Job Map Creation of Education Content Creators

Context

Due to the importance of HubSpot’s free education platform, HubSpot Academy, as a vector for HubSpot to sell CRM software, there was an initiative to provide even more content on HubSpot Academy in order to increase this acquisition channel. Therefore, a business priority for 2023 was to expand the creation of content to external “education influencers” in order to expand this acquisition channel.

As a first step towards pursuing this initiative, I conducted two projects with the goal of getting a fundamental understanding of how creators were using to create content.

  • In the first project, the objective was to learn more about how creators on our own platform, HubSpot Academy, were creating content so that we could improve on the current experience.

  • In the second project, the objective was to learn more about how creators who used educational platforms other than HubSpot Academy were creating content in order for us to gather competitive intelligence and prepare for a future launch for external creators.

At the conclusion of both research projects, we identified similarities and differences between the two groups in order to get an understanding of how the external content creator experience will differ from the Academy Professor experience.

Participants: 7 Academy Professors & 9 External Creators

Timeframe: 3 months

Recruitment

I conducted 16 interviews with 7 internal creators for HubSpot Academy and 9 external creators who have published content on platforms like LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, Skillshare and Coursera.

  • Professor @ HubSpot Academy

  • Instructor @ LinkedIn Learning

  • Instructor @ Udemy

  • Instructor @ Coursera

In order to get an understanding of the Creator’s process of creating content, we conducted an interview using the Jobs-to-be-done framework.

In this framework, a job is defined as the fundamental goal customers are trying to accomplish or the problem they are trying to solve in a given situation. In the case of this project, the job that we had participants walk us through was creating and publishing educational content onto a platform.

In interviews with participants, we identified “publishing content on an educational platform” as the job, and then asked content creators a series of questions, based on the JTBD framework, to identify how they executed this job. E.g.: What resources do you need before you get this job done? What tools do you need to carry out the job?

Jobs-to-be-done Interviews

Results

A job map was created for internal creators (i.e., Academy Professors) which detailed their job of publishing content on HubSpot Academy from start to finish. I also observed friction areas for Professors during their process to target areas for improvement… (1/2)

…I also constructed a job map for external creators and found that not only do internal and external creators follow similar processes, but they also experience similar areas of frustration. (2/2)

  • Similarities

    Creators like using collaborative tools like GoogleDocs to do their scripting

    Creators don’t upload their course until almost the last phase of content creation

    Scripting and editing content is a time-consuming task for all content creators

  • Differences

    External content creators don’t use a Content Management System

    Each external platform has their content creation process that they adhere to

    Academy Professors are both instructional designers and SMEs, while external creators are primarily only SMEs

Readout

The results were presented to the team, and steps were immediately taken to act on the results. For example, Academy’s product management team took steps to finalize the business requirements that would be necessary for external creators, such as the payment structure, content creation guidelines and feedback loop.

The design team also made making immediate improvements to the UI of HubSpot Academy based on the results, creating a more intuitive workflow.

The overall initiative that this project launched was to “build for all creators.” It was important to not only provide the education platform and UI itself, but also improving the overall process for creating content from start to finish for both Academy professors and external content creators.

Updated UI for HubSpot Academy’s content creation back-end.