On this episode of How to Grow a CMO, host Alastair Hussain is joined by Prachi Gore, Chief Marketing Officer at Asana.
Prachi reflects on how her grandfather instilled in her a strong sense of independence, and how moving beyond engineering led her to discover marketing’s balance of analytical thinking and creativity. She also discusses learning to take bigger risks and why failure can be more rewarding than staying safely on course.
They explore Asana’s transformation into a multi-product company, the importance of breaking down silos between marketing, sales and product, and why marketers must retain their focus on customer value. Prachi also explains why trying to do everything at once is the worst possible strategy, and why effective planning requires difficult trade-offs.
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Ali
Prachi, thank you so much for joining us today.
Prachi
Absolutely, Ali. This is going to be fantastic.
Ali
Good. Let's keep that energy. So, the first part, I would love to get to know a little bit more about how you became the person you are. So, could you kick off by telling me a story from your childhood that's shaped who you are today?
Prachi
Yeah, I mean, I think this goes back to when I was very little, but my grandfather was raised by a single mom in India in times that did not really value women who were financially independent, I guess is how I will put it. And since I was very little, he coached us and encouraged us, my sister and me, to really stand on our own feet. He's like, you can do anything you want, anything, but I want you to be like financially independent always. Even if you don't choose to work, figure out how you're going to be able to stand on your own if you ever need to. And that just like drove this spirit of independence and wanting to chase things that made me more independent since I was little. And I think, you know, a lot of what we do today is all about teamwork, which is great, but also as a CMO or as any leader, you have to like have faith in your, you know, in your gut, your conviction, your decisions, and you should be able to stand by them independently if you need to push for something.
Prachi
And I do think that helps. So it's shaped a lot of different things I've done in my life, including moving from my home country here, and many other decisions. But I always remember the mentorship, I guess, of my grandfather from way back when.
Ali
That's incredible. And like you say, that to us feels like quite a natural thing today, but given the context and the time for him to have stood out like that, do you think there was anything that he had seen in his life that made him think that way? Or is he just a visionary, open-minded person?
Prachi
He was pretty progressive in that way, but he'd seen the struggles his mother went through when she had to raise her kids by herself. She decided not to remarry and wanted to do that. So she moved to a different city and really struggled because she didn't have the education. Women were not expected to work or allowed to sometimes. And so she was the oddball trying to, you know, make the money to raise her two kids. And my grandfather, from the age of two, was raised by her alone. I think that shaped, you know, what he never wanted to see. He also really asked my mom to take up hobbies and be independent and do other things, which at that time was unusual. It was unusual to have both parents working, but I grew up with that.
Ali
What an amazing gift to be able to give to your children or grandchildren. I hope I'm able to instil some similar values in mine.
Prachi
I know.
Ali
Other than your grandfather, was there anybody else who's been a particularly big influence on your life?
Prachi
Yeah, and this is not childhood, I would say. I was older, in college, and I had a teacher and coach. And he gave me an insight. I studied engineering and I was good at it. I was good, I was a good engineer, but I was not great. And something about wanting to continue pursuing more in engineering bothered me. And so, he kind of caught that and he gave me the permission almost to say, try it out, but if you don't like it, like go chase something else. It's okay. You haven't wasted your life, really. Like there are a lot of fundamentals that engineering will go give you to still do something different. And I didn't know that it was going to be marketing then. I didn't know what it was going to be, but I think that permission, I almost needed that in some ways. And I was fresh out of college and working at that time as an engineer, but I was in contact with him and that opened a lot of pathways and doorways for me. He helped make connections so I could try out different internships and things like that, but that was influential.
Ali
Fantastic. It also seems to be kind of a bit of a thread there between that and what you were talking about earlier, that again, you're being encouraged to kind of take responsibility and accountability and feel that sense of agency, I think, is much the same thing.
Prachi
Yeah, exactly.
Ali
In your life.
Prachi
Yeah, yeah. And I needed that maybe as a child. Yes, yeah.
