Building the future of work

As a Principal Product Designer and Product Design Director at Asana, I led strategic visioning that resulted in launching 2 new patented products and the formation of 5 new teams.

Bringing block based editing to Asana

CHALLENGE

Asana’s text editor was dated and lacking many of the basics users have come to expect and love in their products: Headers, code blocks, intuitive interactions and real-time collaboration.

SOLUTION

Leveraging best patterns and the latest technology in the field, bring rich, robust document editing experiences in Asana, unlocking a competitive edge with smart text that connects the Workgraph.

ROLE & DURATION

Principal Product Designer

6 months

CONSTRAINTS & TEAM

Scalability & Technical Debt

Leadership: C-Suite Reviews

Peers: 1 PM, 1 APM, 1 PPM, 1 UXR, 1 DS, 1 Eng Lead, 5 Eng, 2 Partner Teams

Reports: 2 Design Contractors

SETTING A VISION

I partnered with my PM to develop a product vision for how text/editing experiences in Asana can evolve and beat the competition.

DELIVERING THE MVP

We then developed a MVP proof of concept, to measure and learn quickly before tackling our entire platform.

SCALING THE PLATFORM

I then oversaw numerous design contractors as the team rolled out this new functionality across all surface areas of the product - ensuring consistency and a best-in-class editing experience for our users.

Launching a best in class OKR product

CHALLENGE

Following the launch of Asana’s venture in the goal management space, we needed to deliver on our promise to customers of connecting work to purpose.

SOLUTION

With automatic progress roll-ups, team leads can connect the work of their teams from projects to goals. Team members can now understand the value of their contributions, and leadership can directly triage and assess OKRs, project and team health.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Principal Product Designer & Manager

DURATION & TEAM

6 months

1 Product Designer

1 PM, 1 APM, 1 PPM, 1 UXR, 1 DS, 2 Eng Leads, 10 Eng

2 Partner Teams

CONSTRAINTS

Stakeholder & Leadership Buy-In

Scalability & Technical Debt

A FEW MEATY QUESTIONS

In discovery, UXR and I uncovered some fundamental product questions related to user comprehension of our workgraph objects and data model constraints. We also realized that many of our teams had overlapping missions and surface areas, without a clear unifying vision.

I coordinated jams and workshops for us to understand our existing product areas, aligning our strategies with the fundamental needs of teams and companies using project management software.

PAVING THE WAY FOR NEW TEAMS & ROADMAPS

Following this work, we spun up a variety of Working Groups to tackle these meaty questions, and based on our findings formed a few new teams to better connect the magic and power of Asana’s features.

CONNECTING WORK TO PURPOSE

Over several launches and iterations delivering on our promise of smart, automatic goal roll-ups, Asana is the #1 ranking OKR software on G2.

Enabling Orientation & Wayfinding

CHALLENGE

A 14 year old product, Asana has launched numerous features without a clearly defined information architecture, which results users in feeling the product is unstructured and complicated, decreasing adoption and retention. A new Navigation team is formed, however they’re struggling to manage stakeholders, dependencies and constraints in order to gain traction towards their first experiment.

SOLUTION

I joined the team for a 6 week strategic sprint, with clearly defined methods and outcomes. Partnering with the team, we built our vision, and narrowed in on core hypotheses and experiments to validate and iterate our way to a better Asana global and contextual navigation.