Today marks a significant milestone for our portfolio company Asana, as they go public through a direct listing.
We have seen the work management market grow tremendously in recent years, with Asana becoming the leader of this emerging category early on. Asana increased quarterly revenue by nearly 3x in two short years, at scale.
So why is work management critical now? And why was Asana able to achieve this tremendous growth? As we reflect on our partnership and look out into the future, we remain excited about Asana’s future and what Asana means for the future of work.
Work management market
The world moves fast. Meeting customers’ ever-changing needs becomes essential. That means more micro-coordination is necessary. New synchronous communication suites like Slack, Teams, and others help improve productivity in such a world, vs. e-mail and meeting-driven communication.
With the rise of micro-coordination, we may be somewhat freed from long meetings and email chains. But as these micro-coordination tasks add up, they do become “busy work.” A lot of this micro-coordination is about clarifying the status and dependencies of work. Teams increasingly become aware of the need to have a single source of truth about their work status and updates.
Added to that is the recent transition to remote work: when we don’t have everyone in the same place, people need to have a single source of truth that clarifies who does what by when, and why. All of these developments point to an ever-increasing need for work management tools.
"In Asana we see alignment, where several functions like user research, product management, design, engineering, marketing, and sales work in harmony to deliver the experience customers need, and hence business results."
Asana’s focus on user experience
Asana has relentlessly focused on usability. Asana positions user research as a peer to product management and design, not a supporting function of them. As a result, the product approach is based on deep customer research, enabling Asana to ship the world-class interaction design that facilitates broad engagement.
As users engage with the product, new data about their work accumulates. Leveraging this unique data and Asana’s proprietary data model (what Asana calls work graph), all sorts of exciting plays become possible. Asana’s product vision laid out such an inspiring vision, where Asana’s thoughtful design and data-driven automation could facilitate users’ work, resulting in alignment from company mission and goals to individual tasks.
Since it’s so easy for teams to start using the platform, a majority of Asana’s customers start with self-service or free trials. Asana’s direct sales model then focuses on helping self-served customers use their product at scale. This approach resulted in an efficient return on sales and marketing with 10.6 months of payback, and a strong international footprint with 41% of their revenue coming from international regions for the fiscal year 2020*.
The power of alignment
In Asana we see alignment, where several functions like user research, product management, design, engineering, marketing, and sales work in harmony to deliver the experience customers need, and hence business results. Asana’s impeccable Glassdoor reviews and award-winning culture speak to the strong alignment they achieved internally, while their external alignment with customers is evidenced by their tremendous growth.
Ever since we partnered up, we’ve been constantly reminded of the importance of this alignment. An inspiring mission drives that alignment. And with management’s willingness to invest further in the business long-term, combined with a talented team of passionate Asanas, Asana’s grand vision for the future of work seems not so distant.
I know that at Asana, employees can express their gratitude and appreciation for their fellow teammates’ work by passing along a quirky plush Traveling Narwhal, reinforcing team culture and alignment in a fun way. So we will send our own version of the Narwhal to Asana, as our token of gratitude. Thank you for inspiring us and showing us the power of alignment by doing what you do.
Congratulations Dustin and the team on today’s milestone!
*Source: Asana S-1