HUBLY Strategic Consulting & Advisory
The Business Challenge
HUBLY a Barclay’s Techstars backed company headquartered at New York already had a workflow management product for financial advisors and were seeing a lot of traction in the market. They were at an interesting fork in its startup journey where the team was contemplating scaling their product and engineering teams to deliver on their strategic vision. The core business challenges faced by HUBLY can be summarized as:
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Product & Engineering were constantly battling about direction of the product, roadmap, day to day product related decisions and what was needed in the market
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The entire HUBLY team was worried about how they are going to grow, scale and how they might be hiring/ as well as onboarding new team members in the current dysfunctional team dynamic that had unfortunately developed
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Although there existed a strong product vision, communicating the vision as a compelling and inspiring story was unfortunately missing. This resulted in complex overhead and processes to compensate for the core challenge; thereby slowing engineering down
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The team members in general; primarily engineering were unable to understand and empathize with the users and hence this resulted in a unhealthy debates in design decisions
Bosky is amazing at cutting through all the noise and will find the core underlying human problems that are causing all the pain and confusion. She will challenge the team and ask the difficult questions that no one will. These questions will be uncomfortable but they will help you address the true problems in your business.
Louis Retief, Cofounder & CEO, Hubly Inc
Our Approach
Spark To Substance spent considerable time understanding HUBLY and where the co-founders were looking to take the company forward. Our approach was centered in understanding the business challenges that were being exposed superficially and re-frame them to help hone in and identify the core of those challenges. We worked in the following critical areas with HUBLY:
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Worked with the founders and the entire team to understand the vision and mission of what the team was trying to build
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Worked to understand and empathize with each individual team member and conducted conversational interviews to uncover insights on their motivations
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Participated in engineering and product team’s rituals to understand and unpack the team culture and dynamics
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Focussed heavily on unearthing the challenges stemming from the innate nature of how people think and work i.e. the human problem. A lot of product and engineering challenges were getting blamed on processes and design direction when in reality they were symptoms of broader systemic challenges arising out of different styles of thinking, working and goals.
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Biggest Aha Moment
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The biggest aha moment was when the two founders met with Bosky where she presented the learnings from her health review and reframed the business challenge where we zoomed in on the people lens in particular. This brought in clarity in areas such as what was needed from product leadership to drive empathy, belief and inspire the rest of the organization to rally behind the same set of customer problems. Rising above the “how of” features to the craftsmanship of storytelling and how different team members consume information ultimately led to the CEO taking over the product leadership to play to their strength.
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Services We Provided
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Overall health ScoreCard & Insights
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Product Strategy Review
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Organizational Design Insights
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KPIs & Metrics
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Coaching
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About HUBLY
Hubly is on a mission to improve workflow management for comprehensive financial advice, allowing firms to scale their services to more clients. Hubly delivers best-in-class workflows and processes management that allow for service standardization, improved collaboration, and a consistent end-client experience. This helps advisory firms increase revenue and reduce churn as they grow.