Clarity in Chaos

 

Alex Hood, Head of Product at Asana, shares his principles for building products that resonate deeply with customers and bring clarity to chaos in our new world of work.

 

Episode Notes

[3m04s] What sparked Alex’s interest in finance and economics and led him to launch his career at Intuit

[6m36s] The origins of Alex’s interest in human-centered product design

[12m24s] How the opportunity to work for Asana meshed with Alex’s drive to bring clarity to the product development process 

[16m42s] Advice on how to apply human-centered design and develop customer empathy as a product builder

[20m45s] How Asana is working to solve the pain points associated with hybrid work 

[27m21s] Why it’s so important to unify brand experience, product experience, and culture 

[32m53s] Reflections on Asana’s IPO, and how the company used its own platform to pull it off for Asana, by Asana, on Asana

[34m32s] The importance of not wasting time on decisions that are easy to reverse 

[36m20s] Alex’s thoughts on leading with curiosity

 

In today’s fractured world of work, Asana develops products that bring connectedness to teams and business processes using a human-centered design approach that prioritizes observing and understanding. And at the center of that process is their Head of Product, Alex Hood. 

In his talk with Jesse, Alex illuminates the principles he’s developed over a career that spans tenures at Intuit, TubeMogul, and Asana. While reflecting on leading key initiatives like the development of Quickbooks at Intuit, Alex gives his advice on how to build customer empathy at scale, how to make the right product decisions while in hypergrowth, how to lead with curiosity, and much more.

Guest Bio

As Head of Product, Alex leads Asana’s product strategy, planning, and the management of the entire product organization, which includes product management, design, and user research. Prior to Asana, Alex was a VP of Product Management at Intuit and led QuickBooks Online. Alex was also the VP of Product at TubeMogul, which is now Adobe’s Advertising Cloud and has held positions at the Nasdaq Stock Market. Alex has an MBA from UC Berkeley.

Helpful Links

+ Episode Transcript

Alex Hood [00:00:00] About 45% of our resources on the product engineering side, the infrastructure side, are decked against new team adoption, because if you think about it only as hey, educate people on show the software works, you've already lost. But if you think about it as you have to help a certain set of folks who are willing to take a bet on you, do change management so that their team experiences benefits that they promise, that's how we think about it. I think that's more of a winning formula.

Jesse Purewal [00:00:43] From Qualtrics Studios, this is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts, and ideas fuel some of the world's most amazing products, brands, and experiences.

Hello, Builders. I'm Jesse Purewal. The voice you just heard belongs to my friend and a head of product at Asana, Alex Hood. Today, Alex and I talk about his experiences learning and leading human centered design and lean product development processes at Intuit, how he's used and adapted these principles at his role at Asana, the importance of having empathy at scale, and consistently generating customer insights as the foundation for building products, his experience taking Asana public, completely virtually on Asana during the pandemic, and his perspectives on leadership. Enjoy Breakthrough Builder, Alex Hood.

I am here with Alex Hood. Alex, thank you for joining me on the show.

Alex Hood [00:01:39] Pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Jesse Purewal [00:01:41] Yeah, you bet. Alex, I want to start all the way at the start with you. Tell me where you grew up and where it all began.

Alex Hood [00:01:46] I grew up in Rochester, New York, home of Eastman Kodak. While it was East Coast, solid Midwestern values, and I learned how to deal with the cold very quickly in life.

Jesse Purewal [00:01:56] I bet. If I had met you at 10 or 11 up in the snow in Rochester in a January or February, what would you have been up to? What was going on for 11-year-old Alex?

Alex Hood [00:02:04] Probably just a lot of crafts and arts. That was the kind of thing that I really enjoyed doing as a kid, just being creative and sketching. That's part of why I enjoy building products now.

Jesse Purewal [00:02:14] Is your family history connected into Kodak, or did you just happen to be in the same town?

