The Business Leadership Podcast episode

TBLP 120 | Christopher O’Donnell: Product Leader

Building and growing a creative and diverse team can give huge positive results to an organization. But the questions of maintainability and scalability of these teams can also be a very big challenge for any business leader.

In this episode, Edwin talks with HubSpot’s SVP of Product, Christopher O’Donnell.

Christopher leads a team of product managers and user experience folks at HubSpot, a SAS technology company. They specialize in all in one marketing, sales and, service CRM solution to small and medium-sized businesses.

A father and a husband before anything else, Christopher is a family-focused person. When he is not leading, Christopher enjoys his passion for storytelling by playing music. In addition to this, he likes to build things, doing woodworking as well as cooking on the side.

In this episode, he talks about his experiences as a business leader in growing a more inclusive and equitable team.

Also, he discusses the significance of giving and getting feedback.

Lastly, drawing on his music background, Chris discusses the parallels between creating a rock and roll album and developing tech products.

What You Will Learn From This Episode

Raising the bar to build a more diverse team through recruitment to ensure a wider palette of abilities and a broader culture
What drove him to make the difficult decision of moving from a comfortable job to join the startup world and landing a leadership position at HubSpot
Creating high a performing team that can make decisions while maintaining the scalability of the team dynamics
He talks about the importance of getting feedback from employees and how to respond to that feedback
The similarities between creating a rock and roll album and maintaining a tech product
Christopher looks back on his mentor and his mentor’s impact on his leadership career
The importance of having business leaders get 360 reviews