Asana: The 'Tesla of Productivity Tools'

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By Lauren Drell2013-08-06 19:08:03 UTC

Quick poll: How much of your time do you spend writing and responding to emails to find out if certain action items are actually getting done? Odds are, a lot. Technology enables us to collaborate with those across the office and across the world, but we still spend a heck of a lot of time checking in, circling back and following up on things. There are plenty of communication and collaboration tools, but they tend to do one or the other — they help you chat with co-workers or divvy up tasks, but they rarely do both.

Asana was born within Facebook in 2009, a time when the company was growing and launching new products, such as the "like" button and new privacy features. The product took off within the company.

Co-founders Justin Rosenstein (a former Googler) and Dustin Moskovitz (a Facebook co-founder) decided that Asana shouldn't be confined to the walls (the literal ones) of Facebook. They felt it should be a tool available to startups, enterprises and non-profits alike, helping improve efficiency and productivity by eliminating those time-consuming, hard-to-follow, 47-thread emails.

They spun off from Facebook and worked to whittle Asana down to its simplest functionality. Though they acknowledge the myriad collaboration softwares that boast "a gazillion" features, a lot of those features are extraneous and end up sitting on the shelf. "Enterprise software hasn't exactly been the place where the world's best designers show up," says Rosenstein. From the get-go, Asana sought to build a design- and product-oriented culture intending to create something people actually want to — and will — use. To further boost efficiency, Asana has baked-in keyboard shortcuts so you can navigate the site with single keystrokes.

While it's hard to quantify productivity, Asana's customers regularly tell them that more than 50% of emails were eliminated thanks to Asana. One customer told the company it was going to hire a PM, but brought on Asana instead. One biotech company whose co-founders are two of the world's top scientists weren't doing research because they were busy managing. After launching Asana, the scientists said they got 75% of their time back. "Enabling top bio-scientists to be able to do science is pretty important," says Kenny Van Zant, head of business and operations. "I like that metric."

A project manager typically runs around asking people to update the Wiki and send action items, and then the individuals maintain their own systems (Post-its, Google Docs, to-do lists, etc.) for personal use. Asana, however, is intended for the entire company and for any conceivable task, which makes for a seamless, hands-off, guilt-trip-free workflow. "We've been really realistic and mindful about integrating into people's workflows," says Rosenstein. "Once you understand Asana, it's a really beautiful, generic system for organizing information and communicating around it," says Rosenstein.

We spoke with Rosenstein about the product, how it came about and the need it fills.

Image: Asana

You thought about better project management at Google, and it was reinforced when you were at Facebook. Was the fact that these companies were growing so rapidly what inspired you to reinvent how people work together? How did the whole idea come about at the beginning, and why did you make this your mission?

Google was my first real job out of college, and I was really blown away by how much of my time was spent sitting in meetings, reading email, writing email. I was a PM, so maybe that was a factor, but even individual contributors, great at being an engineer, great at being a designer, were spending so much time not engineering or designing, but doing this sort of "work about work."

At first I though, "Okay, I'm just being bad at my job. It can't be that everyone's doing this." And the more I talked to people, the more I heard, "Oh, yeah, that's totally normal." Everyone just spends all day just reading and writing email and coordinating with the left hand what the right hand is doing.

I thought that was crazy. Someone must have solved this problem. So I went on a personal journey, tying together all these tools and methodologies, reading all these different things, and I was just blown away that there was nothing that was nearly good enough.

At Google, I built an internal tool that wasn't meant for anyone but me and my team, but I'd gotten a thousand people to organically adopt it. When I got to Facebook, it turned out that Dustin, then the VP of engineering, had also written an internal tool for Facebook, because he had the exact same problem and frustrations and had also thought about this problem really deeply. So immediately, we were kindred spirits.