Ali
And also, I think that's a quality that's so important over these next few years. We recently saw, with OpenAI publishing all the maths results, a lot of mathematicians feel like their sense of agency for their own topic, their own subject, their own discipline is being removed. And obviously we are seeing that some of those patterns play out and actually retaining that sense of agency is so important for me. There's a lovely quote from Mira Murati, who used to be the CTO of OpenAI and then set up her own company, Thinking Machines, talking about how important it is that actually all these kinds of prophecies of what is about to happen in the next three, five, 10 years, they may or may not be right, but really importantly, they seem to remove our sense of agency, the sense that we have some control over this. We have some control over our own lives. And I just think it's absolutely critical that people maintain that.
Prachi
Yeah. Sometimes you get stuck in your ways and you have the accountability and control to get out of it.
Ali
if you choose. Yeah, absolutely. Very good. And so when you think back to who you were at a younger age, an unspecified younger age, is there any piece of advice that maybe you wish you had heard earlier or a particular thing that you would say to them to help them through the next 10, 20, 30 years?
Prachi
One of the biggest ones for me, which has now become second nature but wasn't when I was little, is like, take risks. It's okay to fail. As a child, I was academically high-performing, and in other aspects too. As I grew up, my expectation of myself was so high that sometimes that deterred me from taking risks for fear of failing. And you can't achieve great things unless you take risks. And sometimes you might fail and that's okay. As I've grown up and spent enough years trying to do lots of different things, I've found that the most reward is in the big risks, even if they fail. You learn so much more than just staying the course. Sometimes you have to stay the course, but I think to my younger self, I would tell her: take risks. It's okay. Failing is okay.
Ali
I love that. So that idea that's encapsulated in, I think, psychological safety, that it is okay to take risks and create a culture where it's okay to take risks. Something that's been really important to me actually, because obviously looking after a lot of strategists, like you said, they're people who often have done very well in school and the idea of not doing well at something could be quite unnerving, disconcerting for them. And it's like, it's okay. You should try stuff that you are not good at. That's part of growing. So yeah, I think that's lovely. Is there kind of anything else outside of work that you are particularly proud of that you've done in the past or that you still do today?
Prachi
Yeah, I mean, growing up, I had asthma as a kid. And so it was quite a blocker on a lot of things that I could have otherwise done: sports, hiking, things I actually enjoyed. And so when I moved here, I kind of learned how to control that. So I didn't need an inhaler, you know, every day. So this was through the course of a marathon, like running a marathon, which felt impossible, or a half marathon. And through that coaching, a doctor I used to go to helped me cope with asthma. And it's a combination of breathing and yoga and like the pace of running. Like I have to start slow. So there's a lot of stuff involved in that. And then there was training my lungs to get better. And I didn't know that one could do that. And touch wood, but it's been years since I've needed to do that. And so I think I'm very proud of like overcoming like an obstacle that I thought I had to live with forever, but you don't have to. Sometimes you might have to, so I don't want to take that for granted.
Prachi
But for me, I was able to cope with it and come out on the other side. And that's been, now it's been more than a decade of no asthma. So I'm proud of myself. It took many, many years.
Ali
That's incredible. And is there something in there as well? I listened to someone speaking the other day who said part of the reason that people are proud of being fit, for example, having great fitness, isn't necessarily that they have great fitness. It's the fact that they've had the discipline to make themselves fitter. And actually, I mean, incredible that you're dealing with your asthma, but also fantastic to be the person who was able to take the steps to do it.
Prachi
Yeah, agreed 100%. There's a lot of pride in that. It's hard to be disciplined.
Ali
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Are there areas of life where you're not so disciplined?
Prachi
There are, yeah, for sure. I think I have a sweet tooth, so I love to eat sweets and I try not to, not too many, but I definitely don't follow a discipline there. Yeah, every once in a while I'm like, okay, I'll go for it if I want it. So that's definitely one. I think with, you know, I have two kids and like raising my kids, I try and balance where I impose or like work with them on their own discipline and our discipline as a family and where we just kind of freewheel without that. And I think that's been great to see that in them. So yeah, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously with my sweet tooth. But yeah, there are many pockets where I'm not as disciplined.
Ali
Fair enough. Yeah, having kids is such an interesting mirror to your own behaviours as well and your own thoughts, isn't it? I think there's something in giving them obviously the best influence that you want to be for them. I think there's something interesting. So I have two relatively young children. My daughter is very independently minded in a lovely way, and I want to encourage it. And someone was remarking about their own relationship with their children. They said, sometimes I feel like I'm giving them a bit of discipline in order to teach them how to rebel. Do you know what I mean? I feel that's the right person for them to become. And obviously, I've got the teenage years ahead of me. So that feels like an interesting thought at the moment, but God knows how that will go. Okay. So then getting a little bit more into your professional life and your career, you obviously said that you were doing engineering at one point. How did you then make the switch to first get into marketing?