Alex Hood [00:02:19] Just happened to be in the same town. My mother was a teacher, my father a small business owner. But I'll tell you what, growing up in a town where Kodak was so dominant, and then seeing such a downfall in Kodak as that company was disrupted from the ground up by digital cameras. Disruption is something that I'm always on the lookout for. I want to be a disruptor, and I do not want to be disrupted. And that is very much part of product strategy.

Jesse Purewal [00:02:49] And how intentional was the start to your career in finance or the markets? You would go on to spend a long number of years Intuit. And so looking back, it sort of seems like oh there was some intentional groundwork there. But how much intent was behind your career start?

Alex Hood [00:03:04] I really got interested in college in economics. And I didn't just get interested in it from a philosophical, academic standpoint. I really got interested in it from a business standpoint. And from my perspective, the best overarching combination of business and economics is study of the stock market. I ended up working for a stock market while I was in college in an internship. I ended up writing my thesis on European stock markets, and I just really loved that area of business and economics overlap. And pursued that for a while until I went to Hofstede for business school.

Jesse Purewal [00:03:49] And did it help explain some of the things that maybe you saw happening around you in Rochester? What was the impact of that?

Alex Hood [00:03:55] I think there's probably two things that were impactful that I bring with me from focus on the stock market and my upbringing. One is macroeconomic trends really matter to people's lives and economies. The stock market is kind of one barometer of that, there are many others. The second one is just an appreciation for behavioral economics. An appreciation for how psychology of folks matters in how markets operate, how they buy products, how they enjoy products. For me that's been a life lesson too as psychology and economics work together to build customer experiences, which is what I do now.

Jesse Purewal [00:04:38] Well, and psychology and products and economics seem to come together in a place you spent a lot of time after your MBA and somewhat during your MBA, Intuit. Talk about the attraction that you had to Intuit and what made that a logical next destination for you after the first few years of your career.

Alex Hood [00:04:55] My eyes were opened when I was getting an MBA about how customer-focused companies really win. And I love that, because if you can attach yourself to a mission you really enjoy pursuing, and then focus on the pain points around that mission, you can really create great change for folks. I was attracted to how consumer packaged good companies really got to know their customers well. They follow their customers home and watch them do laundry, or clean their house, or buy their groceries. And then they innovate based on what they observed, what they heard, what they saw.

Scott Cook at Intuit, the founder, he was from Procter & Gamble. And he applied that same customer-driven toolkit of understanding big, big pain points really, really well and innovating on top of what you learned to a problem that was solved by technology. And that's the founding of Intuit. That's how Quicken got started. He watched his wife struggle across the kitchen table balancing her checkbook and created software to make that that much easier. Kind of over and over again, that's the play that's run at Intuit. Now that's called human-centered design. And I've taken a page out of that book, and that's how we build product at Asana.

Jesse Purewal [00:06:18] Talk about how you learned the ropes around what is now called human-centered design at Intuit. Did you experience it as a discipline that was well healed, or was it emerging and did you get a chance to help build it and help institutionalize it a little bit across the portfolio of products you got a chance to work on at Intuit.

Alex Hood [00:06:36] When I was growing up as a product manager at Intuit, so was the discipline of human-centered design. It was called Design for Delight there, it's still in use. And as it was rolled out, I got to work on very, very large products, millions and millions of installed users. And also work on my own internal startups at the company. And I got to use the same practices applied to different problems. Like zero to one problems, or five million to ten million problems. So I got to practice there.

And then I left and worked at a smaller company called [inaudible] , which IPO'd and was later acquired by [inaudible] . And I went back to Intuit and I think I was able to contribute more at that point to the thoughts and how we were pushing innovation in human-centered design, actually because I left and came back.

Jesse Purewal [00:07:28] Were there elements of the Intuit culture as well that attracted you back? What kind of a place is a it for a product person to learn at, to build at, to be part of?

