Case Study: HubSpot empowers analysts to own their tools with dbt Labs

HubSpot empowers analysts to own their tools with dbt

HubSpot, the global customer experience platform, needed to scale analytics without creating a bottleneck for its data engineering team. As the company grew, analysts were slowed by manual, Airflow-based SQL model deployment, messy code reuse, hard-to-manage dependencies, and time-consuming troubleshooting. HubSpot was looking for a better way to let analysts own more of their data workflows while still maintaining quality and consistency.

With dbt Labs’ dbt, HubSpot gave analysts guardrails to build and manage transformation models directly in SQL, automatically handle dependencies with ref functions, and use best practices like incremental modeling and testing. The result was faster development, easier troubleshooting, and a more scalable analytics organization: two analyst teams fully migrated to dbt, business users gained more self-serve exploration in Looker, and the company moved closer to its goal of letting all analysts build data pipelines in hours instead of days.

HubSpot

James Densmore

Director