Culture as Product: Designing a Great Company Culture - Justin Rosenstein - Lean Startup Week 2017

Thanks Alicia. Good morning. It's an honor to be here. I've become a student of great products. Whether it's the iPhone, Facebook, Gmail, think of your favorite product. We know that great products don't just happen; they're the result of years of careful craftsmanship: design, implementing, taking the time to talk to customers, measure, and continuously improve. We don't normally think about it this way, but culture is exactly the same. Great cultures don't just happen; they're the result of years of craftsmanship. Whether you like it or not, your culture is your company's second product. Arguably, it's your first product. What we're going to look at today is how we can apply a lot of the well-known principles that we've come to know for developing great products to develop great cultures. So what is culture? Culture is the sum total of all of the interactions that people have in your organization. It's the language that you use, it's the practices that you have, it's the values that you share. And the reason culture matters is that it can be a huge accelerant or something that really slows you down in getting to your mission. If you have a company that's a well-oiled machine, everyone's focused on the right things, you have great practices, and people aren't distracted by petty politics and interpersonal drama, you're going to be able to move much more quickly toward your mission and toward your business objectives. Also, great people have lots of options about where to work, and they want to work in great cultures. So if you invest in your culture, you're able to hire and retain a much higher level of talent. But also, this is the company that you are going to work in. As a leader, you'll find that in order to have the stamina required to go day in and day out and do the hard work required to build a company, you want to have a culture that, when you come to work every day, feels like it's supporting you and helping you to thrive. I think there's this pernicious myth that business success is maximized when you have a cutthroat culture and people are burning the candle from both ends. But in actuality, both personal experience and all the data point to the fact that a great supportive culture is what maximizes business success. In fact, I was excited to see that Parnassus Endeavors, an investment fund, created a portfolio of Fortune 100 best companies to work for, and it returns 12.2% annualized returns as opposed to the S&P 500's 8.5%. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think there's a direct causal relationship. I think we've enjoyed this causal relationship at Asana. We put quite a bit of work into our culture, and I was excited to see recently Fast Company described it as the best culture in tech. I think this has been a massive accelerant for us: having well-honed processes, having the ability to hire and retain exceptional talent. I think it's been a core competitive advantage that's enabled us to turn Asana into one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the world today. On the flip side, in the last couple of years, we've seen some great missions start to unravel because they didn't invest enough time in culture, and things started to go south. I would say it's never too early to start this investment, because your culture is the seed from which the rest of your organization is going to grow. In the very first week that my business partner Dustin Moskovitz and I started Asana, we did just two things: one was we started a Git repo and built out a very simple code base, and two, we wrote a first draft of our initial values list, because we felt it was that important to what we were trying to do. On the flip side, it's never too late to think about this. Sometimes I hear people say, 'We don't have time to think about all this touchy-feely stuff. We have quarterly objectives to hit, we have deadlines breathing down our necks.' I would just say you don't have the time not to. You can't afford not to think about these things; they're that important. So what we're going to look at is how we can apply the well-known product development process—design, implement, measure, and improve—and apply that to the development of cultures. Let's look at each of these in turn, starting with design. Design is a deeply introspective process. It's soul-searching as a team into who you are deep down and what it is you're really trying to accomplish. This is a time to avoid platitudes and think about your company's soul. For example, 'Move fast and break things' works really well for a company like Facebook circa 2007. If you apply that to Boeing, it probably wouldn't turn out as well. This is a deeply collaborative endeavor. You want to find the individual contributors, the executives, anyone throughout the company who you feel most deeply understands and embodies the soul of your organization. Get everyone together, find out what you all agree on, and more importantly, what are the areas where you don't yet agree. Then you need to come together and figure out what you really want your organization to look like. Then after the design phase comes implementation. At Asana, we strive to infuse our design principles into every single aspect of the culture. For example, we really value focus, and so we've developed the practice of No Meeting Wednesday. It is so nice. It is such a pleasure to have an entire day in which you have no meetings, no distractions, where you can get into real flow and maker time. We find some of the most creative parts of Asana happen on Wednesdays. We also really value learning from each other, so we've developed a culture in which it just feels natural to, in real time, be giving each other regular, blunt, loving feedback. We have practices to reinforce this. Once a year, everyone gets peer reviews from six people that they nominate, and we tell each other what's growing well and what are places where you still have to improve. We're all in this together, helping each other level up our skills