Alex Hood [00:07:39] Well you start with a giant customer problem, which is how can... I was working on QuickBooks throughout my career there, which is how do you help small businesses prosper? And as I mentioned before, my father was a small business owner, so it definitely hit home. So I was very, very passionate about the mission. And then you take a product where there's two things going on. You're iterating on top of the features that exist to modernize them, simplify the benefit delivery of them, or you're creating ancillary features and products that are market zero to one. At Intuit, it's a great place to learn product management, or design, or engineering, because you can swap back between teams who are working in different life cycle phases, all on really important missions that fire up whole teams.

Jesse Purewal [00:08:28] The time you were there, I think, coincides very much with when all of technology was becoming more mobile, more cloud centric. Talk about what that journey was like, particularly given that the category you were disrupting in and innovating in, by rights, had existed for many, many decades already. And you were not only building a new mousetrap, but now having to rebuild it for a new world.

Alex Hood [00:08:51] That's the Eastman Kodak distruption. If you're not willing to disrupt yourself, then somebody's going to do that for you. So at Intuit, we took the opportunity to disrupt ourselves. We had a huge business around QuickBooks that was distributed on CD-ROMs. And the future is cloud, so we had to pivot to cloud. Cloud also enables anywhere anytime access to your finances, another great solutions for small businesses to have it on a mobile device. So we needed to get mobile functionality that first worked with the desktop and then worked with the cloud. Beautiful thing is, once you do do the hard technology work to get the benefits that you delivered initially that customers loved on the desktop into the cloud, then you could scale it internationally. The pieces I laid out there are the key transformation moments for QuickBooks during my tenure there, all of it very exciting.

Jesse Purewal [00:09:44] What are the top two or three things, if you had to go back and point to, that you had to become good at, or that you had to exercise talent in to grow a company like that, and to continue to grow enrolls at a company like that?

Alex Hood [00:09:58] Actually, my first role at Intuit was in more of a corporate strategy role where I was learning how to be an internal consultant before I went back into product management. So I say this because probably the biggest thing I learned was how to apply the scientific method to a product set of problems. Management consulting is basically taking the scientific method, being hypothesis driven, testing and validating your hypothesis through experimentation. Consultants do a great job of applying that to business problems.

And the a-ha for me was that it could also be applied to product problems as well. Now think has become more of par for the course of how products get innovated, but that wasn't so much the case or the understood methodology years and years ago when I was just starting at Intuit. Now it's been more popularized by folks like Eric Ries with the Lean Startup Method, 37Signals Getting Real, and others. So I think the startup methodologies are more hypothesis driven, use more of the scientific method done well at the time were rarely applied to large company product development work. That's another change that happened while I was at Intuit that's also happened across the industry.

Jesse Purewal [00:11:15] Well because at that time so many of the larger enterprises were running maybe their backends on software, but they weren't really running revenue on software and platforms. And probably even if they wanted to bring some of that discipline to how they operated, might not have had the tool sets to be able to execute it.

Alex Hood [00:11:31] Yeah, a lot of the tools they were using were on-premises, server-based, a lot of it home grown software, or software that required massive amounts of integrations, systems integration work and consulting, to get to work. And we've just, as an industry, moved so far beyond that. Cloud tools are now pretty easy to use, ubiquitous, low cost, and you can move that much faster, you can curate that much faster. But I think even back then if you had blinked, you wouldn't imagine the kind of tools that we have today.

Jesse Purewal [00:12:03] So you graduated up to some pretty senior roles. You then onboard to Asana in 2018 as the Chief Product Officer. How familiar were you with Asana when you were over at Intuit? Did you use the product, did people move between those companies? What were your on ramps to the company, and how did you organize your thinking on how to take the opportunity?

Alex Hood [00:12:24] What I craved was for this high level goal, how does that goal breakout, how can I actually see how the constituent pieces are coming along in real time? And frankly, how can I help? What clarity can I provide? Where are teams blocked, where are resources needed? And to be able to have a product that is running at startup speed. Because I didn't have that top to bottom clarity, because we were a matrix organization where a lot of the stakeholders that I worked with, they didn't care about the whole roadmap, they only cared about project A, D, E, Q, and F. I just really came to view that like, gosh, I have the product organization here where a lot of time is spent trying to figure out who is doing what by when and why.

