Every gamer knows the term. OP. Overpowered. The weapon, the character, the ability that feels almost unfair. George isn't much of a gamer, but his two sons are, and he hears the term all the time. So on this episode of HubHeroes, it collided with a question his brain started running while he was chilling on the couch: what's the most overpowered part of HubSpot?
He dropped the question in Slack before the show: what do you think the most powerful part or thing about HubSpot software is, and why? Software, on purpose. The community got lovingly set aside for this one, because George, Max, and Chad have sung its praises in plenty of historical episodes, and this time they wanted to argue about the product itself.
The short version: Max Cohen made the case for HubSpot's record system and the cross-team visibility it creates. Chad Hohn went to bat for Data Hub, the hub formerly known as Operations. And by the end, all three landed somewhere neither answer started: the most powerful part of HubSpot might be the humans who pick it up.
S Tier, Explained For The Rest Of Us
Max and Chad are the gamers of the group. George will tell you himself he's not, though he'll defend Frogger to his last breath. So when the guys started throwing around S tier (the top of the gaming tier list, above A, B, C, and D), George made them explain it. It's just real gamer hour stuff, apparently.
But the framing stuck. If you were building a tier list of everything inside HubSpot, what earns the S? That's the whole episode in one question. The guys even floated resurrecting an old idea: a full tier-ranking episode of HubSpot workflow actions. Stay tuned.
Max's Pick: Records And Cross-Team Visibility
Max started by naming the answer everybody gives: workflows. Run this episode with anybody and that's where they go, because workflows have their fingers in literally everything and can do whatever you want. From a raw tool perspective, it's the easy answer. It wasn't his.
“It just has to be how it interconnects all the different parts or departments or units or pieces of your business together in a way that you just can't do with a standalone point solution that would be built for any of those.”
Think about how many times you've interacted with a business where the human you're talking to says, I can't see that, support uses its own system. That's fundamental friction. It makes it harder for teams to do their jobs and harder to even talk about the parts of the business they can't see. Max still doesn't think there's another piece of software that gives a genuinely great experience to marketing, sales, and support all at once, without any of the three feeling like a tacked-on afterthought.
When George pushed him to get under the umbrella and name what's actually doing the work, Max got specific: the base level is records.
- A support human dealing with a furious human can walk back through everything recorded on the deal from the sales process and find where expectations were set incorrectly.
- A salesperson can see how a trial account has been interacting with the support team and actually understand what's going on before the next conversation.
- A marketer who captured leads at a trade show or through an email campaign can watch those humans engage, get sold to, and get onboarded, all in one system, without jumping between products.
“A lot of that is the record infrastructure and how easy it is to adapt to different teams and how they do their job and the visibility that it gives other people.”
George caught the tell: Max said the word visibility three times without noticing. So here's the question George would put to you: do you have visibility in your organization? Can your teams actually see across the things Max is describing? Maybe. Maybe not.
Chad's Pick: Data Hub, The Hub Formerly Known As Operations
Chad prefaced his answer the way a good ops brain does: it depends on who you are and what your needs are. But for him, it has to be Data Hub, formerly Operations Hub, and Data Studio inside it. Where Max was talking about the front end, the interface your humans see, Chad went straight to the back end: the data architecture underneath it all.
Data sets are the star. With Data Hub (especially at Enterprise, though Chad noted you can still create custom data sets without it), you can build curated reporting data for the humans you're teaching to report at a lighter level. Here are the properties we use for sales reporting; use the sales reporting data set. Custom formulas included.
Then he stacked on the part that makes data humans sit up straight:
- Ingest data from an external source. Chad called out Snowflake and AWS S3 buckets, where enterprises aggregate data from many other sources, and bring it into HubSpot to use like a BI tool.
- Sync that external data to objects through Data Hub, so it isn't just something you look at.
- Fire workflows off that external data, which puts exactly what Max was describing in front of your team, at the data level.
And when there's no standard integration? Chad painted the picture every ops human recognizes: some NetSuite baggage add-on running Apache PHP from 1995, or an old ASPX something. If you have access to the data, you can still get it into HubSpot, or at least make it visible there. That's amazing.
“Man, it's so configurable at the data level for slicing and dicing ingestion and export.”
George loved the tension: Max picked records, Chad picked data, and as the guys immediately pointed out, records are kind of the front end of the data. Do you even need records if you don't have data? Two answers, one system, different armor.
The Trick Question: Just Vibe Code It Yourself, Right?
Then George pulled out the sneaky trick question he'd been saving. Max, how long do you think it would take you to vibe code the record system HubSpot gives you?
Max's first move was the right one: it depends on where the record system ends. Vibe code a simple record page? Probably pretty easily. But think about all the work HubSpot has put in over something like fifteen years: how much of it can be customized, custom extensions, viewing permissions, UI extensions that are native to records, and then all the customization layers on top of that. His final answer: a long time.
The joke in the room: fine, it's a weekend. A weekend of pain, and then another month of going back and buying HubSpot again.
Chad got the same question about the data side, and his answer went straight at the hype. Data is just data; it lives in tables. The engine is the hard part. Humans say it all the time: I'll just code this thing up in Base44 or Replit or Lovable and I'm done. And then, Chad pointed out, they never once have tested permissions. You don't want everybody seeing everything, and it's crazy how much work goes into that.
