avoid 'customer-hostile' solutions.

"I don't know that we even talk about problems without a qualifier. Are we talking about a business problem? Are we talking about a customer problem? Are we talking about an efficiency problem? Describ..."

Direct, unmediated access to users is essential for understanding the 'why' behind the data.

"we spent a lot of time talking to users directly, and a lot of guerrilla user research techniques. Literally, sometimes going outside and just talking to runners in passing to understand what were the..."

Interviewing lost prospects or churned users reveals emotional and brand-related barriers that usage data cannot capture.

"I usually tend to really enjoy my conversations with people who decided not to use HubSpot and to really try to unpack what drove that decision. Was it as calculated, as I think sometimes we can all m..."