When I learned about Asana, they're solving this problem very well and uniquely. I got to know the co-founders here, Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, and I heard Dustin basically say the same thing. He's the co-founder of Facebook. And he got to the point in his head of engineering where he was spending all this time on who's doing what by when, and not on the thing that he loves, which is creatively figuring out from a systems perspective how to build software. And he eventually left Facebook thinking that that was another huge opportunity and a great place for him to apply his time and talent, and I agree. So that's how I got started at Asana.

Jesse Purewal [00:13:48] Was there any lamenting that you had to do with breaking from a focus on an explicitly SMB audience for the product? Or actually was it more ironically the other way, that at the time you joined Asana you were really focused on maybe some of the same kinds of desired customer segments that you had originally gone into Intuit to try to help drive growth with?

Alex Hood [00:14:13] I think the missions are fairly common between the two. So at Intuit it's helping small businesses prosper. And at Asana, it's helping the world's teams work together effortlessly. Those are related. I think the Asana mission is maybe one level of abstraction higher. You think about a lot of the strife that we're in, a lot of the reasons for friction, a lot of the reasons that teams can't perform, or individuals don't live up to their potential, I do think it has to do with a lack of clarity. And it does have to do with the fact that it really is hard for smart, ambitious people to work together and the same set of backs to have a shared victory. I love working on teams. I love sharing victories. I'm a product builder, so the mission really spoke to me.

Jesse Purewal [00:15:02] If you're bragging a little bit about yourself, what did Justin and the team you met maybe see in you and the particular growth journey that you went on and took Intuit on that made you the right person for that moment at Asana?

Alex Hood [00:15:16] Well Justin is one of the best product visionaries I've ever met, and maybe will ever meet. He can really kind of call the future before it happens. He's an amazing innovator. He led the product organization to a certain level of scale, but I think his passion really is, what's the best ideas, what are the ideas that really, really help people as a visionary? I come with a set of skills around how to scale and operationalize product teams. I love the mission stuff too, and thankfully I partner with Justin on many of the vision aspects, though more and more of that's becoming mine over time. But the product team has grown tenfold since I've been here, and that's fun. I get a lot of enjoyment out of building a company really rapidly, building a team rapidly because it's the high leverage bit to having create outcomes. And then building the product all at the same time. Those three aspects of my role are extremely intellectually challenging.

Jesse Purewal [00:16:24] So, Alex, let me return to human-centered design. I know it's one of your key tenets as a product leader. It's also a guiding principle at Asana, largely something that you have a shared interest with the company and its leadership team in. Talk about how you and your team interpret and apply human-centered design as you build.

Alex Hood [00:16:42] Well human-centered design has a couple of tenets. One is, before you go solutioning and brainstorming and building, you really get a sense of what is the underlying pain that you're trying to solve. And you get that pain by getting deep empathy for customers, by watching and interacting with them, and by even interacting with them on ideas. Not necessarily because that's where you'll end up as a solution, but because by jamming with them, you get a better sense of their pain. You're using different methods to get them to articulate, or display, the issues that they care about. So that's one, pain before solution.

The other is, you give yourself a chance to go really, really broad on the pain before you narrow in on the target customer and the target pain that you're solving. And then, you converge again on solution space. You go really, really broad. Your first idea's never the best one for sure. You try to come up with eight ideas for every one that you feel like is the right one. And only then do you start to then narrow on what is the right solution based on the narrow customer definition, the narrow paint point that you selected earlier. And as you build and code, you're constantly checking and refining your solution as you narrow in further at what that solution is. So the two tenets are, pain before solution, and second is go broad before going narrow.

Jesse Purewal [00:18:09] And how do you listen at scale? How do you bring empathy at scale?

