The marketing chief tells Tim Healey why classroom theory is no match for work experience, and how vulnerability shapes high-performing teams.
Since entering the world of marketing over two decades ago, you’ve really done it all. You’ve worked across B2C and B2B marketing, with leadership roles at Facebook, Salesforce, and now Asana as CMO. Can you walk us through your career journey and how you got here?
I have always wanted to be in marketing. When I was studying communications at university I was offered an HTML coding class – I took it, and when I graduated in 1998 there was demand for marketers who had code skills. It was very much the era of ‘the digital startup’.
Early on I worked for a web analytics company in San Diego for a year, and then a mentor, who worked at an advertising agency in San Diego, said: “If you really want to have a career, you have two options: you can go to San Francisco, or you can go to New York.”
I’m a third-generation San Diegan and it’s a big part of my personality, but I chose to move to San Francisco. I started working in digital marketing, focusing on email marketing and joined SourceForge, which was making user generated content before Facebook and TikTok.
I got really involved in building the online community there, and that allowed me to get hired by this website called Jigsaw. I was quickly given more responsibility and soon I was running all of their marketing which had a B2C community side and B2B side, where companies would buy the data in aggregate. In 2010, we were bought by Salesforce.
Salesforce’s 3,500 people seemed huge to me at the time (by the time I left they had around 80,000 employees). I quickly realized that if you’re going to learn B2B software-as-a-service marketing, there’s no better place to learn it than at Salesforce. I went to Facebook for a short time, but got another opportunity back at Salesforce so I ended up being there another nine years.
I’d always wanted to be a CMO. When the job came up at Asana, I talked to a ton of companies and really fell in love with both the product (and its potential for changing the way people work) and also the people.
Asana’s project management platform makes it easy to coordinate work across businesses.
What’s the offer at Asana?
Asana is a work management platform. We make it easy for teams to coordinate work across the business by providing a single source of truth so that people know exactly who is doing what, by when, and why. All the information that is so often siloed, all the emails, docs and spreadsheets, is managed and accessible in one place, giving everyone visibility no matter where they sit in the organization. This is incredibly powerful for a business.
By giving teams this level of visibility and clarity, we make it easy for people to coordinate complex workflows and processes. For marketers, that could be anything from a product launch to campaign planning and execution, or a creative work intake process for a busy design team. They plan and execute it all in Asana.
Now we’ve brought AI into these workflows too. It’s just like a teammate advising and taking action, just like a real colleague would, with human oversight. The great thing about this is that it frees employees from the busy-work and lets them focus on the fun, high impact stuff.
Revenue for Asana’s last third quarter was $183.9m. That’s a 10% increase year on year. What does that mean for you and your team in 2025?
It means we have a healthy business but we need to grow more, grow faster. And anyone reading this is probably saying, ‘me too.’ Over the next 12 months, marketing will be driving our growth at Asana: we are investing in brand, direct response and product.
The Asana team
How is your marketing team structured at Asana?
I have six direct reports. There is a head of product marketing, which of course I have a soft spot for having done so much of it in my career. We have a head of revenue marketing, which is a combination of demand gen and field marketing. There is a head of brand and content, which is strongly linked to our social systems team. We have a head of marketing strategy who is across the analytics and data science. I also have a head of creative.
I strongly believe in hiring well in the areas that you are weak in. If you’re a marketer, data and analytics are crucial in order to both run your business and to have credibility. I did not get into marketing because I love data, but I recognize how important it is. So my head of marketing strategy is like my right-hand person in many ways.
We also have a head of corporate marketing who does a lot of our PR, and looks after our corporate positioning. Our community team is key too. Connecting educational content to how you train your customers – and then how you make them evangelists within our community – is all one motion.
Drawing on your leadership expertise, what has your career taught you that helps you make a great marketing team?
When I hire, I believe everyone needs a level of skill to what they’re doing. I care very little about where someone went to school, but I really care about the challenges that they have solved. If you have relevant work experience, I’d rather take the work experience over what you’ve learned in the classroom.
There are also three further things that I look for: Are you collaborative? Are you self-starting? Are you positive? If you find someone with the skill that you need, that also has those three soft skills, you will build a really strong team with people that have ‘low drama’ and like to get things done. I’ve never gone wrong from hiring someone that has those three skills.
From my personal perspective, how I show up as a leader is also very important. You can’t expect people to be good leaders if you are not a good leader yourself. I’ve learned a lot from the good leaders I worked with, and I’ve learned a lot from the bad leaders who I don’t want to emulate.
I also believe in being authentic, transparent, straightforward, and vulnerable. If you act like you have all the answers, it’s a false premise. No leader has all the answers. Being vulnerable, especially with your direct reports when it comes to finding solutions to really hard problems, is a really good way to build a strong team culture and get more out of people, because people intrinsically want to help each other.
The Asana offices in San Francisco
When you say ‘be vulnerable’ what do you mean?
When I’m asked a question, there are times when I say: “Honestly, I don’t know.” Admitting what you don’t know, when you need help, and even admitting when you’re having a bad day is so important.
At the start of every staff meeting in my team, we go around the room and we check our emotional temperature: ‘red, yellow or green.’ If you’re a red because you’re up all night because your dog was puking and your car broke down on the way to work, then we need to know that, because that’s going to impact how you show up.
There are days where I don’t have the energy to solve this problem. I may say: “I know this is important. I want to help. I will help tomorrow, because I might lose it if I do it today.” People respect that and in my experience, typically they go: “Oh, okay, you know what? We’ll come back tomorrow, and by then we actually might have some ideas of how we can fix this ourselves too.”
What was your first memory of a marketing success where you felt this is the role for me?