more and more over time. Sometimes this implementation phase requires a kind of reprogramming of people. For example, one of our principles is that we see the primary goal of management as coaching. Our org chart has the CEO at the bottom, and then it grows out like a tree where the fruit are the people who are actually doing the real work—the individual contributors—and managers are the branches who support them. Sometimes we've hired managers from other organizations, and even when they intellectually agree with this, they're so accustomed to the habits of working in a top-down command-and-control structure that it requires ongoing management training to help them develop new habits, which they really appreciate. As a leader, a lot of your role in implementation is consistently talking the talk. If you just have a list of values that are in some onboarding manual, then they're not going to become real. HR handbooks are where values go to die. Instead, you want to find ways to constantly link back. We have bi-weekly company all-hands meetings, we have documentation of our different practices, and these are all opportunities to link the particular implementation details to the why and the cultural design principles and values that are at work there. You'll know you're succeeding when people actually use that language day-to-day. If you walk the halls of Asana, you'll overhear people really using words like mindfulness and equanimity. Sometimes it sounds like self-parody. And then you get to measure and improve. It can be a never-ending process. One way we do this is we have an anonymous survey once a year where we ask everyone in the company over a hundred questions. This allows us to find out what are the places to celebrate and see where we're doing great and keep going, and what are the places that we need to improve. Just like every product is going to have bugs, every culture has culture bugs, and that's okay. We're able to take all that data and identify what are our top culture bugs, triage, prioritize, assign owners to each one, and then, as part of our values of clarity and transparency, we actually share that list with the whole company. That leads to sometimes awkward experiences. For example, I remember once we had a company-wide meeting, and we were projecting onto the projector in big font an anonymous, angrily written quote where someone said they did not understand Asana's compensation structure, they did not have any idea what it was going to take to get a promotion, and they were quite bitter about that, understandably. I think a lot of organizations would get squeamish about that and try to talk about it behind closed doors, but we like to stare those problems in the face. What we find is that it enables us to solve them more readily. Since then, we've implemented better management training, we've hired a full-time compensation lead, we've improved our documentation. I think we still have a ways to go, but we can track year over year that we're getting better and better. So design, implement, measure, and improve: the key way of doing both great product development and developing culture. So now we'll look at four examples, four features that we've added to Asana's culture: empowerment, inclusiveness, clarity, and mindfulness, and how we've applied that process. We'll start with empowerment. The design principle here is we want to take all those great people we've hired and empower them to do their best work, not be at the mercy of pointy-haired bosses. One way that we implement this is we have an Areas of Responsibility system where we look at the full space of all the decisions that need to be made and assign them to the right people. A lot of organizations would assign all of those to a small number of executives, but we try to push responsibility for decision-making as close as possible to the people who are actually doing the work, because they have the most context on the decision. When we measured how we were doing here, we found out that in some cases we had swung the pendulum too far. We had people who were straight out of college being asked to make some major architectural decisions and sometimes getting overwhelmed. So we've improved by starting people off with a more reasonable amount of responsibility and then increasing it over time. Next, inclusiveness. The design principle here is that regardless of your age, your sex, your skin color, whether you're an intern or an executive, an engineer or a salesperson, every single person at Asana deserves deep mutual respect. To be honest, the fact that I have to point this out out loud makes me pretty pissed and sad. But as I hope you know by now, the world that we live in and our industry as a whole does not have this as a default. As a result, you have to go above and beyond. It's not enough to just not discriminate; you actually have to proactively foster spaces in which people feel safe to bring their full selves to work. One way that we've implemented this is through our Employee Resource Groups. Today we have three: we have a women's group, an LGBTQIA group, and a people of color group. Those groups are employee-led, everyone is welcome to join, and they are forums for which Asana provides budget, staffing, and space. People can come together, talk about real hard issues facing the world and the workplace, have a safe space to talk, and figure out what we can do at Asana to just keep holding up our game and being as radically inclusive as we possibly can. Clarity. The design principle here—and this is deeply infused not only into our culture but into our product—is we think that teams are able to be much more effective when everyone has perfect clarity on who is doing what, when, and why. It starts with the why. It starts with clarity of purpose. We want everyone in the company to deeply internalize the mission and their role in it. The very first thing you see when you walk into Asana's office, printed on the wall in huge font, is our mission statement: 'To help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly.' Then from that mission, we're able