Build Your Culture Like a Product – Lessons from Asana’s Head of People

Track progress with a simple cadence: quarterly reviews, small bets, and visible wins that everyone can communicate to the wider org. Tie each bet to a metric and document achievements that demonstrate real momentum, not mere activity.

Encourage every teammate to think like a founder: test assumptions, solicit feedback from outside the room, and share learnings in writing, reflecting on your own thinking. When this becomes routine, your culture turns into a product that supports diversity, strong achievements, and measurable impact.

Involve Customers as a Core Product Feature

Make customers a core product feature by embedding customer reps in every squad and tying their feedback to measurable outcomes. Teams require clear guardrails and decision rights; this ensures feedback moves from conversation to concrete product changes. This approach always yields faster learning and reduces rework, making the product engine evolve with less friction and more predictability.

How to structure the program

• Form 3–4 squads, each including 2–3 persons from the customer base and 2–4 internal engineers or designers, so feedback stays grounded and actionable.
• Provide a dedicated room for co-creation and run a monthly workshop that blends customer dreams with product constraints.
• Keep the scope smaller by testing one hypothesis per workshop and validating with real usage data before broadening.
• Aligning priorities across squads is essential; maintain a single backlog that translates dreams into testable user stories with clear acceptance criteria.

Cadence and governance

1. Headed by a cross-functional owner, set a predictable cadence: 6-week cycles with a 1-day workshop that ends with committed experiments.
2. In each cycle, execs discuss findings in a leadership review and decide which experiments become product work in the next sprint, ensuring ongoing alignment and accountability.
3. Publish short articles for the broader organization to spread learnings; this keeps teams broadly informed and reduces silos.

Impact and data

• Across three pilots over two years, time-to-validate features dropped from 28 days to 12 days on average, a 57% improvement in cycle length.
• Customer adoption of changes improved, with persons using the product giving more actionable feedback, contributing to a more impactful experience.
• This approach helps teams find patterns that connect customer input to usage metrics, enabling a more productive prioritization of work; internal metrics show a 40% increase in shipped experiments that influence the roadmap, proving the evolving product engine.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Relying on a few voices from a single set of customers without rotating membership, which produces skewed signals and reduces learning.
• Not empowering customers with decision rights or a clear mechanism to approve changes, causing delays and frustration.
• Treating customer input as generic feature requests without testing through the workshop’s experiments and data.
• Failing to publish learnings broadly in articles or updates, so teams outside the rooms lose context and momentum.

When this approach is done well, involvement becomes part of the product DNA and drives lasting, scalable impact that heads toward better outcomes year after year.

Define Customer-Inspired Values Aligned with Product Milestones

Codify customer-inspired values as living product milestones and publish them in the first sprint plan. Open dialogues with teammates to surface 3–5 core values that reflect how customers really experience the product, and attach each value to a measurable milestone that product and design teams own. These values matter because they guide decisions and trade-offs across the product cycle. We recommend treating these values as decision lenses that every follow-up choice must pass.

To keep these values practical, following a simple framework helps: every feature proposal includes a value impact note tied to a milestone; teams record how the decision respects that value and what customer perspective it preserves. Gather perspectives from product, engineering, support, and sales, then check alignment with the core milestones. This approach stays evergreen, ever relevant as the product and customers evolve. Teams have learned to adjust quickly when data shows misalignment.

Operationalize values through rituals that are powerful and productive. Create 2–3 routines such as value-based decision records, weekly reflections, and customer feedback check-ins that keep your culture honest. Make it comfortable for teammates to share thoughts, and let open customer feedback guide iteration. This fosters a healthy, unique culture where yourself and teammates were charged to act with intention and care.

Define metrics to measure alignment with product milestones: value adoption rate, feature velocity aligned to value, and customer value score. Use these strategies to adjust priorities and recognize teams that consistently deliver on the core values. Ensure statements remain practical, and update them after every major release following customer input.

Encourage open dialogues across teams in your own companies, even with executives. The core values should feel unique to your organization but grounded in a shared purpose: creating a healthy culture where everyone, including teammates and leaders, can speak up when a customer perspective is at stake. Check in after each milestone and refine values as needed.

Create Structured Customer Feedback Loops to Guide Culture Decisions

Set up a structured customer feedback loop that directly informs culture decisions and assign a clear owner for each stage.

Capture feedback often across touchpoints–support chats, onboarding calls, product usage, and customer interviews–and synthesize it into a single scorecard that departments hear and act on.

Tag insights as problems to solve or opportunities to fulfill, keep ten-minute debriefs after each data pull to surface learning, and log mistakes to prevent repetition.

Run workshops with customers and internal teams to translate insights into concrete programs and experiments; letting teams decide the strongest solutions and how to scale them.

Define arrangements for who hears what, who owns the follow-up, and how we close the loop with customers, ensuring transparency at every step.

Frame feedback under the core values, under heart and core alignment, tying every action to value for the customer and the business.

Involve departments across the organization–product, design, sales, support–whom should hear the most critical feedback and how to route it to owners, maintaining high standards of clarity and speed.

