Five Minute Focus On: Tatiana Armstrong, Asana

Tell us about Asana
Asana is an app that makes it easier for teams to track their work with greater clarity, accountability, and efficiency. Asana was recently named one of Fast Company’s 2016 Most Innovative Companies; the top work-tracking vendor on Forbes’s inaugural 2016 Cloud 100 list; and the top private cloud company to work for by Glassdoor.

What’s your role in Asana
I’m the Customer Success Manager responsible for focusing our support in EMEA.

Tell us something about Asana we might not know
I started as employee #70 two years ago and since then we have quickly grown to about 260 employees across three different offices (SF, NY and Dublin).  Even as Asana continues to grow we maintain quirks and traditions that maintain our small start-up feel.

One tradition is celebrating an employee’s “Asanaversary” — that is, a current employee’s yearly anniversary of being “an Asana” (that’s what we call each other). As part of a new employee’s onboarding, they sign up to do an “Asanaversary interview” with a more veteran Asana — who they are, how they ended up at Asana, veteran advice for a new employee — and then fun questions like what their spirit animal is, preferred superpower or favorite local restaurant.  The interview is then shared with everyone in the company making you feel connected as a community across three different offices.  It’s a great way to keep new and more veteran staff connected, additionally it helps new employees break the ice with/learn from someone who’s been in the company a while in their first few weeks. Some creative new hires take this very seriously and come up with amazing, beautifully designed Asanaversaries. I think they’ve become harder and harder to top but they always manage to!

What’s next for Asana?
This year Asana went beyond project management to deliver a slew of new features that allow any type of team within any type of company to track any type of work inside Asana – whether it’s a recruiting team specifically managing a pipeline of candidates inside Asana thanks to our new Custom Fields feature, to more teams generally being able to track work more visually with our recent release of Asana Boards. This has been really exciting for me to continue to engage and empower both new and older customer alike.

Now as we head into 2017, we have a pretty exciting time ahead as we continue our fast growth both within large organizations and across the globe. Over the next year, we’ll be especially focused on continuing to make the core application faster, we’ll be forming additional plans related to internationalization, and we’ll of course be continuing to innovate our core product so that teams everywhere continue to have a world-class work tracking app that’s both easy enough for anyone to use and powerful enough for all types of work.

What’s your favourite thing about working in Dublin?
So many things! I love how proud the Irish are of their country and heritage, so the people here are just electric and always so fun to interact with. I went to a show called the Shadows of Táin at the Smock Alley Theatre and really appreciated how rich Irish folklore is but I feel like that was just scratching the surface of this endless supply of stories, traditions and history. I’m constantly learning new things about the culture and country – thanks in large part to my wonderful coworkers here. I also love the outdoors so I like how you can end up outside of the city, surrounded by nature or the ocean, just a short train ride away.

What do you like about being a Glandore Member?
I love that Glandore has a holistic approach in which they take care of its members. It’s much more than just a great office space and a beautiful building to work out of. It strives to be an influencer within the industry by providing networking opportunities and seminars with interesting guest speakers while also focusing on the importance of members outside strictly the business realm by offering things like yoga in the building or hosting multiple fun social events. You can tell the staff behind the scenes are working hard to enrich our work experience here and the extra effort is definitely noticeable and appreciated.

Friday nights in or Friday nights out?
Friday nights out with the coworkers for some happy hour food and drink is always fun.

What TV series are you currently binge watching?
Well I don’t have TV so I’m at the mercy of Netflix’s not so great selection. I just finished watching The Crown which was really well done and currently watching Luke Cage, which is good but man, it’s violent.

Asana helps humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly.
Visit asana.com for more information. You can also check Asana out on social; Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Blog

Follow Glandore on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram & Facebook for regular updates.