Harvard in Tech Spotlight: Yasmin Kothari, Product Lead at Asana
Last month, I had the chance to speak with Yasmin Kothari HBS ’13 and Product Lead at Asana (the work management software tool), about a number of topics including product management, user-centricity, and leadership.
To set the context, could you share more about your journey to Asana?
I’ve always been interested in the intersection of great strategy and strong execution (which is what product management is all about!). When I graduated college I joined McKinsey as a strategy consultant. I learned how to break down complex problems, structure the right solutions, and build a compelling story around them. The work was fascinating, but the thing that was missing for me was actually seeing the strategy through.
I then worked with business-focused nonprofits in India and Rwanda, where I really got to get my hands dirty and get in the weeds of execution. I learned about investing, emerging markets, and the importance of truly knowing your end user.
After business school, I knew I wanted to combine the strategic aspects of consulting with deep user understanding and the ability to see projects through execution. That led me to a career in strategy and product management, and exciting roles at PayPal, Airbnb, Domio (a real estate startup), and now Asana!
Wow — your international experience in emerging markets is really unique. How has it shaped your work?
One of my main learnings from that work was the importance of deeply understanding your user. While in India I visited a lower income village to understand the potential for implementing solar technology. The village was incredibly remote — a four hour uphill hike from the closest road. When I arrived, I found a small town of a few dozen shacks and dirt pathways between them. I was shocked to see that even in such an isolated place, one of the most popular drinks was Coca-Cola! In that moment, I realized the power of a brand that combines powerful logistics (shipping products to even the most seemingly remote places), and deep customer understanding (building and adapting a brand that resonates with people across cultural contexts).
I also learned firsthand how to build that deep customer understanding. One of my responsibilities in Rwanda was getting to know our potential users — in this case, rural coffee farmers. I hired a translator and embarked on dozens of focus groups in small villages throughout the countryside. Through this experience I learned the importance of checking my own biases: frequently, the farmers had processes that were better than our proposed technological solutions or surfaced needs that I never anticipated. I realized that to truly understand your audience’s psychographic profile and jobs to be done, you need to design your research thoughtfully. This means asking open ended questions, observing people play around with a prototype without guidance, and listening to the underlying needs in their answers and behaviors.
What have you learned about designing great processes and environments for product team success?
The product team is the core working group on a particular feature set or customer problem. It often comprises a product manager, a designer, a user researcher, a data scientist, and a group of engineers. To make sure that a product team like this can thrive, I’ve learned three main lessons.
Don’t bring solutions, bring problems to solve. A company’s leadership should set the course for the organization by outlining the main goals and mission for the company — not by championing specific solutions and mandating that they be built. Then each product team can tackle specific problems and achieve those goals. The product team has the deepest knowledge about their users and features, and therefore they are the best suited to design the most effective and innovative solutions.
Bake collaboration into the process. The product process should have built-in touch points along the way for brainstorming new ideas, critiquing early sketches and designs, and sharing customer learnings. Great ideas can come from anywhere — and it’s often in conversation among different functions and viewpoints where the magic happens.
Product development is no longer an old school assembly line where there are one-directional, linear handoffs between design, product, and engineering. Instead, get the designer and engineer perspectives early on. Establish both formal and informal checkpoints across team members to brainstorm and share ideas. By gathering feedback from everyone, you not only create more thoughtful products but you also help everyone feel ownership over the ultimate solution.
Make customer interaction seamless. Great products are based in deep user understanding. While a user researcher can drive much of the formal research, there are many other ways to make regular customer interaction a seamless part of the product process. Encourage regular interaction with sales or customer service teams to understand what they are hearing on the front lines. Build lightweight ways for all product team members to hop on a call with a customer to get quick feedback. Publish user videos and research reports widely so everyone has access.
It is crucial to ensure everyone understands the full context, not just their specific piece of the puzzle. When everyone has all the information, especially around the user experience, they are able to be more creative, have more agency, and create more impact through proposing, designing, and executing on proposed solutions. By making it easy for PMs, designers, and even engineers to engage with customers, your teams will build better products for their users.