Prachi
Yeah, so I'm an engineer by training. I did complete my graduation. I also did a job as an engineer for a few years, but then when I was working as an engineer, I tried to take on projects within the company I was at that were in different domains, non-engineering. So planning and strategy, like ops types of roles. I did HR types of roles, like just projects. I wouldn't say roles, but it's like— big projects in other departments. And that gave me a sense of like what I might enjoy. And then I also took some classes, like I knew I needed some education to truly pivot. So I ended up taking some classes. I used to live in St. Louis, Missouri, and they would do sample classes at WashU. And I ended up taking some sample classes to see what subjects might interest me. Anyway, I ended up doing an MBA and then did two or three different internships, strategy ops again, product marketing, and then I enjoyed marketing because I had the science part of it: I was extremely analytical and logical. I could break big, complex problems into little steps and build towards that.
Prachi
At that time, digital marketing was new, so I understood like HTML and code, and so I could work with IT counterparts. So there were lots of things that I was good at, but there was also a big component of art and creativity and like, you know, so like the balance of art and science I loved in marketing, at least in the internships I did. And then I haven't looked back.
Ali
Amazing. I love the fact you took a few sample classes and ended up doing an MBA. That's quite a— it's not something that necessarily happens to everyone. That's very impressive. Very cool. Out of interest, what sort of things did you— I think it's interesting to hear about how early experiences and encounters with marketing shape how you think about it as a discipline. So for some people, they stumble across a mentor in an early job who kind of shapes how they think about it. Others, I spoke to, I think it was David from Appian, who was talking about he had the joy of going to just a really good marketing degree programme and learning classic marketing principles and that kind of thing. How was your early understanding of marketing shaped?
Prachi
The biggest influence and opportunity for me came when I joined a company as an intern after my MBA. I graduated in the 2008, 2009 era, when that wasn't a great market. So I started in a consumer tech company, and our CMO there saw potential. I joined as a digital marketing manager on some paid programmes, you know? I covered for my boss, who was out on leave, and that's how I got to know the CMO. And she just started giving me all these opportunities, like, you know, just like filling in for things that she needed done or like these stretchy projects because she saw the potential. I was there four or five years, and she really, really, really shaped who I became as a marketer. She was a brand marketer; that was her speciality. Her name is Jan Soderstrom and she was a fantastic brand marketer, you know, so she gave me exposure to like, she let me run like this whole brand campaign. Like I was like not a brand person at that time, you know, I was a digital marketer.
Prachi
So she gave me all these opportunities and I was willing to work really hard. I worked very, very hard. So I, you know, I had my full-time job and then I did all these other things, but over the four or five years, I got so many opportunities to take on big, chunky projects and different things that I could do. Of course, I grew in those five years well beyond paid media. I ended up leading the whole digital team by the end of it, but I also got to do a lot of brand work. I led marketing ops for a little bit. She gave me the opportunity to do content and product marketing for certain areas. So that was my shaping because not only did I continue to do demand generation, which was my growth path into becoming head of marketing eventually, but I also had enough of a taste of all these other things that I could become a holistic marketer. I could think bigger than just my domain quite early in my career. And so I think that just set me up for success. It became the stepping stone to every future role that I took because I could just think more broadly.
Prachi
I had the taste for what those other things could do and bring to the table.
Ali
What a fantastic opportunity. And again, that seems to be one of the emerging themes, I think, for a lot of CMOs that I speak to. There are too many disciplines within marketing, or too many kind of sub-disciplines or crafts within marketing to be an expert in all of them. But to have some knowledge of how all this comes together in some kind of coherent function is absolutely critical, right? And actually, obviously employing people who hopefully do know an awful lot more about the thing that they're doing in some ways than you might. But being able to orchestrate all this together is such an integral part of the modern CMO role.
Prachi
Yeah, I think it gives you two things. One is just knowledge of how those things come together, but also empathy for the hard things in that job. And so, both of those shape you as a leader. One is to just influence enough of the strategy and hire the experts to do the job, but two is understanding the challenges they might have, just having that empathy.