Alex Hood [00:18:14] I'm glad you mentioned scale, because human-centered design is the key way that I scale. I don't have to be across every project or bit of work, because I know that the process is customer focused, and I know that the people on the team care about customers and are using the system that provides the best outcomes proven over time. So human-centered design is a scaling mechanism for me to be able to run. We have 30 to 32 program teams right now all working on different missions, and I don't have to be across all of them all the time.

With that said, the other thing that is a scaling mechanism is we have a very robust user research team. And each of our teams can ask really deep questions and has all the different DIY tools to get in touch with customers so that our first innovation that we ship is not even a customer facing innovation. It usually is a core insight. It is an a-ha, or a pattern, or a unique way of thinking about the world. That comes from deep user research and synthesis, really smart minds getting around the problem. Once we get that insight, then we move to the second diamond of the solutions base. But it all comes from the foundation of having a really amazing set of customer insights to capitalize on.

Jesse Purewal [00:19:39] Alex, talk to me in the context of work forcing, teaming going forward. In a hybrid model where you're ostensibly going to have customers on every point on the spectrum from work anywhere to essentially everybody returning to the office, how are you thinking about the roadmap, how are you thinking about prioritization, trade-offs, choices, design as it relates to now this immense diversity in how people will physically space and where they will work?

Alex Hood [00:20:09] I do think that the mission that Asana's on is right for the moment. Before the pandemic, I think we were mostly favored by early adopters. And as we went into the pandemic and everybody started to work from home, CIOs stopped spending on everything, really, but security and collaboration. So now we're at a place where we're more mainstream. There is defined market called work management where we're a leader, and it's a billion and a quarter information workers. And work management tools of like clarify of who's doing what by when has only penetrated three, four percent into that base.

So the tool really is purpose built for the types of problems that we're trying to solve now. There can still be a lack of clarity if you're sitting next to your coworker, or sitting in the same zip code separated by three blocks, or 13 and a half hours away in Bangalore. The pain points are still the same, so having a plan of record being a complementary piece of software, a complementary tool to where teams communicate, and to other places where teams store their content, you sort of need all three for teams to be able to perform really well. And we're innovating in the plan of record, the coordination layer.

Jesse Purewal [00:21:25] What fraction of time do you believe you can give people back? If you'd say, there's X percent of time that's spent on spin, and the work of work, or the process of process that we could give half of that back through the tool sets we create, or a quarter of that. What's the aspiration for how good this can get? Is it actually a hundred percent if we keep building with empathy at scale and using the double diamond as you talked about?

Alex Hood [00:21:53] The problem that we're solving is around where people spend their time at work. 60% of the time people spend at work is on work about work, not the true strategic content or craft elements of their job. Filling in status spreadsheets, getting together to talk about status updates, getting pinged for notifications on like what's the latest point of record. All that stuff is a 60% tax on progress. At Asana, we don't have nearly as much of that as other companies. So it's fun to live in the utopia where that is cut dramatically. When our customers tell us at scale when they use Asana, they tell us they get about a day a week back when they use Asana. Because think about all the status meetings you don't need to go to if status is always available to you in real time. Think about all the clarifying questions you don't have to answer if clarifying questions have already been answered before and are very easily findable.

So, I'd say customers are saying now a day a week, but the opportunity is 60% of the time on a billion and a quarter people on the planet doing some of the most important invention, innovation, progress-creating work for humanity. That's pretty exciting.

Jesse Purewal [00:23:11] Alex, how do you think about the frame of reference challenge here, vis-a-vis potential user groups? And what I mean by that is, if I'm Google and I'm innovating in the G Suite, I'm moving people away from a historical usage of maybe some other platform, but I'm still doing email, I'm still doing writing, I'm still doing spreadsheets. If I am moving into Zoom or I'm moving into Google Meet, I'm innovating the meeting, but it's still the meeting in a content share that the advancement of the category that you're leading is quite different altogether in the sense that it hasn't been software based and platform based for very long. Meaning, there a are lot of people in certain cohorts who have no frame of references for using software to do the work that you're talking about. And then you have some people who it was like, of course we're going to work in something like Asana. How do you bridge that gap culturally within organizations where you have people who just get it intuitively, and others who have no frame of reference for it?

