A Sense of Purpose is Product Management

Yasmin Kothari is the product lead for the align area at Asana.

Yasmin Kothari’s resume reads like a Who’s Who of tech products: PayPal, Airbnb, and now, Asana, where she is product lead for the align area, managing six product teams.

Yasmin is passionate about purpose — finding it at work and helping others do the same at and with Asana.

“We know that 63% of employees want their employer to provide more opportunities for purpose in their day-to-day work,” she says. “So no matter where folks are working, all employees are craving that sense of purpose. … What can the tool we’re building do to unlock that sense of purpose? How can Asana drive clarity, drive accountability, and ultimately, help all people at an organization find that sense of purpose?”

Driving purpose can be harder at larger organizations, where frontline workers are far removed from top-level objectives. But with Asana, Yasmin says, “any task an individual is working on can be connected up to their team’s goals. And, ultimately, all the way up to a top-level company mission. So each individual person actually understands how their daily work, the thing they’re spending their nine-to-five on, actually ladders all the way up to the company goals, or said in other words, work has purpose.”

Yasmin openly shares how Asana helps their own PMs find purpose, including the six core competencies they believe are critical for all employees, how they shape PMs using a climbing wall rather than a ladder, and even a deep dive into Asana’s own PM success guide.

Hear all this and more on this episode of This Is Product Management.

Download the transcript:

Here are some highlights: 

• The importance of understanding enterprise
• Professional growth as a climbing wall
• Asana’s PM success guide
• PM growth: management vs. individual leadership
• Setting direction from the top