We traded notes and talked about what the next generation of this could look like. We started brainstorming and thought, "What would the ultimate tool for organizing Facebook look like? It's growing really fast, it's a really ambitious project." I was working with people across the company on all these different things, and we were just spending so much time just trying to figure out what was going on, who's responsible for what, what are the steps between us and the completion of this project — just trying to make sure nothing fell between the cracks.

Out of that brainstorming, Dustin just started building that internal tool, which is, to this day, the backbone of Facebook's organization. At Facebook at the time, the effect — the number of meetings I had to be in and status updates we had to collect — was so dramatic. Everyone just got so much more effective and efficient from what was comparatively, relative to Asana, a very simple tool.

I remember the day when I just sat and hit upon a revelation, like, Whoa, we have hit upon something really big here. This is not specific to Facebook or Google, this is not even specific to tech companies. Every organization on Earth, whether it's business or government or non-profit — every time that a group of humans are working together towards a common goal — the mechanics of organization are just really hard. If we could make that easier, we knew people would be happier, because that part of people's jobs is easily the most annoying or painful. Beyond that, if a group of people were "telepathically synced" — you knew exactly what you were supposed to work on, you knew exactly what the state of everything was, if you could seamlessly coordinate everything — imagine what you could do, how much bigger the project you could take on, imagine how insanely awesome products would be, or how insanely awesome conferences would be, or how insanely awesome governments would be.

So we just knew that it was not reasonable to just do this as an internal project. We had to do this for real, because it was a Facebook-sized opportunity that could dramatically change the world. It was a nice dream at the time. Today, so many tech companies, non-profits and other organizations use Asana to do many great things in the world, and it's really gratifying to be able to accelerate all those endeavors at the same time.

On the tech side, yes, being able to see a company like Uber revolutionize transportation, or being able to see Airbnb revolutionize the way people travel and have world experiences — those are very exciting and close to home because they are in our industry. I happened to be at a leadership meeting this weekend, so I was seeing CEOs and leaders from all different sorts of companies in different industries. I was wearing my Asana T-shirt and it was really gratifying because every five minutes, someone was coming up to me, and there were so many different segments and industries — for-profit, non-profit, retail, tech — and a lot of them said, "Wow, it's like you built Asana for my particular industry, and it totally changed the way we work!"

And for me, some of the most exciting stuff is seeing non-profits that are working on bringing healthcare to poor areas talk about the amount of healthcare they have to provide. Or on the industry side, biotech companies working on curing cancer and diseases, saying that now their lab is so much more efficient because they can actually know what everyone is working on, they have the lab results from everyone, they can see that someone's already working on that.

The idea that in addition to revolutionizing one particular industry, we're now able to revolutionize healthcare or the way diseases are treated is pretty good.

At Mashable, we use Asana especially on the tech side, to prioritize and organize dev and design projects, which have a lot of moving pieces and people involved. So I'm curious — how did you build Asana without having Asana?

It was pretty painful at first. We built an earlier version of similar content when we were at Facebook, and that was probably the worst part of leaving Facebook — we had to leave behind the tool. It wasn't simple, but we made it a priority very early on to get to something we could use internally, as quickly as possible, which took a year. There was a while when the product was not good enough for public consumption; you didn't know if it would crash [when you did certain things], but it was at least good enough that we could use it internally. That was always our first goal from the start, to get to that point — then we could have the leverage to start building up the product.

A lot of startups exist to fix a very specific pain point, but Asana is a lot more philosophical about it. You guys really want to change the world by transforming the way we all collaborate with each other.

I think we are focusing on a specific pain point — it's just very big. I have a lot of admiration for companies who are going after more specific things, and in some ways, you kind of wish that this problem could be solved as a set of other little things. And it would be nice if we thought that was the right path, but our feeling is that the process is broken at such a systemic level. The solution required is a big overhaul. People who've tried big overhauls, like Google Wave, often fail because they're unrealistic about creating into the existing environment, and we try to simultaneously ask, "What is the real long-term solution to this problem, which fits into the existing world?"

