When I visited HubSpot’s headquarters in fall 2019 as a first-year MBA at MIT Sloan, I focused on a few things:

1. Understanding the Accelerated Leadership Program (ALP)
2. Chatting up current ALP members
3. Checking out the office snacks

At the time I envisioned a smooth transition from my in-person MBA program to an internship in Product at a mission-driven tech company. As a former management consultant, I knew that I needed to go somewhere where I could lean heavily on my strategy and operations skill set.

I also knew I wanted to understand how a SaaS company operates and work close to Product, helping envision and build the things that deliver value to the customer. What this looked like—product management, go-to-market strategy—was what I hoped to test in the next stage of my career. I accepted the summer internship at HubSpot because I felt I would be challenged yet supported as I made this transition. 

The events of spring 2019 changed the way I thought about my career.

Instead of only focusing on the what of my job, I paid more attention to how I would work as I observed HubSpot and other companies shift and upend old assumptions to meet the challenges of an uncertain and evolving future. Would this be a place that could enable my professional and personal growth even as the ground shifted beneath us all? 

The short answer: yes.

In between masked walks during that muggy Cambridge summer, I observed closely how my co-workers at HubSpot brought a highly autonomous culture into a virtual community. I learned how HubSpot builds a new product offering and contributed to one myself. I talked to HubSpot customers, asked executives random questions in Ask-Me-Anything sessions (AMAs, agonized over the perfect GIFs on Slack, and developed a strong admiration for HubSpot’s leadership as they navigated the uncertainty of a global pandemic. 

Most importantly, I realized that my day-to-day interactions with HubSpotters—consistently brilliant, frank, and kind in the face of both professional and personal ambiguity—defined the how of working at HubSpot.

This alignment between what I’m interested in doing and how I want to work is why I accepted the full-time ALP role. I’m currently in my first rotation, helping a Product team think through HubSpot’s strategy around messaging.

Looking forward, I have a few hypotheses about what my other rotations could look like. And I’m especially excited to be a part of HubSpot’s next chapter of growth with a female CEO.

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