Alex Hood [00:24:11] Yeah. Well what you described is a situation that is ripe for disruption, when the existing tools aren't good enough and you have to really create something that is easy to adopt and spread. That's the name of the game. You're right, the tools that folks use to manage work together hasn't really changed in form factor in 30 years. It comes from the Microsoft Office CD-ROM suite, where you've got PowerPoint, you've got email, you've got documents, and you've got spreadsheets. Google has done great work to innovate in order to get those elements into the cloud. But they haven't really changed the form factor. So if you're going to create a new form factor for how people work, it has to be so good, that after they try it, they get some benefit. That they can't imagine the old fashioned way. That's why I spend a lot of my time making sure that we have the best designers on our team.

When we talk about reduction of work about work, we look at everything and say, "Hey, do we need three extra clicks to get this option, or can this be at face level?" Why are there so many options here? Why is this confusing? Work about work reduction actually is how we think about designing the software in itself. About 45% of our resources on the product engineering side, not the infrastructure side, are decked against new team adoption, because if you think about it only as, hey, educate people on how the software works, you've already lost. But if you think about it is as you have to help a certain set of folks who are willing to take a bet on you, do change management so that their team experiences benefits that they promise, that's how we think about it. I think that's more of a winning formula.

Jesse Purewal [00:26:05] Hey, it's Jesse. If you like conversations with entrepreneurial leaders in tech who are behind some of the most amazing products and companies, check out one of our past episodes, my conversation with Sheila Vashee. Drew Houston at Dropbox hired Sheila to be marketing employee number two, and she was behind the company's meteoric rise from consumer app to indispensable B2B platform. Take a listen to Sheila telling me about how she built brand love at Dropbox based on clear communication, continuous adaptation, and a commitment to the company's purpose. The episode with Sheila is episode nine of season two, and you can get it wherever you get your podcasts.

If you're enjoying Breakthrough Builders, please drop us a rating and a review, and tell your friends. Now, back to the rest of my conversation with Asana's head of product, Alex Hood.

Talk about the role that maybe brand and product play together in helping advance this cause. Obviously brand is something that can be highly abstract, but in a product world is increasingly easy to quantity, and measure, and make improvements to. So I wonder how you regard the brand and how you think about managing and creating and improving people's perceptions of it, and then using their opinions around it to think about product innovation.

Alex Hood [00:27:21] Yeah, well we organize our teams so that there's very high integrity between the brand and the product. So our design team, for instance, is a combination of brand designers who are sharing the promise of what life could be like if you were to have your team use Asana. Reduction of work about work, more satisfying at work, more time in flow state. If you were back and forth with your team to get the job done, better understanding of how your work ladders up to something greater. And then we make sure that we deliver those same exact things in the products. To me, that is a brand promise. It's the definition of the brand promise. So as we've evolved our product offering and more of our brand promise is to leaders of organizations and not just in digital contributors organizations. So you've seen our brand more up market, even more premium, and that's all by intent.

Jesse Purewal [00:28:17] Yeah, we have the same dynamic internal default tricks where at some point you have to have a much more strategic purview of, and vision for, and adoption of what's going on with the vision and not rely exclusively on the end user love. The end user love matters, and we still have to make sure that we're doing everything we can to cultivate that, but it becomes actually both and instead of an either or. It strikes me you're clearly at that point.

I've heard you also, Alex, talk about the idea of culture as product. Talk about what that means to you and how you approach culture at Asana through a lens of product, and how you personally do so as a product leader.

Alex Hood [00:28:58] My role is really three elements. It's helping build the company, it's helping build team, it's helping build the product. And because I am a product builder, I really approach all three of those challenges with the same set of tools. And what we do at Asana overall, it's how we run the business. So we really think about culture as a product in itself. And in that product of culture, there's new learning, there's experimentation, there's iteration, and then there's bugs. And by using that language and using that methodology and product building, we're actually able to build something intentionally, and with the practices that we know about how we build software.

