My name's Sika I am a product manager on
the mobile team. So I studied public
health nutrition in college so my path
to becoming a PM is a bit strange I
would say. I studied public health as an
undergrad and then went to grad school
for public health as well and after
graduating I ended up working at my
friends food startup that I had written
my thesis about. I did some ops work at
that startup for about two years and it
was while I was there that I realized
that I really liked product management
and then found Asana and here I am.
So as a PM my main job is to help us
figure out and by us I mean my entire
team figure out what it is that we
should be building and why we should be
building it for our users. So at any
given time there are lots of problems
that we can solve, lots of pains we can
alleviate and I think figuring out which
pains to work on and why it's more
important than any number of things is
is really where the bread and butter of
my role comes in. I like lots of things
about being a PM. I think
personality-wise I get bored fairly
easily so I think PMing is a role that
keeps me on my toes and a big part of
that is just ultimately that a lot of my
job is filling the white space and doing
what needs to be done so that we can
ship a feature on time. I really
like that aspect of working with lots of
different people and figuring out how to
problem-solve on the fly. So I'm excited
about working Asana the product and
I've been excited about it for the past
year because it's a meta problem
essentially,
lots of people lots of teams lots of
different companies need a way to work
together better and so it's really cool
to work on something that extends beyond
just the things that I'm interested in.
It's cool to know that there are all
sorts of companies all sorts of people
that use our software so that they can
you know bring about
good in the world from nonprofits to
other tech companies that are doing
interesting things so it's pretty it's
pretty exciting to get to be at the
Nexus point of all of that. So I like a
lot of things about working at Asana but
in terms of my day to day I think the
thing that I'm constantly excited about
and empowered by is just the level of
autonomy and transparency that exists at
the company so from being able to get
involved in projects just because I
happen to stumble upon you know folks
talking about it or just the level of
trust that I have felt basically from
the beginning of my time here it's been
really great to be surrounded by people
that like essentially believed in me and
feel like I was someone that should have
been hired and then are giving me the
space to do my job and thrive. I'd say
I'm proud of all of the work that I've
done since I joined. In particular we
updated a lot of the really core flows
to our mobile app in my time here so far
so creating tasks is a lot different on
mobile right now and that's because of
the work that me and my team did and so
it's really great to improve the
experience on I guess a really common
user flow since creating tasks pretty
important in Asana. I'd say the
cultures put into practice just in all
of my day-to-day interactions. I think
everyone that works at asana really
cares about being the best version of
themselves and bringing their whole
selves to work so I think the culture
around mindfulness around like really
thinking about how you're interacting
with people and making sure that all of
those interactions feel good is
something that I've felt both in meetings
but also just like over lunch talking
to folks. So I feel like I have a good
sense of both who people are like when
they're working and also outside of work
and that's it's pretty nice to
feel like you can be a full person at
your workplace