Justin Rosenstein

**Dan Costa** (0:04)
Hi, I'm Dan Costa, the Director-in-Chief of pcmag.com, and welcome to Fast Forward, part of an ongoing conversation about living in the future. My guest today is Justin Rosenstein, Co-Founder and Head of Product for Asana. This is an app that makes teams work better together. Asana is currently PCMag's editor's choice for productivity software. It is also what we use in-house to manage our editorial workflows. We have a lot of big passionate fans on staff. We're going to talk about personal productivity, we're going to talk about team productivity, and we're going to talk about the changing nature of work and the tools we use to get it done. Justin, thanks so much for doing the show.

**Justin Rosenstein** (0:36)
My pleasure.

**Dan Costa** (0:37)
Let's talk straight off the bat about how PCMag is using Asana, which is amazing to me that we opened up Asana to the staff. We said we're going to roll it out slowly, we're going to build small teams, we're going to see who wants to, we're going to let people onboard themselves, and it just spread through the staff team by team, and people wanted to be on the service. You don't get that with a lot of business software products. How do you make that happen as the head of product?

**Justin Rosenstein** (1:07)
Yes, some of it's about product design. I think historically, there's been consumer software that has a higher and higher bar over time for software design, and then there's enterprise software, which you think of as ugly, old, gray. And I think we came from a consumer software background, and I used to work at Facebook and at Google, but had the business needs of real enterprise customers, and so it just felt very natural to build something that was as high quality design-wise as consumer software, but had all the power and richness of something you need to really run a complex business. But I think the other thing is that the traditional way that people have done leadership, delegation, deciding what to do, is very much a holdover from the industrial revolution. This very top-down, hierarchical boss tells you what to do, and you just do what you're told. You don't even understand how your work necessarily fits into the bigger picture. Whereas the new kind of work that people do is much more collaborative, much more everyone coming together and figuring out collectively what is the work that needs to be done. So I think it's just a tool that enables everyone on the team to essentially be collaborating and co-creating the plan and the leadership together, which I think is a lot preferable in modern environments.

**Dan Costa** (2:16)
So give me the Asana origin story. The short version of it is, well, you used to work at Facebook and Facebook used this tool and now there's Asana. Flesh that out a little bit for me.

**Justin Rosenstein** (2:27)
Yeah, totally.
My first job out of college was working at Google and after that worked at Facebook. And in both cases, I came in, especially at Google, came in with bright eyes and the fantasy, I'm going to be spending all my time working with brilliant people to solve important problems. I was just pretty devastated to discover that I, and maybe more sadly, the people that I was working with, literally spent most of our time, not building great tools and great products, but just coordinating, just like making sure the left hand knew what the right hand was doing, keeping everyone on the same page, status meetings and status updates. And Google's relatively super well-run company, there's this study from McKinsey that says that the average knowledge worker literally spends more than 70 percent of their time not doing work, not doing whatever it is they're supposed to be doing, but doing work about work. Just all of that hell of coordination. And so at first I just assumed I must be doing something wrong, and then eventually realized no, this is the water that people were swimming in, and just had gotten accustomed to it. And so built a very simple tool at Google. And then at Facebook, I started spending time with Dustin Moskovitz, who was the co-founder of Facebook, and he had the problem. He had multiple hundreds of people working with him on his team, and so he had the problem even worse than I did. It was just like, how do you figure out what's going on in the company? How do you keep everyone on the same page? And so by day, we were doing our day jobs, and then by night and on weekends, we just got so obsessed with this that we started building an internal productivity system, an internal work tracking system. And we didn't even mandate it, but it just took off within the company. And so we started to realize that by night we were doing that, and by day we could feel the number of meetings going down, the amount of productivity going up, just what we were able to accomplish. And so at first we were like, oh, maybe we'll keep this as a secret sauce for Facebook, and it is still like has gotten deeply integrated to how Facebook does get so much done. But the more we thought about it, we realized that the problem was universal, just the chaos within teams, the inability for everyone to stay on the same page. And the solution that we had developed wasn't unique to Facebook, wasn't unique to software companies. Anyone could benefit from that kind of clarity. And the more we thought about what we cared about as people in the world, there's so many important things that need to change. We need much better energy technology. We need to improve our education system. We need to upgrade our health care system, upgrade our government. And basically all the things that we realized we were passionate about deeply as humans all come down to teams of people working together. And if all the people working on all those different important projects were all spending upwards of 70% of their time on this work about work, if we could build this single horizontal tool that would enable all those organizations to be able to move faster, that just felt like such a leveraged way for us to use our time.