A very simplistic example. In Asana, we have the notion of projects, and portfolios of projects, and goals, and tasks. But really, a task is the atomic unit of work. One task can be assigned to exactly one person. You might say, well that's not to true because this person and I, we share the responsibility. In our case, that almost never really works that well. If you can break down tasks to where there's individual accountability, and you can track that accountability that much better. So that is a philosophy of how we run our own projects here that we've product-ized as a best practice in Asana. And some of that's due to trial and error.

Jesse Purewal [00:30:21] Let me also follow up with that to say, where do you insert any boundaries around culture as product? Where do you think the limits of the analogy are, either because of the emotional factor, or creating culture, and the idea that it is inherently human? Or actually, is that the wrong way to think about it, and it is a perfect analogy, and you've seen it play out?

Alex Hood [00:30:44] I think the experimentation notion of it is really the most important piece. I don't think... We're not willing to experiment to the place where you're running an AB test of completely polar opposite cultures. Because one of those opposing views will eventually get un-chipped. And so it's mostly iteration. It's iteration, and it's curiosity of what is working well versus not holding truths to be self-evident when maybe they're really not. The best product builders are super, super curious, and super, super open, but they're also very data driven. And that's how we think about product as well.

Jesse Purewal [00:31:21] It does past the sniff test. There's a lot of people who will advocate for culture adds versus just culture fits, for example, in hiring. You could see that as, "Hey, my culture product just went from version 5.0.1 to 5.0.2 with hiring that person or that team," instead of saying, "Well, our culture is this fixed thing, so can we really have this organ come join the body?" It's actually really helpful. And a lot of it probably reflects the way people are already behaving, and it gives a set of tools to be able to coherently move forward.

Alex Hood [00:31:58] Yeah, it's important for us here as well. I joined Asana three and a half years ago and I think I was maybe employee 250 or so. And we've hired a thousand people since then. And we've grown 45% or so since the pandemic. Scaling that culture is important, just like scaling a product is important as well. So we spend a lot of our time thinking about culture very intentionally. We think that having a very, very strong culture where people feel included and can do their best work is a highly leveraged asset that pays off. And also, gosh, we're in the collaboration business. We should be role modeling experimenting around collaboration. If we're not able to do this best in class, we don't belong in this business.

Jesse Purewal [00:32:44] Alex, what's your favorite demonstration of Asana running Asana? What do you love to point to as look at what we can do and look what we can unlock?

Alex Hood [00:32:53] An example that we talk about a lot is we went public as a company on Asana during a pandemic. And going public is no small feat. It's one of the largest cross functional projects that companies of our size go through. Legal team, marketing team, PR team, external vendors and consultants, product team. There's documents that need to be co-created. There are changes you need to make to how the company shares data. There's' just so much that needs to get done as a project in order to go public externally and have a new set of control internally. And we did that on Asana, in Asana, for Asana.

We were able to set our goals of what we wanted to do. We were able to then work backwards of who needs to do what by when. We were able to avoid all the status meetings of how all that stuff is going, because we can all just see it in Asana. And we made sure that right eyes were looking at the right pieces. We made the right folks had the right contacts, because it all exists in the same spot. And we didn't end up being that distracted by the motion of going public, where I think it can be all consuming for some companies that were our size when we went public a few quarters ago.

Jesse Purewal [00:34:09] Yeah, it's an impressive feat. Congratulations. I want to ask a couple personal leadership perspectives of you. One is around decision making. When you've personally had to decide something important, whether it's been a new role, considering a new company, key hire, or you have to make a tough call on something, what are the heuristics and variables that you like to look at? What's guides you?

Alex Hood [00:34:32] Well, for company level decisions, and for product level decisions, we're okay shipping things that are very easily reversible. And with cloud based infrastructure running [inaudible] product at scale, you can have a lot of different tests out there. So you don't have to be right all the time the first time, as long as you can run some experiments and figure out the way. Those are things that really help us make decisions. Understanding decisions that are hard to revers and then being thoughtful about those and not wasting time on decisions that are easy to reverse, and frankly, delegating them, that helps speed up decision making.