To be clear, both guys think what these tools stub out is genuinely impressive. Chad said so twice. But there's a wall between an impressive prototype and a fully permissioned back end that actually works. You'd get stuck at the point where you take the prototype the tool stubbed out, Chad said:
“And then try and add permission layers on top of it. And it probably just completely blow chunks immediately.”
That's the trick inside the trick question. The most overpowered parts of HubSpot are exactly the parts nobody rebuilds in a weekend: a mature record system and a permission layer that already works.
Main Quest Vs. Side Quests
George brought it home with Frogger. (Yes, Frogger. He knows he's dating himself.) He'd attack a screen the same way over and over, and he didn't beat it until he realized he had to go a different way. Which set up the real question: what's the main quest for the humans running HubSpot in 2026 and beyond? Because a lot of them are off on side quests, trying to build their own stuff, chasing buzzword side quests, because it's the easy way out.
Max reached for Fable, a game where your actions dictate the way the story goes. That's HubSpot. Unlike most games, the storyline isn't defined for you. Every single business has different goals, challenges, and things they're trying to accomplish, so you have to figure out what your main storyline is before you can figure out what your quest line may be.
Chad, who's worked inside plenty of organizations, said the same thing in ops language: it always ends up being discovery. What is the team currently doing? What needs to come out of an external process and into HubSpot? What's too much work right now because there's lower hanging fruit? Then prioritize the lowest effort, highest reward work, the stuff that produces something really useful for the team. And don't just listen to the humans in charge of those areas; you truly need to understand what the humans in the seats are currently doing, and align with that too.
He also named the most relatable side quest in business: the spreadsheet. Your humans are always reluctant to give up their spreadsheet side quests, even though the HubSpot record editor is now column filterable like a spreadsheet and can even drop associated object data into the view. There's so much we can do now that we never really could before.
Discovery Isn't A One-Time Event
Then George asked the question that made the room go quiet, and he made sure everyone listening knew it. Organizations do discovery at the beginning of their quest, and then they walk aimlessly along for the rest of it, bouncing into things, hoping that's how they make it through door number three to get to level thirteen. How many organizations run a continual discovery process, each month or each quarter, to find the newest things they should know about their storyline? The silence answered him.
Chad's defense of the real world was fair, though. The priority list and the backlog are constantly changing due to external circumstances. Somebody wants a thing. A dumpster fire has to be dealt with right now. Revenue gets calculated differently than HubSpot calculates it, and now something has to ship by a certain date. Your main quest is never the same, because it's unique to your portal. Each portal has its own storyline. Do good due diligence on the roadmap, and be willing to dump a whole feature tree when you actually don't need it anymore.
Admins, Go Find The Silent Problems
Max added the admin's side of the deal. Once the portal is built the way it was originally meant to be built, your job isn't done. Humans get used to tools that work the way they work and can't be fixed, so oftentimes they won't say anything when something is painful. Sometimes you have to go sniff out where the inefficiencies are: check in, ask what's painful about doing the job day to day, and find solutions to fix that stuff.
And do it in a smart way. It's a balancing act; you don't want to change things every day because one human mentioned a problem. Max's play: seek out an issue, then confirm it. Jane said she was having this problem. Jim, are you experiencing it too? Everyone else? Cool, come up with a plan to fix it and communicate that to everybody. That's the duty. The opposite is going on a bunch of side quests on your own, building new stuff nobody asked for just because you've got super admin and you know HubSpot can do it. That's a very easy trap to fall into.
George flagged one more delicious detail: it took until about minute 28 of the episode for anybody to actually use the word reporting. Nobody's first answer to the most powerful part of HubSpot was the numbers. But like the timer that suddenly shows up somewhere around level 33 of Tetris (George downloaded it on a recent trip and is still mad about that timer), the stats are part of the game whether you're watching them or not. Business is changing every day.
The Real Superpower Is The Human Who Picks It Up
Here's where George landed the plane. A lot of HubSpot is OP. Records are OP. Data Hub is OP. Even workflows, the answer everybody gives, are legitimately OP. But which part is most overpowered in your organization depends on something HubSpot doesn't ship in any hub.
“What I find very fascinating about this conversation is that a lot of HubSpot is OP. And what I hear you guys saying is the part that is most OP in an organization depends upon the player who picks up the thing.”
The most powerful part of HubSpot software might just be the humans who pick it up, apply it to their processes and the other humans in their organization, and pay attention, because they have the vision and visibility they need.
Chad's final thought said it in one breath, and George's advice was to rewind and listen to it five times:
“It's flexible enough to let you turn your thoughts into reality inside of an organized system. That's the superpower, really, if you boil it down for true.”
The takeaway: stop hunting for the one overpowered feature. Do the discovery, keep doing the discovery, and be the human who turns thoughts into reality inside an organized system. That's S tier.
Want a head start on that continual discovery? Grab The HubSpot Portal Audit Checklist and find the silent problems hiding in your portal before they find you.
Until next time: be a happy, helpful, humble human, and do some happy HubSpotting.
