The Playbook Behind Asana’s Enterprise Growth
Your guide to becoming enterprise-ready and transforming PLG users into high-value enterprise clients.
In today’s economic climate, profitability is paramount, and moving upmarket has become a critical strategy: larger clients tend to offer greater scale and retain longer. However, the journey from serving SMBs to enterprise clients demands an evolution of your product, go-to-market strategy, and operations.
Many tech companies, such as Evernote and Basecamp, have struggled with this shift. Evernote faced challenges due to a lack of enterprise-grade features and a failure to align its product with IT and compliance needs, while Basecamp's simplicity-first philosophy made it difficult to cater to complex organizational requirements. These examples highlight that transitioning to serve enterprises is no small challenge.
If you’re wondering whether your organization is ready to make this leap, or how to navigate the transition, this case study breaks down when and how Asana moved to focus more on enterprise customers.
Context
Asana is a work management platform that originally grew through a product-led growth (PLG) model, focused on small teams and offering simple and easy-to-use tools for collaboration, such as task management, team communication, and project tracking. In 2011, Asana launched its PLG approach which allowed teams to start using the product organically through a free or trial plan. Over time, as teams within large organizations adopted Asana, the company recognized the opportunity to leverage that organic adoption to become an enterprise-wide tool. In 2020, this realization led to a shift in strategy, combining its PLG foundation with enterprise-focused features and motions to serve a larger, more complex customer base.
Introduction
Introducing Lawrence Han, former Enterprise Product Lead who guided the Asana product through its evolution to the enterprise grade work management platform that it is today.
How Asana drove growth & adoption of Enterprise through PLG
Most of Asana’s early growth was driven through the Land, Expand, Explode PLG model.
1. Land: Champions acquired through organic or paid channels
Asana gets adopted by a team lead who has grown tired of work falling off track and sets out to find a work management solution for their team. These team leads find Asana through its website (driven through paid advertisements, word of mouth, etc.) and sign up for a free trial. The goal is to enable the team lead to institute Asana as a work management system on their team within that trial period and convert to a paid offering for their immediate team.
2. Expand: Cross-Team Adoption
Once a team lead successfully drives value with their team, they cross-pollinate the product across the organization. For example, a marketing team within one division may collaborate with their sales team through Asana, creating an a-ha moment for the sales team, who then picks it up for their own workflows. That sales team’s efficiency inspires another sales team in another division, who then picks it up themselves, continuing the flywheel.
3. Explode: Company-Wide Adoption
As Asana becomes prevalent across many disparate teams within an organization, CIO and IT leaders take notice and consider standardizing on it as an enterprise-wide platform. In this phase, the goal is to take the momentum of the product across several teams, and bring it to the forefront for a centralized buyer to make it the tool of choice across the organization.
Enterprise Readiness: Shifting to a world of many Explodes
As product traction accelerates in the "Explode" phase, CIO offices begin considering enterprise-wide deployment, effectively pulling the product upmarket themselves.
This shift demands an evolution across organizational functions, particularly in product development.
How much to support that evolution, at any given time, depends on a few factors:
Customer deployments: Over time, Asana could see the Expand motion working effectively, at scale, at its large customers. Asana could observe this in high net retention rates, especially when zooming in on the large customer segment.
Macro events: Every so often, a large macro trend kicks in and boosts certain categories of software. Over the last 2 years, it has been AI. In 2020, there was a massive and sudden shift to remote work. Asana could observe this through collaboration managers or IT departments entering the funnel, looking to deploy across the organization.
Category momentum: Over time, the entire work management category became more prevalent, with teams across the world looking for work management solutions across players. You could see this momentum across the category, from brand marketing (i.e. billboards, paid ads) to multiple players hitting IPO scale.
When Asana reached this point, the product organization had to think much more about value it could provide to the Explode stakeholder:
Building features aimed at organizational value, like Portfolio management and OKRs make Asana more useful for company-level operations.
Building security and compliance capabilities so IT could have peace of mind about their company’s data flowing into Asana.
Hooking into an enterprise ecosystem via integrations with other collaboration products (Slack, Microsoft / Google suites, etc.), so companies can create a “best-in-class” SaaS stack that interplays seamlessly.
Standardization capabilities so that enterprises can match the product with their processes, and do a well synchronized rollout across an organization.
Each of these topics could have its own blog post. But we’ll dive into the one evolution that was needed across the entire product organization: driving a culture of enterprise readiness across the product development process.
Driving Enterprise Readiness across the product
Driving a product that had traditionally run off of PLG into one that could also support the needs of the enterprise, required a shift in how Asana developed product. Some examples of the evolution and expectations when serving PLG vs. Enterprise that the Asana product team had to incorporate in:
Asana’s Enterprise Readiness Review Process
Process changes can be a growth lever by itself, driving significant impact on your metrics. As a product leader, mastering the art of designing and implementing effective processes is essential for advancing your career. Many people think that introducing process will slow down iteration cycles. While that can happen if process exists purely for process' sake, the outcome of a well-designed process change is often the opposite: increased speed, higher quality deliverables, or greater impact on company metrics. The key is to anchor each change in first principles, ensuring it has a direct and lasting effect on the outcomes that matter most.
