HubSpot Culture Design Canvas | By Gustavo Razzetti

How HubSpot’s Culture Code treats culture as a product

Several years ago, as HubSpot began to scale its business, the marketing software company realized that it was time to start talking about culture.

For years, HubSpot leaders have avoided that conversation; they believe that talking about your company’s D.N.A. might taint it. Or worse, ruin it.

Until they realized that times had changed.

As Co-Founder Dharmesh Shah wrote here, “Today, everybody talks about culture. In fact, the first rule of Culture Club is that you do talk about culture.”

That’s why HubSpot decided to approach culture as a product.

“We thought about our culture truly as a product,” explains Katie Burke, chief people officer at HubSpot. “How would I develop this if it were a product? What would be most important? What kind of customer feedback would we care about? How would we make sure it had a point of view?”

The result was its now-famous Culture Code deck. Since being published, the original SlideShare version has been viewed over 5 million times.