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 at 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: 


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.

Get in touch with Boundaryless:

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast

-  Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_ 
-  Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts 
-  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo 

Music 

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

The Boundaryless Conversations

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

Welcome to Simple Online Business Development! In this podcase, we explore how to establish a powerful YouTube channel for your business in 2025. With over 1 billion hours of video consumed daily on the platform, now is the perfect time to seize this colossal opportunity. Learn how to lay a solid foundation by setting up a dedicated Google account and choosing an impactful brand name that resonates with your audience. Discover essential tips for creating eye-catching visuals like profile pictures and channel banners that reflect your brand's personality. Get ready to make a lasting impression!


Your_2025_YouTube_Business_Roadmap__From_Zero_to_Community

Boundaryless helps global customers with Business Strategy and Organization Design for the age of Ecosystems.
We do it by creating openly accessible frameworks and by supporting a community of organizations, institutions, and individuals through workshops, training, and consulting services. 

In this space we host all our audio recordings, including the Boundaryless Conversations podcast, a show focused on exploring the future of large scale organising by leveraging on technology, network effects and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous. 

We used to be online at platformdesigntoolkit.com... now find us on our new website: www.boundaryless.io!

Email: hello@boundaryless.io

New tracks tagged #customization,