Ali
Yeah, absolutely. And it's almost like having access or understanding how to use different tools, isn't it, as well? I mean, I'm a firm believer in bringing a range of skills to bear on any significant marketing problem, or at least a range of perspectives. And obviously we've set up the agency in order to do exactly that. I think that there is something there, isn't there, that the big interesting problems and the big interesting breakthroughs that marketing teams make tend to be pretty cross-functional. I mean, I don't think— I don't see— there won't be many CMOs who are just delighted that everyone's siloed and working in their own little worlds.
Prachi
Yeah, no, no. I mean, increasingly today, the silos are not just within marketing, but also, of course, with sales and product teams. My last almost decade has been a combination of what we call in tech PLG, which is product-led growth, and SLG, which is sales-led growth. And so it's like you also have to break silos across those cross-functional teams, not just your marketing team.
Ali
Yeah, absolutely. We actually did a little bit of research into that earlier in the year called The Cost of Chaos, and product was the function that felt most distant for most marketers, which I think is such a shame. And interestingly, so many CMOs I speak to came up from product as well, often literally in the product function. So there's definitely an advantage to understanding it.
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Ali
Can you tell me a little bit about Asana, the business you're now at, fantastic business, and also the role of marketing there?
Prachi
So, Asana is a— it's an agentic work orchestration platform today. So, it is an 18-year-old company. Until last year, we had the one product that we call collaborative work management, but with the introduction of agents, what that has done for us and our customers is that it's allowed us to transform project management into work execution because agents can execute a lot of the work, but the collaboration aspect between humans and agents stays. And so that's Asana. And then we are moving from a single product to a multi-product company this year, which means we are creating end-to-end agentic solutions for personas. So agencies are one of them, R&D teams are one of them, service management is one of them. So we have these persona-packaged products now. So marketing's biggest job this year, and I would say next year, is to change the narrative, reposition Asana with the new vision in mind. We've been a company for 17, 18 years where we have the opportunity to completely transform the outcomes for our customers. So how do we go tell that story? So that's objective one: changing the perception. While retaining an amazing brand, how do you change the perception of what that brand can go and do for you?
Prachi
And then objective two is to go create demand amongst these new audiences, like our core audiences that we've served. It's a horizontal platform, so anyone can use it, but it's like marketing teams, creative teams, operations teams, and then agencies and R&D teams have been the majority of who we've served. How do you go create demand now in an IT audience who knows Asana but has never seen Asana solving their use cases or problems? So, I think those two things, demand creation with new audiences to sell our multiple products, and brand transformation through our corporate narrative and positioning, are the two biggest charters for marketing.
Ali
That's very exciting. It's lovely to be at a business which is wanting to launch that next phase of growth, like you say, with that repositioning. Can I ask you, what was the thinking behind the decision to create that portfolio of products for the different user groups?
Prachi
So when you think about orchestrated execution of your work, we talk about them in terms of workflows. So eventually, if you want to become an agentic enterprise, we believe that you'll always have humans in the loop, but a lot can be done through agents. And we believe that the agents and humans will need a place to work together. And when you think about those workflows, they're different for the persona or the work that you're trying to do. So if you're an agency, the agency needs collaboration internally with their various parts, but they also need a way of collaborating with their customers through a client portal or something. They need to do resource management, timesheets, budgets, like all of these additional things are needed to be part of that workflow to truly get to end-to-end agentic execution. Our product was horizontal and didn't have some of those, but thinking about the persona allowed us to create truly agentic, end-to-end workflows to serve the audience in a fuller way, I would say. And so that was the thinking behind creating persona-packaged products. All of these products are now GA, but in our process, we start with design partners, then EA, then GA, and we've seen tremendous success already in both design partner and EA programmes across all of these.
Prachi
So, excited for— I mean, they've all GA'd this month—last month, I should say, September—but I'm excited for inflective growth from those.
Ali
Brilliant. And it seems like such a smart move, obviously. And one of the other interesting things I think about this repositioning is it feels like you landed on a story slightly earlier, before some other people had realised that was the right story to have. Story maybe undersells it, like the right approach to have in order to help businesses get the most possible value from AI. Did you sense a little bit of that internally? It's like, oh, actually, we know this is the right place. We kind of need to claim it and stake our claim to it now, even if not everyone's going to be there just yet.
