This week on First Round Review, we sit down with Asana’s Head of People for an inside look at how she built a company culture amidst rapid scale.
Build Your Culture Like a Product — Lessons from Asana’s Head of People
When it comes to company culture, there are two sides to the coin. There are the implicit bits that can’t be framework-ified — they spring forth directly from the traits of the founding team, as well as the folks brought into the fold early on. Eventually, these might be codified into a set of company values or rituals, but in the beginning, they likely exist first as an engine quietly humming beneath the surface.
Then there are the explicit pieces of company culture that are put into place with intentionality and rigor. And that’s where folks like Anna Binder come in.
Binder joined Asana as Head of People back in 2016. The company had around 100 people at the time and had recently raised its Series C — and she was the first HR hire to climb aboard. But just because there wasn’t an official People team on Asana’s org chart, that doesn’t mean that culture was non-existent. Binder’s job wasn’t to spin something up from scratch. Instead, it was to evaluate the culture that already existed, figure out what was working and what could use some tinkering, and put a more robust strategy into place as the company eyed a big leap in growth.
“You have to build your culture like the product,” says Binder.
In our sit down with Binder, she unpacks her guide for doing exactly that. First, she rewinds the clock back eight years to when she first joined Asana, and the specific steps she took early on to develop a comprehensive plan for creating the cultural roadmap. Next, she shares some of her tactical advice for disseminating your values across the org and up and down the ladder, with specific examples of how Asana has tackled this. And finally, she takes us inside the C-Suite, and the rituals the Asana deploys to foster a trusting, high-impact exec team.
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review editors
Recommended resources:
-First Round Partner Todd Jackson is the guest on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast this week, unpacking the ins and outs of the PMF Method framework.
-Shreyas Doshi on how the best leaders micro-manage.
-Patrick Collison on beauty and craftsmanship when building products.
-There's no one way to approach PR — 10 perspectives for startups to have