Why I joined Asana: Marie Tomasi, Community Program Manager

Meet Marie, a Community Program Manager originally from France and based in Dublin. Marie initially moved to Ireland to get out of her comfort zone and become a teacher. It was meant to be a one-year experience and now she’s about to celebrate her 13th year there! At Asana, Marie spends her time working directly with our customer community and is a true customer advocate. Get to know Marie and why she joined #teamasana.

What was your journey to becoming a Community Program Manager?  

In college I studied teaching and French literature, so when I graduated with my Master’s degree in 2009, I naturally turned to teaching. For a couple of years, I taught French as a foreign language to pre-school, primary, and secondary school students both in Ireland and Switzerland, and later I decided to take a turn into the tech world. After working with several User Operations and Social Media teams, I found my way to Asana. I first joined our wonderful User Operations (essentially customer support) team with a focus on our social media and Community Forum support. Most recently, I transitioned to a new role in Marketing on our Community team to lead our Community Forum! 

How have you felt supported in your career journey and growth at Asana? 

In my three years at Asana, I’ve had the opportunity to work on various teams throughout the company. The support I’ve received from my teammates and managers through these changes has been invaluable and has shaped me into the program manager I am today. Asana as a company has been incredibly supportive by allowing me to grow when I moved from User Operations to Marketing, and more recently when I became a manager. 

Describe what a day is like on the Dublin team

When I joined Asana back in 2017, the Dublin team was quite small. I remember having lunch all together as an office and playing games every day. Fast forward three years, we’ve moved to our third office, and now have tons of Asanas in Dublin! A lot has changed, but we’ve managed to keep and scale the most important thing we have: our culture.

As with a lot of Dubliners, we’re still working remotely, and while we cannot wait to return to our office, we’ve managed to keep many of our traditions. One of my favorites is our Grande meeting which happens every month and gives all teams based in EMEA an opportunity to come together and share an update on their work. We don’t always have the chance to work closely together, so this is an incredible way to see how all of our work fits together. 

What is something unique about the Community team? 

Our team is special in so many ways! The Community team is spread out all around the world (San Francisco, Dublin, London, and Tokyo), and while we rarely get to be all together in one place, we’ve built incredibly strong relationships based on trust and communication. We all come from very different professional backgrounds, which is one of our biggest strengths. It makes us creative, flexible, and efficient. The last few months have illustrated all of the above. When the pandemic began, we had to shift all of our in-person events to virtual events in the span of just a few weeks. We took this opportunity to explore new formats, new content, and delivered incredibly successful events. In fact, our virtual events have been so successful that we may continue to organize them in tandem with our in-person events moving forward. 

Lastly, our team has an incredible purpose—to bring our customers together, build connections with and between them, and foster engagement. Whether it is through our Community forum, or during our community events, we get to work very closely with our customers. Meeting them face to face (virtually!), listening to their stories, and working together to improve their workflows gives us an incredible insight into their worlds and allows us to be huge advocates internally.

How do you use Asana in your day to day work?

I genuinely could not imagine working without Asana! I’m a huge fan of My Tasks and it is my source of truth when I organize my work every day. I especially like the auto-promote feature which automatically brings up tasks to the top of my list as the due date approaches. I also love the Advanced Search feature, which allows me to find anything in Asana, even when I remember very little about the task I’m looking for. I also multi-home a lot of my tasks. In my role, I regularly work cross-functionally and being able to house one task in multiple projects allows me to give visibility to my stakeholders. 

What does Asana’s mission mean to you?

In the world we currently live in, I believe our mission is more critical than ever. Enabling the world’s teams to work together effortlessly is our way to support and contribute to our customers’ missions and help build our future. I am incredibly proud of our mission and excited to continue supporting it within our community. 

What’s your mantra and where did you develop it?

“Keep our customers at the heart of every decision you make.” I believe this is key to building trust and loyalty in our brand and product. As a Community Manager and a member of our Voice of Customer committee, I regularly get to share feedback from our community members with our Product teams. Over the last couple of years, so many of the new updates or features (like Dark Mode) we shipped were born from feedback within our Community. Seeing these features come to life and getting to share the news back with our Community is one of the most rewarding parts of my job. 

If you could give a new Asana one piece of advice, what would it be?

Asana is growing fast and offers so many opportunities to explore. Stay curious and don’t be afraid to ask questions. Asana will be there to help you to grow, both professionally and personally.  

Work with Marie—join our team!

Check out opportunities to join the Marketing team. We have open roles in Dublin and San Francisco!