Show recap — Friday, September 11, 2026

Another Orange Morning Recap: September 11, 2026

The Friday before Unbound, and Casey Hawkins joined from the road for the second day running, unmuted and off the hook for screen sharing while the connection held. Chris Carolan drove the tabs and Madelyn Donovan took the Friday seat, most excited about the sessions and the feeling of being back in school. Six updates on the board, one of them a major one, and a closing Breeze prompt that the room did not enjoy as much as it deserved.

Here is what we got into: personalized navigation and who should be doing the tailoring, Breeze building your buying group from real activity, revenue reporting from contracts and the seat question that will not go away, the transcripts API and the quiz about which transcripts are even in HubSpot, a Will It Breeze that told us what to stop doing, and this week's horoscope.

Before the Board: Donuts and a Webinar

Two things Madelyn and Chris are looking after in Boston. The Donut Happy Hour returns on day three of Unbound, right across the street from the convention center. Chris went in 2024 when other folks were putting it on, Madelyn did the work of bringing it back this year, and a lot of people have already said they are coming. Not too early, and a good reason to make it to day three. Then the week after, on Wednesday, September 23 at 10 a.m. Central, Unbound Unboxed: a webinar where the Hubsessed team talks through what they learned and what they think you should care about.

Somebody Has to Do the Tailoring

Personalized Navigation

Madelyn picked the major update first. Users now get a slimmer navigation tailored to their own use cases, and can customize it by adding their own groupings, reordering, and adding or removing items. HubSpot's reasoning is that the current navigation carries more than eighty items and is overwhelming, and that trimming it helps people adopt the platform, build habits and see value faster. It is a public beta for all hubs and tiers, and Chris had never been able to click the button before today.

Madelyn's read is that this depends on the client. For someone brand new to HubSpot you want to be careful, because they can overwhelm themselves by accident. For a comfortable user who knows which objects and tools they use and which they never touch, removing things from their immediate view is a real help. Her next question is permissions. She has watched users add properties to their own record views and then tell teammates to just look at the card, while the rest of the team cannot see it and has no idea what they mean. Personalizing without understanding how you did it can confuse people, and the announcement notes that admin-customizable navigation for teammates is a separate, upcoming beta.

Why it matters: Chris has a longer grudge. A lot of data model decisions got made because the navigation was bad: that should be a pipeline, not a custom object, but a custom object goes on the nav and then people know what to click. He looks forward to losing fewer of those debates. Read the announcement carefully, though: users get a navigation tailored to their use cases, and somebody has to do the tailoring. He wants to see whether there is a suggested version first or just leads, deals and contacts. If you consult, coach or train on HubSpot, add this to your audit list. Someone's navigation can laser-focus you on what they actually use, and it can also hide the thing they should be using, because it was manufactured by them or by whoever built the portal before them.

For more details: the full update on personalized navigation.

True Canvas

Buying Groups with Breeze

Chris picked this one and called it wild before he was done reading. Breeze can now map, review and manage your buying groups. Open any buying group and Breeze is in the sidebar with the full customer context: contacts, deal history, emails, call transcripts and meetings. Ask it to map the decision makers, surface who is missing, multithread engagement or find blockers, and the changes land in the group as it makes them. Or open Breeze from any page, ask about the stakeholders on a company or deal, and the buying group appears inside the conversation. Private beta, Sales Hub and Service Hub Professional and Enterprise.

Chris requested the beta on air. The point to take in is the shape of it: you are talking to Breeze and a canvas of your buying group comes up, built from your real data. HubSpot has been calling document creation Canvas for a while; this is the true version, a mapping interface you manage inside the conversation. It is the kind of thing the team has been building outside HubSpot with the same data because nothing inside it could do this, and now it is here. The reason to train reps in Breeze rather than on the record is that once you understand what it found you can change the system from the conversation: deal tags, associations, the contact who was mentioned in an email and never created. That last one is where deals die, because everyone else on the page is talking to that person and you do not know they exist.

Why it matters: Madelyn named the blocker on the other side. People do not know whether the data Breeze shows is real, or whether it is touching the data they mean it to, and often what helps most is the product marketing that shows it working. A report is the same data in a different view, and this is too. Chris took it to the empowerment question: who am I going to mess with if I act in this view? In a culture of governance, where users cannot change anything and the admins do it, imagine someone surprised by this map in a Breeze conversation, the best-placed person to fix it, screenshotting it for an admin instead. The momentum you lose by not letting the person act right then is huge.

For more details: the full update on buying groups with Breeze.

The Seat Question, Again

Revenue Reporting from Contracts

Madelyn picked this one from her other screen, which Chris admitted he does too while Casey shares. With the contracts object, detailed revenue data can live in HubSpot: not just what was sold, but what was booked and committed, and how that changed over time through expansions, contractions and renewals. This package builds on that with pre-built reports in the analytics suite, custom reports in the report builder, and revenue event data you can extract by API. It is a public beta.