Prachi
Yes. I mean, I think once the vision for where we want to take the company was clear, we worked on positioning. We talked to a lot of our customers to test some of that positioning. We talked to industry analysts, so we got a lot of external feedback also in addition to our own vision. And I think the operating system for human-agent teams is a very— it's a visionary concept. So if you think about running a campaign, I'll probably break it down to the persona and something else, but the vision that we are the operating system for human-agent teams, and that is humans, agents, and systems all connecting end-to-end agentically is the vision that stayed even though it was kind of a concept, not a reality today for many of our customers. So, we've made those types of decisions because we believe that that is where the world is headed and we are an integral part, or we can be an integral part of driving that outcome for our customers. And then, we also do a lot of use case marketing and things like that to talk to the customer where they are today.
Ali
Yeah, very good. Can I understand then, so with the challenges, yeah, kind of the two real goals for marketing are obviously this repositioning work and obviously driving that demand. Is there anything you've done or changed about the way you structure the marketing function or how the marketing function approaches its job, that is, the kind of actions you've taken to help the marketing function achieve those goals?
Prachi
Absolutely. I mean, I think we are our own customer zero. So, when I talk about these end-to-end workflows, we've implemented those end-to-end workflows. So, in marketing, for instance, we have—well, our teams use a lot of agents, over 50, but we have about 15 agents that are like team players, like truly everyone else in the team uses them as well. So they're like teammates, real teammates. We've optimised processes; SEO is a great example. End-to-end SEO content writing, from the request coming in all the way to publishing, takes a lot of manual steps. But many of them can be done agentically, like creative brief writing, and these days, even publishing through the different tools. So, that's one. Our events process has a lot of agents and humans working together, but we've shrunk the time it takes to do these things. In terms of SEO, we just write a lot more content, but high-quality content. Our analyst relations team is a one-person show, and we have these five different personas and categories we are chasing. Like, he has multiple agents that he's using to run this operation at scale.
Prachi
So, across a lot of different marketing functions, we have thought about the workflow end-to-end and are putting in agents and humans to achieve the outcomes. This is allowing us to scale significantly. To do this exact same thing, to launch five new personas and products in a year, we would have had to scale our teams a lot in the past, but we haven't needed to because we have agentic teammates now working with all of us. So I think that is the biggest fundamental change that has brought a lot of productivity and efficiency for our team this year, but we don't stop experimenting. I mean, the number of tools and technologies out there that can transform how you operate as a team is amazing. And it's going to change every six months. There's like a new wonder that pops up that is doing amazing things. So, I think we can't take the experimentation mindset off, even though we've found some recipes that scale. So, we'll continue to experiment as a team on what more we could do with the AI solutions available to us.
Prachi
And then, I think in terms of the first principles of marketing, that often shapes your team. The goals and the first principles of marketing shape how you design your team. Those haven't changed. Marketing is still in the business of driving perception, growth, and demand creation, and we are still organised to go do that as teams, but each team has agents now working with them or cross-functionally, and we are in the business of delivering the utmost customer value. That should not change. So when I think about content, if you don't build a knowledge base or a customer brain that has deep persona research, all your field calls, your support ticket data, like product usage, if it doesn't have all of that, the content that is written is going to be generic. It's going to be fluffy, it's going to be generic. Like AI can write content, but it needs a ton of context to be able to do that. And if you don't provide it context, it can't. But the minute you do, it is very high-quality content that can be produced, right? So there are a lot of these types of infrastructure builds, I would say, that we are doing today, which wouldn't have been a role or a team I would've built in the past.
Prachi
So that has changed a little bit because we need that infrastructure to go drive the outcomes, but the fundamentals of marketing still stay. Like, you have to be creative, you have to deliver customer value, you have to go know your audience really well and create demand, work with sales, work with product. So those fundamentals don't change.
Ali
Yes, 100% agree with that. And luckily, I think most of the CMOs that I've had on the show speaking about this this season have absolutely echoed the same sentiment. There is plenty about marketing which will remain true to our fundamental principles of what marketing is.
