Hello from down under: Asana in APAC

If there’s one thing to know about Asana, it’s that we’re a mission-driven company. Last year, we opened our flagship office in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region in Sydney as another step towards fulfilling our mission to enable all teams to work together effortlessly.

Since landing in APAC, we’ve found an incredible community of Asana champions, customers, and teammates. We’ve also made our product available in Japanese, hosted two Asana Together World Tour events, and grown a dynamic team of Asanas who are scaling our local Sales, Customer Success, User Operations, and Marketing functions.  

With so many exciting developments, we wanted to look back on some of the biggest highlights from our first few months in APAC. Here are the latest updates on the business, our community, and our team.

Uncovering untapped potential in APAC

Australia is Asana’s third largest market, with revenue having doubled in the last 12 months prior to our office launch in Sydney. Much of our growth in APAC has been organic, with customers ranging from the Leukemia Foundation to KFC. In fact, we often hear from organizations that they’re looking for ways to be more agile and move faster. To do so, they’re undertaking digital transformation projects to get their teams out of email and centralize work information all in one place.

“Australia is a big market and Australia is a cloud-savvy market and a tech-savvy market,” says Head of Business Chris Farinacci, who recently visited our offices down under and spoke with The Sydney Morning Herald. “Because of that, we’ve just seen incredible traction.”

Needless to say, the opportunity to help teams move faster and be more productive is enormous in APAC. Given the strong demand, we’ve started to run custom workshops throughout Australia and New Zealand to train customers and share best practices.

Building a local community of people passionate about productivity

We’re committed to serving our customers, and one way we do this is by organizing events that enable them to connect and learn together—face to face. In 2018, we kicked off the Asana Together World Tour, visiting cities around the world to host panel discussions as well as hands-on workshops and, of course, meet our community of amazing customers.

This spring, the Asana Together World Tour stopped in Tokyo, Melbourne, and Sydney for the first time. We felt energized meeting local customers, hearing from folks about how Asana is making a difference for them, and seeing their excitement about our growing teams across the Pacific.

The Asana community in Japan is especially excited about Asana. Our Tokyo panel discussion, The Art & Science of Teamwork, featured customers from Campfire, Cyber Agent, Zaim, and LIG and had the largest attendance of any event we’ve held globally. Attendees kept things exciting by sharing photos and quotes on social media (including many photos with the elusive yeti!).

In Melbourne and Sydney, we welcomed panelists from Asana customers like Dropbox, SANE Australia, Peninsula Leisure, Employment Hero, KFC and Instructure. Audience members represented a variety of customers—ranging in company size and industries—and each shared their strategies for keeping their teams on track, along with their Asana tips.

This month, we’ll be hosting another round of ATWT events in Sydney and Melbourne to help our customers maximize the value they get from Asana. Don’t miss our Head of Marketing, Dave King, for a special Asana for Marketing & Creative Teams Workshop in Sydney on June 20!

Doing good work with great people

Our goal in APAC is to better serve our growing customer base, and having a mission-driven team of customer-obsessed employees is vital to achieving that goal. Asana has an in-office culture, where we value having shared space and face time, so it’s important to us to be in an accessible part of town that our employees enjoy going to. We set up shop in a new WeWork building in the heart of Sydney, and plan to build out our presence in Japan this year as well. The Sydney office is home to our customer-facing teams and serves as our regional hub for driving business growth and serving customers

As we expand globally, it’s crucial that we scale the Asana culture to our new offices and enable our new teams to embrace our mission and values. One way we do this is by appointing a landing team for each new office that we open. This is a unique Asana program that we started in Dublin and have replicated in Vancouver and Sydney, giving current Asanas the opportunity to transfer to a new office and take on the exciting challenge of setting up a new office and region for long-term success.

Take McKenna Farrar. McKenna started at Asana two years ago as a Mid-Market Account Executive in San Francisco and 6 months ago, she took the opportunity to be a part of our APAC landing team and start a new career chapter with Asana in Sydney. Her approach to opening a new office?  “It’s important to draw on past learnings and successful strategies to help build the foundation for our landing team,” she says.“We’re simultaneously adapting those strategies, while constantly experimenting in the region and because we’re a small team, we can quickly make decisions to pivot when necessary or implement a new process.”

Join us in Sydney, Tokyo—and beyond

We’re just getting started in Australia, Japan, and the greater APAC region, and we’re excited to continue helping teams work together effortlessly. Stay tuned for more news and updates, and if you’re interested in being a part of our journey in Sydney and Tokyo, check out our open positions.