The summary of episode 6 at Asana: September 2012 – January 2013
At the end of every “Episode” at Asana, I write an “End Of Episode Summary” that I share with the entire team. In the spirit of transparency, we have started to make these summaries public. You can read more about why we do this.
In Episode 6, we finished the transition from executing a series of short projects to organizing into longer-running initiatives. In addition to the existing Performance program, we created roadmaps focused on Growth, Big Teams, and Mobile. Even though we may not have teams staffed for them in every episode going forward, these programs will endure and we’ve taken the first big steps down each of them.
We’ve also matured on the operations side. This is the first episode where we really had a complete marketing team, now that Justin K and Jim have joined us and ramped up. Together with Dan, Kenny, and a lot of outside help we’ve relaunched our marketing site, developed new tools, scaled up our SEM program, and more. We also kicked off a real, scalable account management program, with Michael and Jerry working closely with our best customers to make them even more successful and help them spread Asana to other teams in their company.
We experimented with our process this episode as well, holding Polish and Grease weeks for the first time and a longer hackathon too. In some ways, these were disruptive to our pace (exacerbated by being clustered around the holidays), but we’re excited to try again in E7 with an improved schedule. In spite of that drawback, these were periods of high energy and productivity and proved yet again that we can produce a lot of value in a short amount of time when we focus our efforts.
Finally, while the team did not grow very much larger this episode, we did grow closer together. We vacationed as a family in Monterey, we danced at Nihon, and – perhaps most importantly – we <3’d each other’s comments for the very first time.
