Doing What Matters, Karen McGrane [Women in Business]

 Editor's note: March is Women's History Month, and to celebrate we have asked HubSpotters to write brief tributes to women they admire. We will publish these articles all month here on the HubSpot Opinion blog as part of a series called "Women in Business." Here, my colleague Meghan Keaney Anderson pays tribute to content strategist Karen McGrane. -- Dan Lyons.

I run the product launch team at HubSpot, a group responsible for the positioning, launch strategy and overall adoption of HubSpot's inbound marketing platform. Not afraid of hyperbole, I believe this is hands-down, bar-none the most fascinating time in the history of the world for content creators. In part, that's why I chose this particular nominee. 

In addition to my work at HubSpot, I teach writing as an adjunct professor at Boston University. You can find me on Twitter @meghkeaney where I'm always up for a conversation on tech, writing, or which of the Die Hard movies is most criminally underrated. 

My Nominee: Karen McGrane

If you ask Karen McGrane what she does, she'll tell you: "On a good day, I make the web more awesome. On a bad day, I just make it suck less." She does a great deal more than that though. Karen has been at the forefront of the way content is changing as a result of our multi-screened, multi-deviced, and multi-channeled world. She's helped the New York Times, Condé Nast, Disney, and Citibank all reframe their thinking on the role of context in a good content strategy.  

When working on the launch of HubSpot's content optimization system, I poured over Karen's writing on adaptive content, particularly her most recent book, Content Strategy for Mobile. All too often people reduce mobile optimization to a series of design check-boxes. Karen helps readers understand the larger change at play. A gifted speaker and writer, Karen has often left me wide-eyed, idea-filled, and eager for the future. Thank you, Karen.