Narrator: Alex Hood, Chief Product Officer of Asana, became interested in consumer behavior when he started his career in the stock market. He later joined Intuit, where he learned about human-centered design. Now, Alex is using this methodology at Asana to guide how they build products and scale teams. In this episode, you'll hear Alex's perspective on how to change user behavior, what makes a product disruptive, how to maximize your productivity, and lots more.

Narrator: Inspired Execution, hosted by DataStax Chairman and CEO Chet Kapoor, follows the journeys of leaders from the world's largest enterprises and fastest-growing startups.

Chet Kapoor: Alex, welcome to the podcast.

Alex Hood: Thank you for having me.

Chet: You started your career in the stock market, and then went to Intuit, and now you're the Chief Product Officer at Asana. Tell us a little bit about your journey.

Alex: In college, I was very, very interested in the intersection of economics and business. So, the behavior that consumers exhibit en masse and then how that impacts business. And there's no better place to see that in action than the stock market, so I got very interested in studying that. Eventually, went to work for the NASDAQ stock market and was posted out in Europe during a time where NASDAQ was experimenting with European markets. It was a really rewarding time and I learned a ton. But the interest in consumer behavior never went away. And what I learned at Berkeley is that there were some tech companies who were really using consumer behavior studies to innovate. And this is before lean startup, this is before that was widely known and popular. They were taking a lot of the Procter and Gamble type of methodologies around following folks home and observing their pain points, doing some broad-based surveying just to understand deep pains before you then jump to a solution.

Alex: And, I admired that about Intuit. Scott Cook, who's the founder there, came from Procter and Gamble and applied that Procter and Gamble product innovation methodology to a technology solution set. I was fascinated by that. And, today at Asana, same thing. We use human-centered design as our operating system in how we build product. We make sure that we are very, very clear on what a customer pain point is after doing lots of research with lots of customers. We try to be expansive with our thinking before we narrow down. We also do a lot of prototyping. Those are some of the tools in the toolkit around how you can be fascinated with customers and deliver great products.

Chet: Coming from the enterprise software background, spending three years at Google, the one thing that everybody will tell you - and I think it seems very obvious - is the hardest thing to do is to change user behavior. It's almost like distribution is easier than actually changing user behavior. Would you agree with that? And, if so, how have you overcome some of that? Do you feel your way through solving that problem or is there a specific way that you approach that?

Alex: You earn the right to be able to do that and there's a measure of that right, which is how high your net promoter score is versus the alternative. If there's a significant gap between those who are willing to promote the new way versus satisfaction with the old way - and that gap must be significant - then you have the right to change. Then, you have folks who take a bet on you, try out the change, and can't keep themselves from telling others about it. You develop champions and then the solution starts to spread like wildfire. It does take a high net promoter score product to be able to do this well.

Chet: I love the way you talked about it. You said it so well. You don't get a right to change the behavior unless you have a high NPS, and then you've got to maintain it as you're asking them to change behavior for their betterment. Right? Let's assume you have a good NPS. How does empathy factor in?

Alex: Well, that's the secret. I mean, that is the recipe to a product experience that is so good that once you try it, the old way feels old-fashioned and antique. That is through a product development process that uses human-centered design. Human-centered design starts with great empathy for a huge customer problem, and then working your way into that problem by being as expansive as possible, and then narrowing it in the most important elements that you could deliver first, and then doing a lot of prototyping along the way. That's the methodology that works over and over again and how the best products are developed.

Chet: In your mind as a practitioner, HCD, is it a science or is it still art?

Alex: I see it as a science. I see as part of the scientific method applied to building product, where you have hypotheses and you use the design process to prove yourself right and wrong, and you learn and iterate along the way. I mentioned that it is our operating system and how we build product here. And it's not meant to be an art-based operating system. In fact, it's a science here at Asana. I lean on it for scale. The fact that I know that our teams are using human-centered design practices means that I don't have to micromanage them. What they will come up with will be great because of the process that's used time and time again comes up with the best ideas. So, as long as I understand what the problem is and I know that we're using the right process, off to the races internally.

Chet: There are a lot of people who would actually state what you just stated, right? Which was it's a science and this is how I scale. Not a lot of people would have great examples of what they put in and what they got out. Right? And, having so much trust in the system. Right? I think that is rare from a practitioner's point of view. They always go back to, "Yes, it's a science. I have this discipline applied but I also use judgment." I have never heard a practitioner say it with as much depth and trust as you just did.

Chet: A large portion of what we do is to affect people and affect the companies that they work for. And disruptive innovation is really important. What is a good example of a product that you have seen that actually does a great job in your mind of disruptive innovation?

Alex: Well, the classic example that comes to mind for me - it's very visceral - is the camera on the back of your cell phone. It wasn't always this good. In fact, it started out pretty terrible. But Eastman Kodak ignored it, to their peril. I'm from Rochester, New York, and I watched during my adolescence lots of my friends' parents get laid off, retire early, Rochester itself lose a lot of economic prosperity because Eastman Kodak ignored that junky camera on the back of these emerging cell phones. And, you know, that sticks with me. I don't want to be in that case. In fact, I'd love to disrupt lots of things.