Madelyn's question was the honest one: you could report on revenue before, so what does this add? Chris's answer is the milestones. Understanding revenue changes over time, at the granularity of line items and dates, has been notoriously hard or impossible in HubSpot, and the workarounds for MRR reporting have all involved some heroic deal pipeline and custom object arrangement. Now you do not have to build that. The reports are in the report library for every hub and tier, and the custom report builder comes with Professional and Enterprise through the analytics suite.

Why it matters: Then the question that will not go away: do you need a Revenue Hub seat? Chris has been told that unless you are using quoting functionality tied to contracts, you do not; contracts behaves like a CRM object, a better container for the data, and the fancy change-quote and e-sign parts are what the seat is for. Madelyn is not sure that is real. She had Chris on a client call last week where contracts ended up being the answer to an ARR and MRR question, and there is still a lot of confusion about who has access. Chris's broader lesson comes from building the deliverables object for clients: the first step is organizing your data and relating it properly, which with contracts means going from deals only to deals, subscriptions, orders and contracts. That feels harder, and it is moving the simplicity to reporting time, when sales, customer success and accounts each own their own piece and nobody has to stumble through the deal to learn when something happened, whether they paid, or whether they know they need to. The revenue events part is what he is most excited about.

For more details: the full update on revenue reporting from contracts.

Pop Quiz: Which Transcripts Are in HubSpot?

Access Transcripts Programmatically via Public API

This was Chris's big one. Call and meeting transcripts can now be retrieved and exported through the existing transcripts API using account-level auth like a private app, as soon as they are created. For many conversations you find the calls or meetings through the CRM APIs and pull each transcript in turn; there is no bulk export in this release, and accounts with Sensitive Data or HIPAA enabled are excluded for now. It is a private beta listed for Service Hub Professional, Sales Hub Professional, Service Hub Starter and Sales Hub Enterprise, which looks like it is missing Service Hub Enterprise and possibly Sales Hub Starter.

Then the pop quiz: what transcripts make it into HubSpot? Chris's Google Meet recordings do, without help from the Notetaker. His Krisp transcripts do not. Madelyn's experience is that for most calling tools the full transcript never lands in HubSpot, and even when a tool pushes one in, it is not clear HubSpot counts it as a HubSpot transcript. The API opens a door to a room that may be emptier than you think.

Why it matters: Casey gave the practitioner's answer. She has not had a recent transcript win inside HubSpot. The recurring-meeting limit on getting transcripts in has reportedly improved, but she has not experienced it, and when a feature like this ships and does not work the way people need, it is easy to abandon. She still uses Fathom for every call. Chris's reason to test anyway: his agents already move between Krisp and Google Meet transcripts to close gaps, and Breeze may be reading the HubSpot-generated transcript in your portal even if you never do. If that context exists inside the system, it needs to be good and clean.

For more details: the full update on the transcripts API.

Will It Breeze: What Should We Stop Doing

The prompt was services, inbox, decide what we should stop doing, aimed at the show's own portal. Breeze answered with a blunt first item: stop using tasks as the main operating system for services. In its sample the task queue is experienced as noisy, stale and hard to trust, with tasks already done but still open and a backlog that needs a sweep, and it cited the specific calls where that came up. Madelyn added the pattern she sees everywhere: AI creating tasks from action items after every call, landing in a portal where everyone already has their own system, which is an adoption gap for the human rather than the tool. Chris admitted he gets an email every day about his overdue tasks and has told Breeze to stop making them.

The second item was to stop pushing forward while requirements and ownership are unclear, and Chris called that nailing it. The bigger point is who said it. Tough talk from Breeze is not tough talk from Chris, Casey or Madelyn that somebody gets upset about. AI can be the more objective source, the one that surfaces the thing everyone has raised ten times on the Monday call, so the eleventh time does not have to tank the meeting. Casey put it plainly: when it is happening just to her, it feels like she is the problem, and when Breeze shows it is across the portal, it becomes a problem with a reason and a fix. That safety will never show up on a dashboard or an ROI report. It is why the show says every day to get your team talking to Breeze.

The HubSpot Horoscopes

Madelyn's standing Friday segment. It is still Virgo season through September 22, so the sign changes just after Unbound, and Chris noted the astrological source is live data, not something AI made up. Virgo's reading this week is two small corrections to the places you work all day: index tables now suggest which property to add and tell you on hover why, and board view lets you drag cards into a deliberate order inside a lane, not just between lanes. Neither will be announced anywhere but here, and both fix something that has been quietly wrong every day. The page at anotherorangemorning.com/hubspot-horoscope now lists the updates influencing each reading, and there is a subscribe box at the bottom for the weekly email once Chris, in his words, gets his act together.

The Rest of Friday's Updates

Also new on the board and not pulled forward: a portal-level setting to turn index page metrics on or off by object type, and automatic topic classification for analyzing Help Desk and customer agent performance. The index page redesign with table, board, calendar, Gantt and report views moved to live. Everything else on the list was Thursday's board, covered in yesterday's recap, and everything that shipped is in the HubSpot updates feed.

The Sign-Off

If you are at Unbound next week, three of the hosts and many more from Value-First and Another Orange Morning will be there. If you are not, the show will do its best to keep you in the know. You probably already own the value you are looking for in HubSpot. You just need to wake up to it. We will see you next time.