Prachi
And for what it's worth, in 2024, I remember, because we started experimenting, I wasn't at Asana then, but I was at another company. We started experimenting with AI very early. And I remember this mindset or the theme then was like, oh, agents can do everything. That was truly the vision statement. It's like, this technology is so awesome, it could literally do everything. And through many failed experiments and some successful ones, I think we've all gotten to this point now where we know where we need the human and where the agents can really deliver and what's needed for it, which is great. I like this future way better than where I thought we would be three years ago.
Ali
Yes. Yeah, agreed, agreed. And I think there's also something interesting there that, you know, the original way that people conceptualised the value of AI was it can do tasks. So, oh, I have a task, it can do a task. Whereas I think I was very fortunate. I read a book called Reshuffle by a chap called Sangeet Paul Choudary, which is absolutely brilliant. And it took a very different approach and said, actually, look, the real value of AI is going to be in coordination and understanding how that works within businesses, within teams, within businesses, within markets, within industries, within ecosystems. That's when you start to understand how things change. And I think that's one of the shifts I've seen. And obviously, you know, like Asana is absolutely kind of leading the way around that thinking too. Okay. So we've talked a little bit about how you came to be the person you are, your role at Asana, who shaped your thinking around marketing. Do you have any kind of useful takeaway tips, if you like, for any CMOs or aspiring CMOs that are listening?
Prachi
Oh, wow. We could spend the whole time. Many of these come from mistakes I've made, but one of the most important things I would say is that doing everything at once is the worst strategy ever. I would really, really encourage any leader in marketing to call the bets. What are the biggest things that'll have the highest impact? And go deep and do those extremely successfully, with the trade-off of saying no to many others. You have to say no to many other things. And anytime that I have not done that, the outcome is meh. And anytime that I have done that, the outcome is fantastic. And so, there are many times still where I feel it's hard to do those trade-offs. You feel like everyone wants everything from you or your teams, and so we have to go do everything. And it's a tough lesson learned in life that we should all keep top of mind in our work life: everything all at once is the worst marketing strategy.
Ali
Very good. I 100% agree with that too. And actually, perhaps this speaks to what I was about to ask as well. It being planning season, every exec's favourite time of the year, every professional's favourite time of the year, do you have any particular tips around planning? And I think, by the way, what you've just said absolutely supports that. Don't pretend that next year you're going to solve every problem that exists under the sun for your business. Obviously, choose those that you are really going to attack. But is there anything else in terms of the mechanics maybe of how to get planning done or get to somewhere good?
Prachi
I mean, I think my preferred method has been, typically, you kind of know when your exec planning session or offsite is, and then you know your planning cadence. And the way I like to design it is I like to do my marketing leaders' planning meetings before that first exec offsite, even if I might have to go deeper in one topic or whatever, depending on the agenda. But even if I know that's going to be a broader strategy discussion, it's like that is the point where I'll bring stuff back to my team, but I like to have their insight into what has worked this year, what has not worked, where they see the teams going next year, and where they see the blockers, so I can represent that as we are having that leadership discussion. So I always like to do that ahead of the exec leadership discussion. And then, of course, after that is done, you get more top-down guidance on, hey, here is the strategic POV on next year. And then I love to do a bottom-up build for every function, every team, every programme, because what I've learned is there is a top-down direction, and when you actually force the teams to do zero-based budgeting, a bottom-up build for what I would do to chase that, there's often a gap.
Prachi
Like the bottom-up says, for this resourcing, we can get this far. The top-down is always aspirational, as it should be. And so then the discussion is strategic around, okay, how do we cover these gaps? And again, that is about trade-offs, and that's the forcing function to say, okay, if I could only get one thing right, what would you want me to get right? Okay, if I could add a second thing to that, what can I get right? What would you add? And so I think that then helps shape the roadmap for the team. And then after that, it's like roadmapping, you know? So that's been my process. I think it works quite well or has for me. So we'll do it again this year at Asana.
Ali
Very good. And I think, actually, interestingly, that ties back to the first topic we covered really around that sense of agency and independence, because implicit in what you're saying is it is up to you as a CMO to go and say, this is what I need in order to achieve these goals. And actually, when I work with CMOs, one of the things I often hear from them is, oh, the CFO's given me a budget that I can't work with. And actually, they haven't been proactive and said, no, look, these are the goals, this is what the budget should be. And that sense, like you said, that's part of who you are. I have the agency to make some decisions. And obviously then you collaborate with the rest of the executive—
Prachi
Team.