When I was at Jigsaw, I had been pigeonholed as the community builder. But the person who was running marketing left suddenly, and I was asked to take on the enterprise side of the business. The CEO asked me to come up with a lead generation campaign, which I did. We launched it, and we got leads and the sales team were able to convert the leads.
I remember feeling: “Wow. I can do this.” I’m not saying it wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be. That feeling unlocked something inside me. I started to think about moving from being a marketing executive to a functional leader in marketing to a head of marketing. It was a different mindset.
AI and marketing: what are some pros and some cons?
I believe the pros are going to outweigh the cons. I think most people do. I use AI today, from image generation to getting feedback on things. All the marketers I speak to are using it, at various levels of depth.
One thing that I hear is that some marketing teams are very worried about displacement. The challenge we face is for marketers to adopt AI without the fear of losing their jobs. Asana is in the business of making people work better, more collaboratively, more efficiently to save time and money. AI is built into our platform and it saves everyone time.
The example I give is this: you sign a contract for a marketing event, you need to tell the sales team. You need to tell the web team to put it on the website. You need to tell finance. That type of function will now happen automatically. That’s not going to take any jobs away. It is going to save hours of work for someone who no longer has to email all those people and make sure they have that information. The time you reclaim can then be used to work on other projects and initiatives.
Emotional connection can be a powerful driver of customer loyalty. How do you and your team foster that kind of connection at Asana?
You need to have empathy for your customers. At Asana, our customers do not wake up every morning and say: “You know what I need to buy? I need to buy some software that improves how we coordinate our work better.”
To address this, we need to make sure we are speaking their language. Every piece of content or copy, image or campaign event must serve their needs. If we want somebody to interact with something we are doing, they need to see the value in it. Is it teaching them something? Is it giving them something to help use our technology? Is it giving them a fact that they can use when they’re building out their marketing plan? If not, why are we doing it?
Shannon takes to the stage to explain how Asana enhances team abilities
Could you tell us about a customer research discovery that you’ve made, that you found surprising?
We know that 57% of a marketer’s time is spent on ‘busy-work’: work that keeps a person busy but has little value in itself. That’s a lot. We use Asana so we’re not as focused on busy-work as some places. Think of all that brain capacity that could be unlocked in marketing teams if they weren’t focused on busy-work. Marketers are creative and analytical – imagine what we could do as marketers if we unlock that 57% of time that’s been wasted on busy-work.
Could you tell us about a marketing mistake that you have made and what you learned from it?
I remember once being given the instruction, ‘We need a campaign to go viral’. I don’t think this was originally my idea, but I was definitely the one that took it and ran. Our solution was to make a video game. And the video game was built around the idea of people in an office killing each other. It sounded much better at the time.
We outsourced it: you could throw staplers at your annoying coworkers and their heads would come off. We spent more than we should have and when the game was ready, we were going to launch it, hoping it would go viral.
And then we looked at it again and decided that we can’t do this. It was horrific. Even if it went viral, what would this say about our brand? So we killed it. The lesson I took from that is ‘going viral,’ should never be your goal. Especially if it involves killing virtual people with staplers.
Asana’s campaigns champion better team connection and communication through their platform
What myth about marketing would you most like to bust?
The myth I would like to bust is that marketers are not strategic or analytical. We are. People think that marketing is ‘brand’ and ‘words and pictures.’ As a marketer, if you don’t look at every dollar, every channel, and you aren’t constantly making sure that you’re optimizing everything, then you need to learn more about marketing.
Equally, within a business, marketing needs a seat at the table. Sometimes marketers aren’t on the board. That’s a miss, because marketers add value to the company. Marketing is essentially the manipulation of emotions to create positive feelings about a brand or a service. Marketers know how to leverage emotions for good.
Whether internal or external to the business, that has far-reaching ramifications. That’s why marketers deserve a seat at the table. As marketers, we are asked to be incredibly creative, completely analytical, and we constantly have to be strategic with how we are spending our time, money and resources.
Marketers have a different set of skills to other members of the C-suite. Their roles are demanding too, but there’s so much more context switching in marketing. Having a marketer at board level is of huge value to any company.
What advice would you give your younger self if you could go back in time?
Two things. Be fearless and be bold. It took me a long time to be confident in who I am and what I bring to the table. The other thing that I tell people all the time is that nobody completely knows what they’re doing. I think there’s a perception – especially when you’re more junior in your career – that the people at the top know everything and have all the answers. They don’t – and that’s OK.
But if you are thinking, ‘Oh, everyone knows more than me – I don’t want to give my opinion’ then you’re doing the business a disservice. Your opinion is important. Sometimes the more junior you are, the closer to the work you are.
When I joined Salesforce, in my first meeting with the CEO, Marc Benioff, I was trying to pitch something. Marc was kind, and explained that he could see what I was saying, but he thought that I was wrong. I was wrong. What I learned in that moment was that nothing happened as a result of being wrong at that time. So my advice is: don’t be scared of speaking truth to power, challenging assumptions and saying what you know – because you know more than you think.
Asana’s series of Work Innovation events bring together business leaders to challenge the status quo of work
What question would you like me to ask the next senior marketer when I interview them?
How are they continuing to drive marketing forward with all the rapid change in data and marketing technology, and when do they think the change will stop or slow down? There is so much to consider: we’re working through this era of rapid change but we constantly face the challenge of how much you do in-house versus how much you outsource.
Your question from a senior marketer is: what would you be doing if you weren’t in marketing?
I would be a makeup influencer. I would knock on the door of Sephora and just ask to help. My guilty pleasure is watching TikTok and Instagram reels of makeup influencers for hours. Wow. I probably shouldn’t say that out loud.
If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is…
It is the manifestation of a company’s brand, value, vision and people.
You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about. wyw.agency.
This interview has already appeared in The Drum. Discover the best campaigns, industry insights and interviews from world-leading marketers, creatives and more.