What is something surprising you have learned about building great products?
Don’t overlook the power of small changes. Great things often come in small packages. You don’t always have to ship something huge to be innovative and provide real value to users. People often think of “product” as a big, step-function change, like the launch of a new product line or a complete redesign of an experience. However, it is important not to forget the power of smaller changes. Usability can be a competitive differentiator in itself.
In conversations with users I often find that some of their most pressing needs can be met by something simple, such as a thoughtful design tweak, adding functionality in a new surface area, or reducing unnecessary steps in a process. These changes might take as little as a week to ship, yet they generate extreme product love and retention from the end user. It is critical to maintain a portion of your roadmap to addressing this low hanging fruit and continually improving the core experience.
For example, one of our product teams at Asana heard that a pain point for users in their everyday workflow was that deleting a section automatically deleted all the tasks within it. This added a lot of extra work, because the user would have to first manually move all the tasks to another section to preserve them. Our team spent a couple days updating the functionality to allow for an option to preserve tasks while deleting just the section header — and those users were delighted! We saw a significant increase in usage, and heard firsthand that we had made their daily workflow much simpler.
How have you found inspiration and creativity?
Understanding various perspectives broadens my horizons and helps me think of new solutions to personal and professional problems. Opportunities for this are everywhere, for example…
Different generations. My parents constantly inspire me with their philosophy around being responsible for using my privilege to improve my society. On the other end of the generational spectrum, my brother (who is younger than I am by a decade) impresses me with his efforts to live an environmentally sustainable lifestyle.
Different industries. I learn so much every time I talk to a friend who is a doctor, a lawyer, a stay-at-home parent, or anything else outside of tech. These conversations open my eyes to new types of opportunities in other industries. They also shift my perspective on how certain products might be viewed by different users.
Different personalities. I am a strong extrovert married to a strong introvert. My husband constantly opens my eyes to new ways of communication and problem solving. If you’re interested in exploring this, I highly recommend the book Quiet by Susan Cain.
You mentioned different personalities. Do you have any tactics to make sure that different personalities can collaborate efficiently?
Make sure everyone has shared goals. Common language and common grounding can bring even the most different people together. For example, imagine a situation where one person on the team wants to be scrappy and build the minimum shippable experience, while another wants to take more time to ship a full fledged product. It’s helpful to ground them both on the shared goal. What type of audience are we building for? What are the user needs that we want to solve for? How does this map to our business targets? What is our longer term plan and timeline? By developing and aligning on shared goals, you build trust that you are working towards the same vision. The rest of the conversation is then much more collaborative.
Map your relationship blindspots. I regularly map out all of my important stakeholders to understand how strong our relationship is currently, versus how strong it should be. Through this process I am able to spot any gaps, and can set up the right meetings and conversations to cultivate relationships with different people. This is especially helpful to identify and rectify blindspots with those who you may not instinctively gravitate towards. For more detail and other tactics, check out my article about effective stakeholder management.
Looking back on your time at Harvard, what would you do more of or do differently?
Harvard has so many incredible resources for students right at their fingertips, and it’s easy to take that for granted. I’d encourage all current students to use their time on campus to take full advantage of those resources to explore the many paths open to them. That could be attending speaker events, participating in workshops, building relationships with professors, or starting a side business with a friend.
For me, the one thing I’d do more of while at HBS is spend more time at the Innovation Lab (i-lab). The i-lab focuses on entrepreneurship and creativity, and is constantly hosting amazing activities, workshops, and speakers. I would have spent more time here to explore innovation and entrepreneurship as a student.
Can you share any closing thoughts — what advice would you give your younger self?
Embrace a growth mindset from a young age! It’s so important to be open to failure and to view it as an opportunity for growth rather than a sign that there’s something wrong with you. This drives resilience, the ability to overcome setbacks and emerge stronger, and the willingness to take healthy risks. By cultivating this mindset early on, you’ll reap the benefits for years to come. I’d encourage anyone at the start of their career to read Mindset by Carol Dweck as a starting point.
