What I find most fascinating about this company is that something that sounds relatively unsexy - work management for enterprise - can be so well aligned with a truly unique mission. Enabling teams to collaborate effortlessly. For anyone who's worked at a dysfunctional company - politics, low morale, low transparency - it makes a huge difference when you have tools that help you collaborate and get on the same page.
By the same token, good tools do not solve politics, low morale or low transparency. I saw Justin Rosenstein and Dustin Moskovitz's talk when Asana was announced (2010? 2011?) and was converted. The idea of ditching email, bringing down barriers between silos and giving a greater vision between layers was inspiring and I immediately tried to implement Asana into all areas of my life.
It didn't really work for me as a personal organiser. Paper was just too damn handy, didn't require a log in and I didn't need any of the collaboration features. It didn't work for my dad and his business because he didn't quite 'get' the task oriented nature of the beast and ended up with a weird mish mash of orders, inquiries etc which ended up being unmanageable and he abandoned it quietly.
I tried setting it up for the production pipeline at the video society at my uni. I thought it would help lower the barrier to entry so that people could more easily get involved, see what was in the works, see tasks that were available to contribute to. But no, nobody logged in. The motivated people were just motivated and didn't require any task management and the disengaged people were too disengaged and uncurious to find it a useful resource.
I tried setting one up at my internship - a small data shop where surely things could be easily captured as tasks. We could assign things, hand things over, track bugs in code, split up larger assignments into smaller ones. But again, after some initial curiosity and a lot of patience from the teams, it didn't quite take either.
It feels a bit like the slow rise of corporate instant messaging generally or slack more specifically. Tools can enable a massive improvement to an organisation's ability to keep in touch, react to change, collaborate and all that usual stuff, but unless the company embraces that change or has a mindset/culture that allows those benefits to come to fruition then even with something like Asana you won't be able to turn things around with tools alone.
You're absolutely right. A mindset needs to accompany any tool in order for it to be successful - or direct relationship to how successful
There's a great book on this topic from the first dot com age. Necessary but not Sufficient (https://www.amazon.com/Necessary-But-Sufficient-Eliyahu-Gold...). The idea being you can adopt a tool but if you don't understand the mental models that go along with that tool then you won't fully reap the benefits.
As a company, this is still our responsibility. The best products educate as well as enable.
Your comment sums up what a lot of the comments here state.
> The motivated people were just motivated and didn't require any task management and the disengaged people were too disengaged and uncurious to find it a useful resource.
What makes it so hard to target the plurality of the middle, I wonder?
Sounds like the exact narrative from my time at Atlassian; I often wonder if these types of ideas are a natural byproduct of companies working in the same space.
As an employee, do you have an equity package? If so, are you worried at all that these new unicorn-status investors will have priority pay-out over your equity if the company doesn't have a $1.5B exit?
Not worried at all. Our value of transparency internally extends to this raise as well.
Yes employees have equity packages and we're well informed of what the terms of this raise are, the dilution and our leadership team has worked hard to get employee-friendly terms. We believe in this because our team members are the main function for Asana to grow and hit these expectations so it must be a trusting and win-win partnership in order for it to last.
If Asana values transparency internally, then why are employees not told their pay bands as well as given a level such as senior engineer? I know engineers who have left because they could not tell if they had room to grow salary wise. The only way they could find their market rate was by interviewing at other companies.
Ex-Asana here. Asana has written about the lack of leveled titles in the past[0]. I believe the use of titles is a separate issue to pay transparency. At around the same time, there was an effort to improve the transparency in pay bands. I have since left (for unrelated reasons), and so I cannot definitively speak to whether that was successful.
Was an employee (and am a happy equity-owner in Asana as a result), and I wouldn't be worried about that - I trust the Asana leadership to ensure clean terms with the investment.
If anything, I'd worry about the anchoring effect - e.g. if the SaaS valuations decline a year from now so that a prospective Asana IPO wouldn't be worth much more than $1.5B, would that result in them being more reluctant to IPO?
But that's the effect that is plaguing unicorn startups - the ones that have to go IPO or get acquired at less than valuation see the employees getting pennies on the dollar for their equity, while the investors that gave the startup the unicorn status take the bulk of the pay out.
Do you know the terms of this latest round of funding? Has senior management confirmed the class of equity?
I'm not a current employee, and even if I were, I'm not sure that would be something I could disclose. But I can tell you that in the past Asana leadership has been very good about insisting on clean-sheet terms for investor funding.
What I find most fascinating about this company is that something that sounds relatively unsexy - work management for enterprise - can be so well aligned with a truly unique mission. Enabling teams to collaborate effortlessly. For anyone who's worked at a dysfunctional company - politics, low morale, low transparency - it makes a huge difference when you have tools that help you collaborate and get on the same page.