Build Your Culture Like a Product — Lessons from Asana’s Head of People

In the early stages of company building, all-out product focus tends to overshadow functions that become essential when the org starts to scale. Take recruiting strategy, for example. Busy founders — likely preoccupied with and Justin, and the rest of the leadership team. But once we decided on the direction I codified it, published it and marketed it,” says Binder.

Getting this down in writing is essential, she notes. “By creating some sort of written plan, you have a framework to turn to when people start asking you questions,” says Binder. “So even if they don’t agree with your order of priority in terms of what to tackle, they’ll understand your methodology and where their particular pony is.”

Here’s an example of an initiative that got prime placement on the roadmap: “Something that bubbled up loudly early was that, in order to scale, we needed to shift the way that we recruited from this startup ‘all hands on deck, let's recruit as many engineers as possible’ to a more professionalized and operationalized recruiting model,” she says. “How many roles, what kinds of roles? What does your pipeline look like? How many interviews can you do in a week? What kind of sourcing do you need?” So operationalizing the recruiting engine got pole position on Binder’s 18-month plan — and took over a year to achieve in full.

Step 4: Over-communicate until you start to annoy yourself

Binder jokes that, at times, her Head of People role can start to feel more like a Chief Communications Officer position — and that’s just as true now as it was when Asana was much smaller. With the roadmap set — sharing this broadly is key. As is repetition.

To pull off successful communication, sometimes you need to share the same information so many times that you get annoyed by the sound of your own voice.

Take the above example about demystifying Asana’s approach to comp. “We had this issue where, even though we had this great comp program in place, people either didn’t know about it or just didn’t understand it. That was a real shame, and it created a lot of chaos, so we implemented an educational program to solve that,” says Binder.

“As one example, people have very different levels of understanding about how equity works. So one of the things I did was invest in education at two different levels — a 101 version where people got to learn at the very basic level how stock options work, what an exercise price is and what a cap table is. And then there was a 201 version for people who had more experience. Separating those groups meant that the beginners had a safe space to ask those basic questions.”

Whether you’re demystifying comp or introducing a new performance review system, default to communicating more than you think is necessary. Sending a one-off email or an offhand mention in an All Hands meeting isn’t going to cut it.