HubSpot's team relies on Confluence for communication and collaboration. But as the number of employees and pages continues to increase, so does the challenges of findability and performance. By hiring a Wiki Product and Knowledge Manager, migrating to Data Center, and integrating applications, HubSpot found valuable solutions to support its rapidly evolving and transparent culture.
HubSpot is a pioneer in inbound marketing, designed to make marketing and sales more human. Their solutions help businesses attract new customers with relevant, useful content, rather than pushing disruptive and impersonal ads and emails.
HubSpot also has this mission internally, building a culture of transparency for its global employees, a culture driven by employees posting relevant, useful content on Confluence.
By migrating from Confluence Server to Data Center and enhancing platform capabilities by integrating multiple applications, HubSpot developed a high-performance, easy-to-use hub that helped facilitate communication, collaboration, and transparency within it.
Dedicate time and resources to developing the HubSpot Hub
Since HubSpot launched Confluence, the global organization has used it as its primary source of information. Executives use Confluence to make important announcements, such as business updates and new offices. The marketing department uses it for project planning. The product department uses it for documentation. Sales and support use it as a knowledge base. HR Workforce Operations uses it to communicate new benefits and hiring strategies, while Business Support uses it for documentation. Ciaira Castorena, WikiProducts and Knowledge Manager, explains, "Whatever you want to know or what you want to tell others, everything can be achieved with Confluence. ”
But as the number of employees and Confluence pages increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to find the right information when needed. In addition, loading speeds slow down during peak hours and sometimes unexpected interruptions occur.
HubSpot employees use Confluence to understand the information they need and get the job done, so company leadership invests in infrastructure and talent to support employee success. They hired a Wiki Products and Knowledge Manager who could focus on managing Confluence content, solving employee challenges, and planning ahead for the future. Ciaira has extensive experience in collaboration software and community management and is the ideal person to do the job.
Confluence gives everyone in the company an equal opportunity to participate, ask questions, and speak out, making the company a company that countless people are proud of. —Chief Personnel Officer, KATIE BURKE
Ciaira was excited about the new opportunity and accepted the new position in hopes of making a difference. She started with two main goals: to thoroughly learn Confluence and to better understand how HubSpot employees around the world use Confluence. "I started to delve into the examples and interviewed all kinds of people in the company," she explains. I even visited our Dublin office to get the staff there involved because I knew everyone used Confluence differently. ”
After collecting research data and identifying pain points, Ciaira began developing her own battle plan. Top priority: Minimize downtime and simplify how content is found.
Collaborate for smooth upgrades and migrations
To address downtime, Ciaira began working with HubSpot's system operations team for system maintenance and upgrades. Matt Krohn, a systems engineer who works with a lot, says their collaboration helps make sure everything goes smoothly: "It's really nice to be able to chat with Ciaira while doing a test upgrade, and she'll say, 'Oh, that looks great!'" Or, 'Well, this thing seems to be broken.' ’”
One of the big projects Ciaira and Matt worked on was HubSpot's migration from Confluence Server to Data Center. Ciaira recommended to the company's leadership to migrate from Server to Data Center in order to improve performance in the short term while laying the foundation for long-term growth. Once the project was approved, she contacted Matt to begin the planning process.
Whatever you want to know, or what you want to tell others, you can do it all with Confluence. —Product and Knowledge Manager, CASTORENA WIKI, CIAIRA
Since the stakes are high, they work together to minimize problems from the start. Matt says, "When upgrading Confluence, I don't like to act on the feel because it's the most exposed tool we use. If Confluence shuts down, executives will know right away because they've been using Confluence all along. ”
Matt's first task was to learn more about Data Center and the migration requirements. After some research, he realized that HubSpot should first migrate their database management system. Matt explains, "Now that we're overhauling Confluence, we finally decided to migrate our database from MySQL to Postgres. It wasn't easy, but we did. ”
With the Postgres implementation complete, Matt and Ciaira turned their attention to Data Center. Through months of collaboration, they completed a complete proof of concept and extensive testing. The preparations worked, and they successfully completed the migration to Data Center. In fact, Ciaira points out, this doesn't seem like a big deal from the perspective of the average HubSpot employee. Since then, even though the hot posts have gone viral internally, there has been no unplanned downtime. In addition, HubSpot engineers can easily add new nodes to their clusters in AWS.
"I can use our automated tools to start a new node, migrate everything to the new node, and then delete the old node. I think it's really fantastic. Matt said. Ciaira adds, "I've received fewer reports of server-related error messages, and content now loads faster. "This migration is a huge win for Confluence administrators and users and will continue to deliver more benefits as HubSpot grows.
Confluence is the key to HubSpot's culture of transparency
Since the migration, Ciaira has worked to simplify content discovery and customize Confluence with apps in the Atlassian Marketplace. From enabling archiving and analytics to adding more improvements and personalization capabilities, HubSpot's commitment to transparency and information sharing drives every change. Katie Burke, Chief People Officer, said: "A transparent work environment increases trust and collaboration, which is key to success for a global organization. With Confluence, we can create a platform that is continuously transparent, giving everyone in the company an equal opportunity to participate, ask questions, and speak out, and build the company into a company that countless people are proud of. ”
The significant improvements Ciaira and her team have made to Confluence are just the beginning. Going forward, Ciaira hopes to improve the way employees stay informed and connected by building and promoting confluence templates, creating training programs, exploring other customized projects, and supporting people to contribute more.
"In the past, most of my projects have revolved around laying a solid foundation and solving difficult points in order to prepare for future success," says Ciaira. For now, I'll focus on using our increasingly stable environment to extend functionality and create a better user experience that is worth adopting for the business. We are about to embark on a truly fun journey! ”