Think about human collaboration — this problem that I'm talking about is as old as history, right? A group of people with a common desire and vision that they want to manifest into the world … How do they actually do it? That's the story of all human projects. So the idea that technology can really accelerate that is something we've seen over and over again, whether we're talking about email or the telephone or the telegraph. These tools really changed the game for what teams of people could accomplish, and therefore what dreams we even try to manifest. And so the opportunity to do that here, with software — that's exactly what we're all about.

Image: Asana

Your name is Asana, you don't have traditional titles, and you have a yoga studio in your office. Is Asana the most zen startup there is?

It is possible we are the most zen startup there is; we would certainly be up there.

We really think there's a better way to lead, and a better way for teams to work together. A lot of that is manifested directly in the tools, but also in the practices we adopt. I've had the privileges of working at Google and Facebook, which have two of the best company cultures that may have ever existed. But then getting to see that and then take a pretty organizational and philosophical view, and say, "Okay, let's make this better. What are the best ideas we can take from those things, as well as other disciplines, like yoga?" We've been super mindful about how we build the culture, and the effect is that at Asana — ask other people, maybe I'm biased — there's this deep sense that everyone knows what's expected of them, everyone knows exactly what they're responsible for, everyone knows who's responsible for what else, everyone knows the exact state of things. Everyone's title is "Asana," and philosophically, that implies that the whole is the parts. You are part of this bigger thing. You are this bigger thing. You understand why you're doing things.

The company is very transparent about what it's working on — you document each "episode" of Asana, and explain what's happened in the past four months or so. Why do you do that? Do you find that people actually care, or is it more a way of showing your team what you've accomplished? What's the philosophy?

It started out as an internal thing, and it goes along with transparency, mindfulness and knowing why you're doing what you're doing. It's easy to get lost in the details and forget what the bigger picture is, especially as a company grows and you're less familiar with what other teams are working on. The fact that Dustin personally, every three or four months, writes this comprehensive description of what we've been working on, why we're working on it, what's going well and what we wish was going better — it means that there's a chance for everyone in the company to be fully aligned with how they fit in, what the bigger picture is, what are the challenges that we need to tackle.

At some point we realized, "Hey, we have this document. Why don't we put this out to the world?" In some ways it's scary and vulnerable, and there are definitely things we document that aren't going well right now and things we know should be a lot better. But there's always an opportunity to get better, and we hear users say that they really appreciate that transparency, because rather than saying, "Oh, Asana doesn't have an iPad app. Why don't those guys make one?" They can see that we made a very conscious decision — while we understand the importance of tablets, there are some other things we've been working on, like building up our recruiting team so we can hire more engineers and designers so we can do more things.

There's this vulnerable logic that allows people to really understand that, even though Asana doesn't do some things perfectly now, this is the horse to bet on, because these guys are really thinking it through and they have their eye on the ball.

What's next for Asana?

Asana so far has been especially embraced by some of the hot, smart, very entrepreneurial startups, those that are really eager to be on the cutting edge of the efficiency game. Which is great. But now we're continuing to make the product work for more established companies with more established profits, making it easier to use, more accessible. Pairing our vision with strong pragmatism is really, I think, something that we're really good at. That means we know how to make this product work for a variety of different teams, and figuring out what companies need to scale a new technology across different skill sets and departments. We're really starting to excel on that front as well, with tackling this really massive problem with a cool product.

Tesla started with this very expensive sports car that mostly sports car enthusiasts were into. Now they're working down to making lower-priced, more pragmatic models. We built the Tesla of productivity tools. So even if you're not already a world-class project manager, we can give you tools to make you a world-class leader.

In most cases the product is already there, and a lot of it is just doing more marketing, getting the word out to more industries and more people. Asana is not Instagram. It does take you making a decision as an organization that you're going to try it out and see how this works. But once people do, they never go back.

Image: Getty

Topics: asana, Dustin Moskovitz, productivity, Tech Innovators Series