HubSpot's personalized navigation gives each human in your portal a shortened left-hand nav they can shape themselves. You pin the tools you actually use, drag them into the order that matches how you work, and push everything else behind a "more" menu. It's a nav that bends to you instead of the other way around.
On this episode of HubHeroes, George B. Thomas opened a demo portal live while Max Cohen and Chad Hohn clicked through it with him, and the three of them asked the only question that matters: is the juice worth the squeeze yet? Short answer, and we'll unpack every piece of it below, it's exciting, it's real, and it's not finished.
What Personalized Navigation Actually Does
When it shows up, you get a pencil icon and a "manage navigation" option, plus an in-product tutorial that welcomes you to your personalized navigation and tells you your most used tools are now one click away. Here's what's live today:
- A slimmed-down left-hand nav instead of the full firehose, with a "more" menu holding the rest: contacts, companies, deals, tickets, products, orders, marketing, and everything else.
- Pin and unpin, so you decide which tools earn a permanent spot.
- Drag to reorder, so invoices can sit right under deals if that's how your day runs.
There's also a switch-back option in your navigation settings if you want the old nav for now. One quiet change worth flagging: the bookmarks affordance that used to live up by home is gone. George called the new pin and unpin behavior the historical bookmark functionality, rebuilt into the nav itself. That's a real upgrade, because bookmarks were opt-in and forgettable while a pinned nav item is just where your eyes already go.
Why The Nav Needed This In The First Place
The current navigation carries 80 plus items. That's not a complaint about HubSpot growing, that's just physics. George put it plainly on screen: HubSpot started as a keyword tool and a blog tool, and everything it runs now has to live somewhere.
George has been using HubSpot since 2012 and admitted there are still days where he stares at the menu and asks why. Max has been wishing for a customizable nav for 11 years, which happens to be exactly how long ago he started working at HubSpot.
“There's so much stuff in it that I feel like even I have a hard time navigating it these days. I just so wish that I could only surface what was actually relevant to me.”
Chad framed the same problem from the admin seat. He's in all 80 plus items constantly because that's the job, and his team is always lost, especially on a small laptop screen where every pixel of sidebar costs you. His picture of the fix is small on purpose: somebody in sales needs about four pages. Contacts, sales workspace, a dashboard, tasks or projects. They don't need to see anything else.
Where You Can Find It Right Now
This is where it got interesting on the show, because neither George nor Chad had opted into anything. Here's what they confirmed live:
- It's showing up in new portals without any beta signup. George saw it in a demo portal he hadn't touched. Chad saw it too. Max's read: new portals.
- It's not in the Sidekick Strategies portal, which suggests older portals are still waiting or still need to enroll.
- Chad went looking for a beta button and couldn't find one. George's only other idea for existing portals: if you're an agency, your PDM might be a path.
The Big Limitation: It's Per Human, Not Per Team
This is the one that decides whether you should care today. Personalized navigation is currently set up one human at a time. There's no admin control. You can't build a nav and deploy it to a team.
Chad pointed to the bottom of HubSpot's own product announcement, where team-level control is listed as coming soon. Which is great news for later and not much help for Monday.
“At the moment it's just this beautiful little look into the future that's fun for people to play with, and it's not useful until you can actually deploy it, in my opinion. I'm not getting my team to set it up manually.”
George's brain went straight to presets: set a customized menu for a certain role and hand it out. Chad extended it to teams, then took it one step further. He wants to know whether admin promoted views can go team-based too, because a tailored nav plus tailored default views per team is when you really wipe the slate clean.
The pattern to watch: nav by team, views by team, permissions on top. Get all three and a new hire opens HubSpot and sees only what their role needs.
Max isn't worried about the setup cost, either. Yes, it's one more thing on the admin checklist. No, that isn't the point.
“Imagine how much time you're saving for all your individual users not having to figure out the navigation, and just having everything and nothing else that they don't need right on the left. That's actually huge.”
Grouping Is In The Tutorial, Not In The Product
HubSpot's in-product tutorial mentions grouping. All three hosts went looking for it live, and all three came up empty. George was certain he'd seen it earlier that morning. Chad said he couldn't figure out how to group them either, but the tutorial definitely said something about grouping. Max said flatly that he didn't think you can yet.
