At 30dps, we are a proud HubSpot partner. HubSpot, for those not familiar with the company, it is the provider of one of the leading marketing automations systems—and that short description doesn’t do their truly outstanding offerings justice! They are an innovator in many areas. One that I admire most is their leadership in the concept of transparency.
An Irritating Outage
Recently, HubSpot had a fairly major technical issue. A database upgrade went awry and caused many people a whole lot of grief. Problems with technology aren’t new. They happen to even the best companies. What was notable in this instance, from my point of view, was how open and honest Dharmesh Shah, a HubSpot founder and CTO, was about the snafu.
Here’s how he started a note that users saw when they accessed the system after the outage:
"It’s been a tough week here at HubSpot, but even a tougher week for you, our customers. A planned database upgrade went terribly wrong in recent days, leading to significant downtime and frustrating outages for many of you... We are very sorry to have let you down."
A Complete Confession
Notice he didn’t use vague language in an effort to minimize the issue. Instead, he said it was “a tough week,” the upgrade went “terribly” wrong, there was “significant” downtime, it was “frustrating” to users. No sugarcoating. HubSpot blew it, and they owned it.
I won’t include the entire text of the note in this post, as it’s quite lengthy, but here are some things it contained that I thought were refreshingly honest and detailed:
- It gave a story-like explanation of why the upgrade was being done, how it had been tested, and how the situation ultimately unfolded.
- It pointed out two major failings on HubSpot’s part that led to the outage—(1) poor timing for the upgrade, which came in close proximity to Cyber Monday and the end of the month, and (2) insufficient testing that didn’t simulate real world conditions.
- It acknowledged that they are still trying to get to other root causes of the problem so it doesn’t happen again.
Why am I sharing this? I’m passing it along because of the unexpectedly positive gut reaction I’ve had to the situation. Surprisingly, HubSpot’s candid and complete revelations about the incident haven’t shaken my trust in them and their product one bit. On the contrary, my confidence in them has increased tremendously. And that, my friends, is a heads up to all of us.
The old school approach to crisis management, which involved minimizing and deflecting, and then quickly moving on just doesn’t work today. (It probably never has, really.) What your customers and my clients want is complete honesty and full transparency. I’ve blogged about that before, but this incident underscored the importance of not just saying, “Our bad. Sorry.” but truly opening up about what went wrong and steps being taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Kudos, HubSpot! We’re behind you 100%.
The truth is, at 30dps we've been extremely happy with HubSpot's reliability and technical support. But we're even happier with how they've handled this exception, and it gives us increased confidence in their reliability going forward.
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