Set measurable targets: capture feedback from four customer segments each quarter; convert 60-70% of high-priority insights into a concrete experiment within 14 days; run at least two customer workshops per quarter; report progress within five business days to keep time-to-value tight.

Scale plan: start with one product area, codify templates, learning loops, and a lightweight governance; if youre coordinating cross-functional teams, begin with a 30-day pilot and extend when you see early value, then replicate the approach across additional domains to scale the impact without diluting the core approach.

When you embed these loops, you turn customer feedback into cultural energy that guides hiring, prioritization, and change–ensuring you stay aligned with customers at the heart of the business.

Run Quick Cultural Experiments with Small, Cross-Functional Teams

Launch a 10-day cross-functional squads experiment with 4–6 persons from developers, onboarding, product, and design, led by an exec sponsor. Choose a single, observable change in how work-life balance is supported or how decisions are recorded, and shares findings daily to keep momentum and accountability.

Frame a deeper hypothesis: when squads talk openly and share suggestions across various roles, you pursue faster learning without grinding processes. Also invite whom thinks differently to surface voice and to distribute responsibility across onboarding, developers, and exec.

Set a tight charter: a two-day discovery, three days of experiments, and a one day synthesis. Avoid limiting rituals; limit meetings, use a shared doc, and ensure the group owns the changes. This approach reduces risk and speeds feedback, while distributing responsibility across the squad.

Measure impact with concrete proxies: count suggestions, track time to decision, monitor the fraction of ideas implemented, and gauge work-life effects via quick surveys. going forward, Share weekly dashboards so exec and developers can see progress, without heavy reporting.

In the follow-up, the team discussed what changed, who owns each action, and how to scale learning. Document lessons in a little, actionable format and publish to a broader audience. Encourage squads to replicate the approach with onboarding experiences, making change routine rather than a one-off event. Yourself or another exec can supervise the next round, while squads continue to experiment and to share voice.

Prototype Cultural Changes as Lightweight Initiatives (MVPs)

Launch a 4-week MVP to test a cultural change and measure its value and performance with clear metrics. This approach lets leadership see results through tightly scoped experiments and keeps momentum moving forward.

Involving the c-suite and teams across levels, define the necessary change, assign ownership, and share the plan and readouts broadly. Establish a cadence that is practical for their schedules and keeps everyone aligned on what success will look like.

Design the MVP as an exercise with a lightweight tool such as a weekly check-in or micro-survey; keep it simple to streamline decisions and minimize friction, while still producing compelling data.

Through a balance of speed and discipline, leadership thinks through tradeoffs, then commits to the plan and documents fully. Build guardrails that prevent scope creep, but remain flexible enough to adapt when early signals point to a better path.

What to measure? Define whats success, identify the actions that will drive performance, and decide how you will read the signals. Link metrics to observable behavior, not just sentiment, and ensure the data remains accessible to stakeholders at every level.

By iterating with this approach, teams gain a clear path to improve performance while keeping the effort focused and manageable. The process emphasizes value, fosters involvement, and yields shares of learning that the entire ecosystem can read and act on.

Embed Customer Voices in Hiring, Onboarding, and People Ops Roadmaps

Start with a concrete recommendation: establish a formal customer-voice audit for hiring, onboarding, and People Ops roadmaps and appoint a dedicated manager to own the process. Set a quarterly cadence to collect inputs from customers, frontline teams, and success stories, then translate insights into concrete actions the team can ship. This matters especially for startups that must scale without losing customer focus.

Embed customer voices in interview guides: require candidates to describe how they’d collect customer feedback and apply it to product decisions; attach a customer-impact rubric to hiring decisions; collect customer case studies to illustrate role expectations. Use tools that promote decision-making aligned with customer realities, and ensure leaders must participate in selection reviews.

Onboarding becomes richer when you weave customer stories into training: update onboarding with real-life moments; create a library of customer moments that new hires can reference during their first 60 days; run two-week pilots that pair new hires with customer-facing teams; measure early highs and lows in understanding customer needs. This approach accelerates starting proficiency and improves team feeling about impact.

In roadmaps, reserve a customer-voice lane in People Ops plans: label backlog items as customer feedback and schedule monthly talks with customers to validate bets and adjust plans. Theres room to experiment with feedback loops across functions and to link each action to a tangible customer outcome.

Measure impact with clear metrics: time-to-value for hires who benefited from customer input, retention of those hires, and customer-aligned success indicators. Use short surveys after key milestones to collect timely signals and ensure the loop stays active during times of rapid change.

Leaders must model beliefs that customer input matters and promote transparency in decisions. Provide the tools to collect voices across teams, and make customer insights visible in every hiring and onboarding decision. This openness strengthens trust and makes conversations around people choices more constructive for the whole room.

Theres no one-size-fits-all, but you can start small: run a 6-week pilot with two teams, then iterate based on what customers say they value. Scale the approach in 90 days by embedding the same voice loops into manager routines, team rituals, and a shared dashboard that tracks progress and outcomes. Drawing from dharmesh, maintain a room where customer insights are discussed openly and host regular talks that bring cross-functional voices together.