What you can do today: pin, unpin, and drag to reorder. Clicking the pencil at the bottom lets you edit what you already have. What you can't do today: create groups, even though the tutorial name-drops them.
Custom Objects Aren't Supported Yet
Max talked to the product manager on this one and confirmed it: you can't pin custom objects to the nav yet. If you were expecting yours to show up under CRM somewhere, it won't. Chad had the clearest explanation for why standard objects were easy and custom ones weren't.
“Each portal has their own unique custom object type ID. So they have to build in some sort of logic to query whatever the custom objects are in this portal. Everything else is standard.”
Max added the second unsolved piece: icons. How does HubSpot handle an icon for an object it's never seen before? Chad's question was blunt. Is it going to be a whole bunch of the same icon? George made the case for why none of this can stay unsolved for long. If you built a custom object, it's because it's important to the way you do business. Of course it needs to be in the menu.
The Wish List The HubHeroes Built
By the middle of the episode the three of them had assembled a running list of what would take this from a preview to a platform feature:
- Grouping, so related tools live together instead of in one flat stack.
- Blocking or removing items, so an admin can take certain tools out of view entirely.
- Admin control through teams or presets, so one setup serves a whole role.
- Customizable icons, especially for custom objects.
- External links, ideally opening as an iframe inside the canvas instead of throwing you out to a new tab.
- Deep links inside HubSpot: a specific company record, a specific web page, 301 redirects, a folder of workflows, a saved view.
Max asked the PM for the external links and the deep links directly, and his reasoning was lived experience. Back when he was first starting at hapily, he spent more time on one HubSpot company record than anywhere else, and no top-level nav item lands you there. George rounded it out from the CMS side: website, landing pages, blog, design manager, files, content staging, plus 301 redirects and menus, all in one place. Today content staging sits a couple of levels deep, and files moved somewhere he couldn't find live on the show.
Then the two ideas collided, and this is the moment worth stealing. Pin a saved view. Now group two or three views you always need together and park that group in the left-hand nav. That's not a shortcut anymore. That's a role-shaped workspace.
White Labeling And The Great Gray Debate
The nav conversation took a hard turn into branding, and Max did not hold back.
“I want to be able to change the logo to my company's logo, and I want to be able to change the color of the nav.”
When George pushed on the actual upside of swapping the HubSpot logo for your own, Max's answer was refreshingly honest: it looks nice. There's a cool factor, and cool factor counts for something when your team lives in a tool all day.
The color is a different story. Max called the new theme depression gray, said it's so bad he'd take the maroon back, and compared using HubSpot these days to watching a black and white TV. Mostly he just wants the blue back. George pointed out the joke writes itself, because that gray is awfully close to the iron ore paint on his own office wall.
Chad's prediction is the practical takeaway: reskinning the portal color-wise to match your company brand kit is going to become a thing. George liked the idea of pulling a color from your brand kit and letting HubSpot build a monochromatic set from it, so it looks like a professional designer touched it rather than a paint bucket.
The Verdict: Two Thumbs Up For The Future
George wanted a straight ruling, so he asked his Siskel and Ebert for thumbs on the customizable menu as it sits today.
“It's two thumbs up for the future. It's still cooking.”
Max ran with the food metaphor and landed the best line of the episode: it's still in the oven, but you know when you take a chocolate chip cookie that's half baked and it's still good? We're just eating the cookie dough, and the cookie dough's great. Chad's version had the same verdict in a different kitchen. They're still cracking the egg, maybe whipping it up, but it's not in the skillet yet.
Both of them gave the same guidance when George asked what a HubSpot admin should do today: no rush, just wait. It's a very cool preview and it's genuinely exciting, and it isn't substantial until you can deploy it for your team as an admin.
What to do right now: if it's in your portal, play with it and learn the interaction model. If it isn't, don't chase it. Nothing about your day gets worse by waiting.
- Sketch the four to five items each role on your team actually needs. That list is the work, not the clicking.
- Note which of your custom objects will need a nav spot the moment support lands.
- Watch for admin and team-level control. That's the release that turns this into a rollout instead of a toy.
Where To Go From Here
We already published a written walkthrough of this feature over on the Sidekick Strategies blog, complete with George's take, so if you want the click-by-click version alongside this conversation, it's waiting for you. In the meantime, make your own call on the customizable menu, keep an eye on that product announcement, and be a happy, helpful, humble human and do some happy HubSpotting.