to derive this pyramid of clarity. In order to get clarity of plan, every year we look at our mission and figure out what are the annual objectives that will enable us to make the most progress against it. Every quarter, what are the key results toward those objectives? And then down to the projects and the tasks, so that you could be an intern fixing some very small bug and be able to understand how your work fits in serving the overall mission and purpose of this organization, which people find really inspiring. When we looked at how we could improve this process, the objectives process actually came out of that. Initially we only had quarterly key results, and we had people pointing out that while they understood what we were trying to do in the next three months, they didn't really understand how that fit into our overall strategy. So annual objectives are a way for the company to come together and really clarify what we're trying to do on a year-to-year basis. Lastly, mindfulness. The design principle here is we want an organization in which we can embrace the present moment, where we can pause and reflect on our past, and we can make conscious decisions about where we want to go in our future. One way that we implement this is through a practice called Roadmap Week. Twice a year, we take a full week out of our calendar and basically stop doing our normal operations. Instead, we divide into committees, where each committee focuses on a different part of the company. For example, the mobile committee will start by assessing the ground: what is the purpose of mobile, how does that fit into our strategy and mission? Then reflect: where have we come in the last six months, what do we think went well, what do we think went poorly? Looking to the future: what are our options, what are the things we could do in the next six months, what are the pros and cons of those options? And then make a conscious choice about where we want to go. Again, sometimes I hear people say, 'We don't have time for that. We're way too busy.' I would say, in the short term, that's going to allow you to move a little bit faster in whatever direction you're going, but taking the time to pause and reflect gives you the opportunity to course-correct. Sometimes you realize you're 10 degrees off or 90 degrees off. Being able to then make sure that you have the confidence that you're moving toward your North Star will, in the long run, speed you up much, much more. There are a lot of processes we can do to infuse mindfulness, but mindfulness is deeper than that. It's also about just the quality of being present with each other in the moment. In the course of doing something complicated like a startup, where there's constantly firefighting, it's very easy to get bogged down and stressed out. We find that by cultivating this ability to stay present and enjoy the ride, not only are we happier, not only do we have less burnout, but we're able to make clear decisions in the fog of war. So empowerment, inclusiveness, clarity, and mindfulness are examples of features that we've added to our culture. Of course, the question is: what are the features that you will add to your culture? So I invite you, when you go back after this conference, to take the time to work with your team and write down what is your mission, what are your values, what is your collective fantasy of what your organization would look like at its very best. Then mindfully assess where you are. Perhaps do an honest survey and find out what are the things that are going well and are worth celebrating, and then where are your culture bugs. It requires facing some hard truths, but it's worth it. Then you'll know where to focus your implementation energy. Then a few months later, you can measure again and just continually improve. All this is actually part of a larger philosophy of a mindful, purposeful approach to teamwork. If you're interested in learning more about that, you can go to wavelength.asana.com. But perhaps the most important thing you can do as a leader is to start from within, because to an amazing extent, the culture of a company reflects the insides of its leadership. You can pay all the lip service you want to inclusiveness, but if you haven't done the hard inner work of unrooting your own biases, that's inevitably going to poison your endeavors. On the flip side, if you take the time to cultivate your own mindfulness, if you meditate just 20 minutes a day, I think you'll see profound ripple effects in the rest of your organization. Over the last 20 years, we've seen this beautiful renaissance in higher and higher quality of products as we've come to understand the importance of great design and the importance of measuring and rapid iteration. I think in the next decade, I hope to see that same kind of renaissance in how we do culture, because bad cultures can destroy great missions, and great cultures can be huge accelerants. Culture is one of the most massively underappreciated levers and competitive advantages you have in building a business. But it's more than that. It's also just an end in itself. I invite you to just take a second and fantasize: what would it be like to come to work every day and have the culture of your dreams? Everyone working like a well-oiled machine, people know exactly what they're supposed to do, there's no infighting or politics or ego in any of it. It's more like the synchronization of jazz musicians or the synchronization of limbs of a single organism. That's probably never going to happen, because as with products, there is no perfect culture. There are no perfect products. But if you set your mind to it, if you come into work every day, every year, and persevere in creating something better and better, you will have greater and greater products and a greater and greater culture. And it's worth it, because these are our lives, and these are our teammates, and this is the world that we're building together. Let's take care of each other, let's love each other, let's build the environments that are necessary in order to do great things together. Thank you.