Meet the NYC Asana Team
A look back on our first year and a sneak peek of what’s to come.
Meet the New York team
Since inception, we’ve assembled a cross-functional team of product managers, designers, engineers, and user researchers who work together to ship great products. There’s a healthy mix of Asana veterans carrying over best practices from our headquarters in San Francisco and local newcomers offering fresh perspectives on ways to adapt in our new city. The result is a team that embodies Asana’s core values—plus a little NYC edge.
“Since Asana uses a distributed responsibility model, we completely own the decisions for our projects and get input from our collaborators in San Francisco, which means we’re autonomous but not isolated. That level of trust has allowed our small team to tackle projects of larger scope and iterate much more quickly than the typical remote office. We’ve already driven two successful product launches and we’re just getting started!”
– Kwame Thomison, Engineering Manager
“As a researcher, the unique opportunity to work in an office where the entire team is focused on the same goal allows me to get involved in the development cycle early and often, which results in everyone having a deep understanding of our customers.”
– Jerry Sparks, User Researcher
Work life at the office
We’re currently located in the hip Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, where great restaurants, nightlife, and sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline keep us entertained outside of the office.
Inside the office, we’re set up with everything we need for a healthy work environment: comfy meeting spaces, ergonomic work stations, nutritious snacks, and even the occasional onsite yoga class.
A look at the product roadmap
In order to maximize our impact on Asana’s mission, this office is dedicated to building features that take work tracking to the next level. To that end, in the past few months we launched Task Dependencies and Boards, both of which were top customer requests and critical to the ongoing success of our company.
We plan to spend the next year incrementally adding more functionality to these key features as well as building new features that serve our users’ needs and move the needle for our business. While we can’t reveal the specifics of our 2017 roadmap just yet, we’re excited to share that our focus will be on helping users manage project timelines and keeping their teammates concentrated on the most important tasks.
Our unique challenges
As the first remote development team, we also have a lot of new and interesting problems to solve beyond the product roadmap. Starting a new office can often feel like doubling your staff overnight: There can be increased coordination costs, a dilution of culture, and more information silos. In anticipation of these challenges, we’ve invested in solutions up front and have been taking an iterative approach with every new process we roll out.
Of course, there have been some bumps in the road (like trialing a couple low-quality video conferencing systems before finding the One) but eventually things fell into place. Each day in the office brings new challenges (big and small), and we’re excited to meet them head on.
We’re hiring!
Now that we’ve gotten a couple of successful product launches under our belts—and an ambitious roadmap ahead of us—it’s time to expand! We’re looking for product managers and engineers who can help us achieve our mission and contribute to our unique culture. If that sounds interesting to you, check out Asana NYC job openings!