Confidential - Interview only
HubSpot CRM Cross Object
Making Cross-Object Relationships Clear, Editable, and Scalable
Designing an inline association system that enables sales teams to understand and edit connected data without leaving the index page.
Duration
2 months
Role
Senior Product Designer (solo)
Team
Project team, Gantt team, and Design System team
Users
Admins, sales reps
Problem
Customers lack an efficient, in-context way to access and manage associated records, forcing them to juggle multiple Index tabs, rely on workarounds, which creates fragmented workflows and unnecessary friction.
Background
Associations in CRM Is Hard to Understand and Even Harder to Edit
Since 2020, CRM associations, especially on Index pages, have been a major pain point at HubSpot. Users could technically access associated data, but only by navigating away from their workflow into record pages. This made even simple tasks slow and error-prone.
To compensate, users created their own workarounds:
Opening multiple index tabs to cross-reference records
Building temporary views just to understand relationships
Using the Lists tool to filter associated data
Adding associated columns that cluttered the UI without providing clarity
Through CSAT and customer calls, I can identify couple consistent pain points:
Customers rarely use the associated cards in Records page
Customers are juggling with multiple Index pages tabs when editing association data
Customers create temporary index pages around associated data for their own references
Customers use a workaround with the List tool to filter by associated data
Customers default associated columns in their views that already take up valuable space
GOAL
How might we enable users to understand and edit cross-object relationships, directly within the index page?
Research
Revisit and Discover with Empathy
Did a competitive analysis with main competitors such as Monday, Attio, Notion, Pipedrive. Takeaway is that most competitors share the same problem, except for Monday.com; however their solution tailors to only 100s records, versus HubSpot data base 1,000s - 100,000s records.
Shared my competitive analysis and conducted a 2 day design sprint with my team and cross functioning partners: project management and pipeline teams. Ended up with a true problem statement and generation direction.
I ideated 4 different design directions.
Side Table
Best for comparison + bulk editing
Powerful but dense
Nested Table
Deep Dive
Unsummarized
These were the results