Welcome to Asana Engineering

We’re so glad you’re here! At Asana Engineering, we aim to build, operate, and scale the most useful software for the world’s teams. We’re fascinated by productivity and thrive on solving problems together that help people achieve their most ambitious goals. 

We learn so much by building and using Asana that we wanted a place to share the things that have helped us along the way. This blog is where we talk about code, tools, technologies, processes, culture, and career stories. 

We started this blog back in 2013, and since then, we’ve grown to operate at a new level of scale and complexity. Asana Engineering has expanded to 4 offices in 3 countries, and our product has scaled to serve more than 70,000 customers and millions of users in 190 countries. So we wanted to reintroduce ourselves. Here’s a little bit about who we are, what we do, and what we’re excited to share with you on this blog.  

Who we are

Asana Engineering is a collaborative group of individuals committed to our craft and excited about building technology that is a force for positive change in the world. We believe in using the best tools for the job, and being mindful about how we solve problems so that we’re always thinking about the future, while still doing great things, fast. 

What’s unique about our work is that we use our own product many times each day. In fact, we rarely email one another at work! Anytime we build something that we know will help our customers, we’re equally excited to know that it will ultimately help our own workflows as well. 

As we’ve grown, our 6 Engineering principles continue to hold true, and keep us connected and focused on building great products together. 

1. Learn with curiosity 

2. Strive for simplicity

3. Articulate your mental model

4. Teach with compassion

5. Ship fast, sustainably

6. Fix problems, even when they’re not yours

What we do

Building product at a product-led company allows us to work closely with our Product, Design, and User Research teams, and we work hand-in-hand through the entire product development process. Engineering is generally structured across these four teams:  

• Product Engineering: Builds the Asana web and mobile application using a customer-driven approach to iterate and evolve our product to meet the needs of teams everywhere. We structure work in Product Engineering into three key pillars: 

  • Workflow pillar

    : Make the right connection between our customers, their tools, and their processes; build features that support our customers’ unique workflows.

  • Clarity pillar: Deliver the pyramid of clarity to our customers; build features to ensure that teams have clarity of purpose, plan, and responsibility, which we know makes them more productive.

  • Adoption pillar: Increase the adoption and monetization of Asana; build features that make it easy for users to quickly see value from the moment they start using Asana. 

• Infrastructure and Security: Builds the foundation needed to support our web and mobile applications, and our API, as well as the systems and tools that enable Asana to easily build secure software (this team analyzes service disruptions on the blog).

• Developer Success: Our main connection to the developers worldwide who build off of the Asana API. This team also runs our company-wide semi-annual hackathon.

• Data Science: Design and use data analysis tools that increase our data’s scalability, accuracy, and accessibility, as well as act as key partners to each product team to ensure we have the right metrics and insights in place (learn more from Rishika).

Here’s how our work is distributed across offices:

• San Francisco is our headquarters and home to every team within Engineering. Within Product Engineering, our San Francisco team supports our Workflow pillar, most recently launching Automation with a voice transcription service. Our HQ is also the primary location for our Mobile and Integrations teams.

• New York is where we first branched out into having a distributed Engineering team, and now has our second largest Engineering team globally. Our New York team is primarily Product Engineering and Data Science who support our Clarity pillar, launching product features like Timeline and Workload. 

• Reykjavik is our first international Engineering office, home to engineers on our Infrastructure team. The Reykjavik team supports the maintenance, security, and scale of our core infrastructure that powers Asana, like LunaDB stability, and is working on internationalization of our product.

• Vancouver is our newest development center that opened earlier this year and growing quickly, with Asanas in Product Engineering and Data Science (learn more from R.J.

  ) who support our Adoption pillar. The Vancouver team is focused on building features that support revenue growth and in-product education.

What’s ahead on the blog

While we solve big technical challenges like creating solutions for complex workflows and building for rapid scale, we’re also solving very human problems around collaboration, communication, and personal development. Coming soon on our blog, you’ll see posts on topics like: 

• Our process for launching new product features

• How Asana Engineering uses Asana, for everything from code reviews to onboarding new team members

• Ways that we use technology in our stack, like React

• Infrastructure and open source technologies we’ve built, like Drawsana

• Conversations with people across the team about things like their career journeys or perspectives on leadership

• How we build our culture to be inclusive and centered on mentorship and growth

• Our internship program and our interns’ experiences working on the team

We’re excited to get reacquainted on this platform, and join in on conversations about these topics with you! Stay in touch with us and get all our latest blog posts by following @AsanaEng on Twitter. And if the work we’re doing at Asana Engineering sounds exciting to you, we’re hiring in San Francisco, New York, and Vancouver – check out all of our open positions.