Alex: So, the notion of disruption is freeing. When I think about Asana and what we're building, I don't necessarily think that it needs to adhere to competing symmetrically in any particular set of categories. I'd love to disrupt across many categories and have the minimum feature set that, taken together, is so much better than any category's best-in-class delivery. For me, that's how I think about disruption in my current role.

Chet: Let's talk about Asana for a second. It's all about enabling productivity. What do you think has been your biggest accomplishment since you've been there?

Alex: I think there are probably two things that I'm proud of. The chapter one of Asana's product vision was to create clarity of who is doing what by when, up and down and across organizations. If you have that clarity, you get to cut out all the status meetings, all the work about work, all the email confusion. And you can have more time to focus on actually getting great things done. And a lot of progress had been made at Asana before I joined and a lot of progress has made on that chapter one of the vision since I've joined.

Alex: Since then, we've also created chapter two of that product vision, which is really to be the navigation system for organizations. That's the future. The idea there is that you set your goal in Asana. Asana gives you turn-by-turn instructions across your organization, how it will get there and how your work ladders to it. And then it automates the rote work along the way. And that requires a lot of new technology - innovation that hasn't occurred yet, some innovation that has occurred - to be able to deliver on that second product vision.

Alex: So, that's one piece. Progress on the chapter one and identifying chapter two with our teams here and the co-founders. The second thing I'm proud of is we just had a ton of growth. We have hired more than 50% of our employees since COVID. And, we have 35, 40 individual mission-based product teams all working on their own specific customer problems, and it's scaled that way with the human-centered design capability, frankly.

Chet: That's awesome. I've always maintained that in order to innovate, you need to simplify everything - like processes, products, execution. It seems like you've gone through that process, including hiring, onboarding, and things like that. What is the one piece of advice you would have given yourself three and a half years ago or five years ago, having gone through the hyper-growth phase that you have in the last 18 months?

Alex: I think it is both simplify and clarify. Things can be a little more nuanced but as long as you have clarity in the nuance and you can communicate it and folks play it back to you, then that's what's important for... You know, for instance, each one of our product teams is working on a specific customer problem. And when I go and ask any of the engineers or designers or product managers or data scientists on that team, you'd love to make sure that they're all speaking from the same playbook of what is the problem that they are solving as, you know, step one. And, having clarity around that is very, very, very important.

Alex: So, I think simplification and clarification are really, really helpful. Making sure that that stuff is written down. People can look at the artifact. Teams that haven't started yet or those who are onboarding a lot of folks can point back to these key decisions that were made. And, at Asana, we use our own software for that. But really, it's just... That is part of leadership. Repeating yourself, clarifying, and simplifying so that over and over again, folks know how what they are doing relates to the broader goal.

Chet: We had a little bit of leadership offsite last week and it's funny, Alex. One of my conversations with them was being bold and the second one was being bored. Right? Because you have to repeat yourself again and again, to the point where you're actually getting bored because you're hearing yourself talk about the same thing again and again and again. But it's really important because I think people... Like you said, people need to know how they fit, how they can draw a line directly from their work to the mission itself, and to continue to remind them. Otherwise, it'll not stick. Is that fair?

Alex: It is, and I used to be a bit bashful about it. Like, hey, maybe I'm not serving a team particularly well because I am repeating myself. Maybe I'm over-explaining. But really no, that's the gig - upleveling so that folks can attach their heart and soul to what is the broader cause and they see how their work relates. And it clarifies and guardrails their work so they don't have to check in for every decision. They feel empowered. Kind of the name of the game.

Chet: You're in the productivity business. What's the best productivity tip that you would like to give to our listeners?

Alex: There's two classes of work that you do on an individual basis. I don't care if you're the CEO or if it's your first job. And I class them into things that you can do effortlessly, where you can get in a flow state, put your headphones on, and just crank away. It's very enjoyable. You know what the goal is. And there's a second class of tasks that require your effortful attention, and those are a pain. Those are the things that you put off and when you put them off too much, your performance starts to suffer. Finding the way to transition that work that requires your effortful attention to make it more effortless is sort of the personal productivity game. And "game" is the right word. For me, I play that game by breaking things down from ambiguous goals to things that I can accomplish in the next 10 minutes to get me started. And then I can surf on that momentum that I just built in the last 10 minutes, and do the next thing that's going to take me 20 minutes.

Alex: Another is to create forcing functions for myself. Give myself 10 minutes to try and knock out these three things that are required, and then it gets easier. But finding ways to cross the bridge between the pain of getting started... We've all sat in front of blank screens to write that college paper, and having the momentum of having a few paragraphs written. To me, that's the big thing you need to do to be productive. And notably, the software I create helps you do that. But, you know, that is just a life hack of how you be productive by creating next steps for yourself, and then taking one and then two.

Chet: Who inspires you?

