Stories
How HubSpot Ran 100+ Interviews in Days with Outset — and Shaped Their AI Roadmap
The Challenge: A Research Gap That Endangered Growth
HubSpot unites marketing, sales, and customer service in one platform for companies around the world, and its north star is Growth Gabby — the target persona that fuels HubSpot's product, marketing, and sales strategies. A clear understanding of her needs isn't a nice-to-have; it's mission-critical.
But as AI began reshaping customer needs at lightning speed, trends that once developed over quarters were emerging in weeks. Being behind created critical consequences: product features that miss the mark, marketing campaigns that don't speak to the customer, and a company optimizing for yesterday’s problems.
Keeping pace with Growth Gabby is how HubSpot de-risks decisions, aligns cross-functional teams, and speaks in the customer’s voice. Yet the existing approach — a handful of interviews once or twice a year — couldn’t keep up. HubSpot needed a current signal on Growth Gabby that was fast enough for the AI era.
"We needed to understand how our customers' needs were changing over time so that we could adapt to change with them," said Jessica Davis, Senior Manager of Customer Insights.
But with only two researchers, this simply wasn’t feasible. Focus groups were too slow. Surveys lacked depth. Outsourcing was expensive and resource-intensive. While they had access to live interviews, sales call recordings, and small focus groups, none of those had a wide enough sample to surface meaningful patterns. Adding to the pressure was manual synthesis. Analyzing open-ended questions one-by-one was too time-intensive to do on a regular basis.
“We just didn’t have the bandwidth to run qualitative research regularly,” said Davis. “But we needed to keep a pulse on our most important persona.”
That's why they turned to Outset.
The Solution: From Bottleneck to AI-Powered Breakthrough
HubSpot used Outset to launch the "Growth Gabby Listening Post," a quarterly, AI-moderated qualitative program that rapidly runs dozens of customer interviews and turns them into actionable themes, quotes, and other insights that are shared company-wide.
“We were skeptical at first,” said Davis. “But after our first trial, we couldn't believe how quickly we got 100 responses — and they were good.”
Instead of writing lengthy guides or handholding a junior researcher, they gave the AI a few simple instructions. The AI interviewer did the rest: running the sessions, following up in real time, and delivering insights that would’ve taken weeks to surface manually.
“It was really easy to get good interviews with just a little bit of guidance,” said Davis. “It was honestly easier than training an intern. We didn’t have to babysit it.”
And analyzing the results was just as easy. What used to be manual, time-consuming topic analysis and sifting through endless open-ended questions became instant synthesis.
"It's easy to see the data really quickly," said Davis. "One feature that is a game-changer is transcript-wide analysis. You just type in a question, and Outset will analyze all of the transcripts across the survey for that question."
The Results: Roadmap-Changing Insights
In just a few days, HubSpot was able to conduct over 100 in-depth interviews — something that previously would have taken weeks. The speed and scale of Outset’s platform gave the team quick visibility into their target persona’s evolving needs without sacrificing quality.
The insights were anything but surface-level. In fact, the interviews uncovered problems that HubSpot didn't even know existed. The team has taken that information and run with it, creating new solutions to gain a competitive advantage. "It's pretty exciting when you can go to one of your co-workers and say, 'Here's a challenge we can solve, and I think we can solve it better than our competitors,'" said Davis.
Feedback from these interviews helped influence HubSpot’s AI product roadmap and shaped the messaging for brand campaigns. Capturing customer language in their own words has given marketers a clear advantage in multiple go-to-market initiatives. For example, when interviews revealed unexpected pain points and language around unified data, it changed the focus and wording for an entire campaign.
“We pull out the exact phrases customers use and give them to marketers,” explained Davis. “It’s their voice, not ours.”
The research quickly gained visibility across the company, and multiple teams began requesting access to the Outset platform. “Eventually, I had to tell them to get their own seat. We needed ours back,” Davis explained with a smile.
Outset has given HubSpot the ability to:
Run in-depth research continuously, not just once or twice a year
Start with quant research and then seamlessly expand to qual insights
Immediately see trends over time with auto-generated bar charts
Influence cross-functional teams with fast, clear, customer-driven insights
“It opened up a Pandora’s box, in a good way,” said Davis. “We have all of these options for different types of research that our team couldn't do before. Now we can.”
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