Episode 10 Summary: Feb 2014 – May 2014

At the end of every “Episode” of work at Asana, each team writes a summary of the work they’ve accomplished to share with the company. We’ve synthesized the highlights from the episode into this post to help you follow along with our progress.

Asana is steadily becoming an essential piece of infrastructure for the best teams around the world, across the most innovative industries including tech, healthcare, and education. In Episode 10, customer growth accelerated, and today, thousands of companies across every continent but one are running their business on Asana.

We want Asana to be a product that you rely on every day. In Episode 10, we moved closer to that goal: we made major investments in our application infrastructure, ran more growth and user experiments than ever, expanded our team in critical areas, including mobile, and began working on some major new features you’ll be hearing about soon.

Keeping Asana stable and fast

At Asana, we describe our priorities as “security before stability before performance before features.” In keeping with that focus, we made a number of vital enhancements to Asana’s security, stability, and scalability. The most notable work we did in this area involved database sharding, which is key to better performance as we grow rapidly to support more teams and more data. We plan to keep going, too — in this episode, we’ll be working on several near-term enhancements, and a bigger project that involves some updates to Luna, our in-house application framework.

We also dedicated a lot of development time to new functionality. Most of what we’re working on is still behind-the-scenes, but we’re incredibly eager to share some major new features and mobile updates with you soon, so stay tuned here…

Growth experiments, content, and support

Understanding how teams work and communicate about work is something we’re dedicating a lot of time to. Our Growth team and newly-created User Research team spent Episode 10 solidifying user research processes and running more experiments than we ever have before. Their research is already informing new product development. Meanwhile, our Design team put the finishing touches on a visual design update that we expect to roll out across all of Asana in this and the next episode. You’ll notice the new design in our emails, the Guide, and some new features.

Following the Episode 9 launch of the Guide, the Marketing team spent Episode 10 generating new content and developing in-product marketing capabilities to inform users of new product features. Meanwhile, our User Operations team continued to grow while providing top-notch support to users at all levels and stages of their lifecycle. We’ve also implemented a process for asking customers to rate our support in order to improve our content and training even more.

10 new employees

We welcomed 10 new asanas to the team in Episode 10 (not including our 10 summer interns!), filling critical roles across the company, including our new Infrastructure lead, Prashant Pandey. We also rolled out a number of employee benefits and successfully moved our entire team to a new floor in our building that we’ve been working on for several months. As is the case in most companies, our Recruiting, HR, and Facilities teams do the unsung, yet critical, jobs that allow us to grow while maintaining a great work environment.

We closed a really solid episode of progress and momentum-building and look forward to sharing some pretty exciting new functionality with you in Episode 11.