Alex: I'm pretty inspired by two things. One is just raw product innovation. I'm inspired by how Apple is an iconic brand and creates solutions that customers didn't ask for, but because of their own innovation and practices, the smart folks on their team, are to create really premium experiences that customers didn't even know that they needed, but then when they experience them, they're amazing and can't go back. So, I'm always looking at tinkering around with new innovators, checking out and seeing what's new on the market. That's part of the gig of being in the product building space.

Alex: I guess I'm also just inspired by ethics and values. And I'm inspired just by my family in a way. The things that I learned growing up about how to do right by other people, how to build trust, how to be accountable yourself and expect accountability from others... That's the necessary lubricant to getting things done. We live in a time where 25% of all deadlines are missed. That's from our own internal surveys at Asana. And, what that looks like, feels like, is you have to ask people for check-ins all the time. Work ends up being very transactional. We spend most of our day at work. And, building trust is really a force multiplier. So, I just think about how my parents operate, how their parents operate, how our family unit operates. Trust is an efficiency play, and trust makes work more rewarding, and trust makes life more rewarding.

Chet: What advice would you give a younger version of yourself?

Alex: Making sure that my motives for why I wanted to lead were correct. I think earlier on in my career, I was like, hey, I need to get promoted to be a manager because X, Y, Z, you know? Hey, look at this person. They're a manager and they're not me. And it's such a big jump to becoming a manager from being an individual contributor. That's such the wrong way to look at it. I'm inspired by Pat Lencioni's book The Motive and he talks a lot in there about folks who come in with that sort of attitude that I was describing - of feeling more entitled to roles where you're leading folks versus folks who really value servant leadership, and who take the time to remove roadblocks for their team, empower their team through things like clarity and next steps and open dialogue and the feeling of creative safety working on the team. Those are very important elements, and I don't think I appreciated that enough in my early management history, but I sure as heck appreciate it now.

Chet: Rapid-fire, quick responses. What new technology are you most excited about?

Alex: Here's a new technology that's not new that I'm excited about. So, I'll answer the question that way. It's natural language processing and voice recognition. Hey, that's been around for a long, long time. It's in our homes. Google Assistant. But it has not had a good business application yet, frankly. And, in a time when we're all working asynchronously when we're all away from each other. I'm excited about the promise of that type of technology transforming how accountable we are to each other by making the words that we say just as accountable as what we type. I'm very excited about disrupting typing and using voice as a way to communicate without there needing to be a meeting.

Chet: That seems like an Asana plug.

Alex: It is, right?

Chet: Or, some kind of road map discussion. You know?

Alex: It's certainly on my mind.

Chet: What are you reading or listening to right now?

Alex: I am a curious academic in some ways, and there's so much great literature now being produced around how teams have changed how they work and how innovation occurs since we've all started working apart from each other. So, I'm consuming, when it comes out, what are the effects of remote work on collaboration? How does it change our relationships? There's a great one that came out about... just this month in the Journal of Nature that followed thousands and thousands of Microsoft workers and saw how their relationships changed, how their work changed. I'm studying that very carefully, and so is our team, because that's the fuel on how we can drive innovation around speeding up everybody else's innovation. Our mission ends up being everybody else's mission.

Chet: It is certainly something that is on all our minds, right? And, I think it's interesting. DataStax was 85% distributed when I joined and we've continued to be distributed. But I think almost all of us, right, are figuring out what the new normal will look like. And it's not apparent, right? It's not clear what it's going to look like. I think we're going to figure this out as we go.

Alex: Yes. I agree. We're going to learn and make a lot of mistakes and also realize that some of the new norms aren't the right ones. So, we're figuring that out just as much as the rest of the industry of knowledge workers is.

Chet: You can have a dinner party with only three people. Who's on your invite list?

Alex: I wish I knew my parents' parents and my relatives that I never got to meet better. There's nurture and there's nature. And I'd love to connect my nature to those who came before me, even to sort of understand what made my parents tick. I just think it would be fascinating to meet folks who are in my bloodline and their experiences in the Great Depression, on being farmers in western New York, working in a watch factory in Boston. I'd love to learn more and have the deep connection to folks that I've never met who I'm descended from.

Chet: What's one word or phrase that defines a great leader?

Alex: Build purpose.

Chet: That is awesome. Alex, this has been a phenomenal conversation. I've thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it. I think our listeners are going to have a blast listening to this. I truly and we all really appreciate the time you've given us. It's been a blast.

Alex: Thank you for having me.

Chet: Thank you very much, and I will come out and hang out with you soon.

Narrator: You have to earn the right to change user behavior. This starts with having empathy for large challenges customers face and methodically narrowing down the issue to deliver solutions. If you apply this process to building your products and your teams, you will achieve amazing outcomes. As you scale, always remember to clarify, simplify, and repeat. This keeps people aligned toward a common mission. To improve your productivity, break down your big goals into things you can accomplish in just a few minutes. And finally, remember to reflect on WHY you want to be a leader.

Narrator: Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode of the Inspired Execution podcast. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the show, and drop us any questions or feedback at inspiredexecution@datastax.com.

Inspired Execution

Asana CPO on the science of human-centered design and disruptive innovation

Episode Transcript