And then I guess lastly, I think of decisions as products, too. So maybe you're catching a theme that product leadership is a hammer and everything's a nail to me. But I think of decisions as products. So if you can create conditions where the decision gets shipped and communicated, you can create conditions where you really understand the pain points associated with the solution you're providing in the decision, and it's been really well understood, and you've asked teams to go broad and narrow on the solutions to come to that decision.

And then you create a culture where decisions stick. There's a disagree and commit culture in the room, as long as everybody's been heard. Decisions get very publicized, there's a lot of clarity around decisions. Back to the benefit of the product. And it's clear who is making the decision, so that we're not wasting time. All those things are reductions of work about work.

Jesse Purewal [00:35:58] And what do you think you discovered about yourself as a leader, or cemented, or reconfirmed in your own mind about your strengths or convictions as someone on the executive leadership team at Asana, at a company that went public in the pandemic and has, to your point, in the last few years, grown in the way that it has?

Alex Hood [00:36:19] Well I think something that I've adapted into part of my style is that I lead with a perspective, but I am very happy to be wrong. So that's hypothesis driven insights, that's using the scientific method to solve problems. I have a perspective, a hypothesis of what we should do. And that would be the plan of record, unless a teammate can build on top of it. And then maybe it's a version 1.1 of my idea, or maybe it's a whole completely different thing. I really try to set myself up where I'm not biased towards that new idea, because that new idea could be so much better. So leading with a perspective is one. Creating a forum where folks can yes/and or build upon your ideas, people feel really comfortable with that, is another. And then by doing that, you're really role modeling curiosity, which is how I think the best work gets done.

Jesse Purewal [00:37:22] So Alex, final question. If you had to give some advice to the builders listening here, give them the world as you have experienced it and as you have helped to build it, what would that advice be?

Alex Hood [00:37:34] Approach your career and building products, or building your business, with a real growth mindset. It's okay being wrong. Curiosity is really the most important trait. Go with your hunch, but be okay and look for reasons why you're wrong. Understand that new experiences are hard by definition and will get easier over time. And give yourself grace in those moments when it is hard, because this is a natural part of the role. Give your teammates that you give new challenges, grace that the thing you gave them makes their life more difficult before it gets easier for them. It's very easy to be close-minded and miss great opportunities to lack curiosity and get disrupted, to approach challenges with a victim mindset instead of an opportunity mindset.

As I found, managing folks is much easier to teach and guide on the skillset piece than it is to teach and guide on the mindset piece. The mindset thing you have to kind of get it right as an individual. So that's why I'm giving advice here on the mindset piece, because the skillset piece then comes naturally afterwards.

Jesse Purewal [00:38:41] Well, Alex, thank you. From the shadows of Rochester to casting your own light here in the Bay Area as a lead at Asana, namaste for the time, and perspective, and input today. I know everybody will enjoy it, so thank you once again.

Alex Hood [00:38:56] Thanks, Jesse.

Jesse Purewal [00:39:01] Thanks for listening to Breakthrough Builders. You can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed the show, I'd be grateful if you could spread the word by leaving a rating and a review. It really does help other people find us. And please, tell your friends.

Breakthrough Builders is a Qualtrics Studios original, presented and produced in collaboration with StudioPod Media in San Francisco. The show is hosted and executive produced by me, Jesse Purewal. Our writer is Todd Bagnull. From StudioPod Media, Deanna Morency is our show coordinator. Editing and production by Katie Sunku Wood. Additional editing and music is provided by Nodalab. Our designers are Baron Santiago, and Vansuka Chindavijak. Website by Gregory Hedon, photography by Christy Hemm Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, James Wadsworth, John Johnson, and Kylan Lundeen.

Season 4Jesse Purewaladvice for product managers, human-centered design, brand experience, product experience, collaboration, hybrid work, asana, alex hood