To help the organization through this transition, Asana created the Enterprise Readiness Squad – an advisory board across Product, Engineering, Design, Legal, Security, Product Marketing and Solutions Engineering that could be a one-stop consultative shop for every product team to get advice on making their features perform in this enterprise context.
Asana’s process was as follows:
Every week, the Enterprise Readiness Squad held a live forum where teams could submit their specs for an “Enterprise Readiness Review”.
The cross-functional team spent 15 minutes at the beginning reading the spec and thinking through feedback through their lens. Privacy counsel would consider the privacy risks, solutions engineers would think through how the solution would fit in a customer’s context, PMM would consider how to roll it out to the field.
The Squad and the working team would come back together and discuss feedback. Asana found this worked best actually having the working team in the room as they could clarify and discuss on the fly.
Enterprise Squad would then summarize findings in a single slide to hand back to the team as an artifact. The Squad would label things as Do / Try / Consider based on how strongly they felt, but ultimately put it to the feature team to decide what they wanted to do: accept the risks or implement the advice.
Asana tried to make this as low lift as possible, so Asana selected reps from across the company who were accustomed to advising product teams. For example, product counsel who regularly advised teams on new features or sales engineers who were the primary point of contact for product teams. In every scaling company, one thing that creeps up is the number of reviews a team must go to ship. Asana tried to catch teams right around the spec phase, where requirements were solid enough to put on paper, but not so much had been invested (in design, in code) that Asana were sending teams to rework.
Here’s the slide template Asana used with a sampling of findings Asana would recommend.
The Impact
It’ll take some time for a process like this to show results, both internally and with customers.
For the team that instituted the Enterprise Readiness Review, they saw the following success over time:
Quantitative Observations:
Increased success in the large customer growth rate. For example, in the second quarter of FY23, Asana grew at 51% overall, but those spending over 100K grew at 105%.
Qualitative Observations:
Features were enterprise ready from the get-go, with less rework or last minute touches to ensure that they landed well with large customers - the sales team could then use these new features in their sales pitch at a faster rate to increase conversion rate.
Privacy, legal and security teams consolidated their review processes into the Enterprise Readiness Review. This sped teams up, not having to navigate numerous review processes.
Leaders praised the enterprise readiness review process as a cross-functional collaboration rhythm that was unique and differentiated in the industry.
The TL;DR
Profitability through Enterprise: Moving upmarket is a critical strategy for SaaS companies aiming to achieve profitability. Larger clients offer scale, long-term value, and increased ARR.
PLG Seeds Enterprise Growth: Asana’s growth was driven by its “Land, Expand, Explode” PLG model, which started with small team adoption, spread across departments, and culminated in enterprise-wide standardization.
Enterprise Readiness is a Cultural Shift: Transitioning to serve enterprise customers required Asana to rethink product development, including building security features, meeting compliance needs, and aligning releases with change management processes.
Collaborative Product Development: Asana created an Enterprise Readiness Squad—a cross-functional advisory board that streamlined reviews and ensured product features met enterprise needs without stalling development timelines.
Process as a Growth Lever: Asana used process innovation to unlock their team’s potential. By knowing which levers to pull and when, they drove faster execution, better quality, and increased metrics.
Impact: Asana’s enterprise strategy resulted in a quicker feature adoption by large customers, faster internal review cycles, and efficient cross-functional collaboration.
🔥 Insider Growth Group’s Step-by-Step Guide to Winning Enterprise Clients
Who This Is For:
Product leaders in a SaaS company transitioning from SMBs to enterprise customers.
Define your ICP:
Your ideal customer persona that understands the value of the product offering
Evaluate Readiness:
Analyze customer data for demand (e.g., security, compliance, integrations).
Identify shifts in user base (e.g., IT involvement, enterprise interest, high value users coming through the funnel).
Build Cross-Functional Support:
Create an Enterprise Readiness Squad with reps from Product, Design, Legal, Security, Marketing, and Solutions Engineering.
Enterprise Readiness Review:
Weekly forums for teams to submit specs for feedback.
Cross-functional review categorized into Do, Try, or Consider.
Deliver Enterprise Features:
Focus on enterprise-grade features such as advanced security (SSO, SCIM), compliance (SOC 2, GDPR), admin controls (granular permissions, audit logs), and deep integrations with popular tools.
Align roadmap pacing with GTM capabilities.
Pricing and Packaging:
Create an enterprise package tailored for larger companies to maximize ACV.
Include features like SSO, SCIM, admin and role permissions, deeper integrations, customized training, and dedicated account managers.
Keep in mind that enterprise buyers often have less price sensitivity but expect volume discounts and procurement wins. Balance flexibility with maximizing account value.
Segment the Sales Team:
The sales team needs to match the skills of the sales team with the buyer (SMB or Enterprise). And that’s where segmentation comes into play.
Monitor Success:
Track growth in enterprise customer adoption and time to close.
Scaling Enterprise Accounts:
Champions of the Product: Leverage intra-company growth by identifying power users using telemetry data and usage analytics.
Create Relationships: Assign Dedicated Support Reps to ensure power users' success and foster strong internal advocacy.
Sales Tooling: Customize demos and create contextual environments that align with each client’s workflow to showcase the product effectively.
Looking to go upmarket?
Let’s connect. We can provide tailored guidance to help you navigate the transition, win enterprise clients, and drive meaningful revenue growth. Schedule a time to chat with us below.