Ali
You work with them. And there are always trade-offs. Of course. But to go there and say, no, this is, I know what I'm doing here. This is what I need. Let's talk from that position. It's a much stronger, much healthier place to be, I think.
Prachi
And that's why we do the bottom-up build, which the teams do. So it's like, then I can represent what they need. So it's always a team effort to get to the plan. But yeah.
Ali
Very good. To finish, do you mind if I ask you a quickfire round? So these are five questions that deserve longer answers, but we insist on keeping them short, if that's okay. So the first one is, complete this sentence. The qualities I look for in my next exceptional hire are—
Prachi
Curiosity and grit.
Ali
I love it. I think almost every CMO has said curiosity first this series. I absolutely love that analogy.
Prachi
I mean, you want problem solvers, you know?
Ali
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Problem decomposition, problem solving is huge. We actually spoke about this earlier, but this idea of psychological safety: creating space where people are comfortable taking a risk, making a mistake, and importantly, owning the mistake as well and learning from it. In that spirit of psychological safety, what's a mistake that you've made in the past couple of weeks or so?
Prachi
A couple of weeks?
Ali
Or a couple of months.
Prachi
No, no, a couple of weeks is fine. I'm making enough mistakes to learn from, but I think in the last couple of weeks, I don't know if it ties back to psychological safety, but it's like one of the things that I want to always do is provide context to my team and provide it as quickly as possible. And we had this offsite, and this was not a stated subject for the offsite, but we had this discussion amongst ELT and moved forward with some inkling of a decision. And it took me two or three extra days to pass that down to my team. But in just those few days, it created a little bit of a swirl because some other information was shared with them previously based on previous decisions. So those types of mistakes, those are so avoidable. It's like, ah, we could have totally avoided this swirl. From a psychological safety standpoint, we sometimes get caught up in like, oh, we have to do this because we have to do it, those types of things, and then stretch the teams. But if that becomes consistent, then that's a mistake.
Prachi
So I try—
Ali
[Unclear wording in source transcript; check audio.] That first point you made actually around context for your team is one of those moments you see quite a lot at the moment where what you need to do for people echoes how you need to work with AI as well. And that idea of the context layer is obviously becoming so important for—[Overlapping speech: “That's true, yeah.”] What is something that most people get wrong about you?
Prachi
Many people think I'm an extrovert. I'm not. I'm an introvert, but I love people. But I think you can tell. I can tell I'm an introvert because if I'm at networking events and things for a long time, then I just want downtime. People give me energy, but I'm an introvert, but I appear like an extrovert.
Ali
Interesting. Yeah, very interesting. That's definitely something I've heard from a few CMOs actually. Okay, so this one's a particularly tricky one. What are the three technologies you're most excited about over the next 10 years?
Prachi
Oh, wow. I think they're all going to be applications of AI. I'm most excited about the application of AI to healthcare and research and speeding up the discovery of cures and medicine. And there is a lot of promise around that in terms of like the vision at least. And so I'm most excited about that. The other thing that excites me is the application of AI for personalised education. I do see a lot of value in schools and the social value in having a school system and teachers, but it's going to be such an aid for the teachers to be able to customise education for the kids, especially in big class sizes in public schools where there's a whole spectrum of learning abilities and how they learn and where they are in the journey. And I'm just excited for the teachers to be able to use this and help their students excel.
Ali
Yeah, absolutely. I actually, I worked with an edtech startup about 15 years ago who were using machine learning at the time.
Prachi
Yeah, that was the AI back then.
Ali
That was AI back then.
Prachi
I think what we used to call AI before generative AI was all machine learning.
Ali
Exactly. Yeah, exactly that. But yeah, absolutely the power of that's going to be phenomenal. And what about a third, if I could press you for a third?
Prachi
Well, the third one I would say I'm excited for what Asana is doing. Like, we are launching some super innovative things, I think, that are going to transform how work is done over the next 10 years. Our goal is to get all our customers towards self-driving organisations, which means humans only do the most strategic things, are in the loop, but agents can drive everything. And I think there is a high possibility of that vision coming to life.
Ali
Fantastic. Thank you, Prachi. So finally, what's one piece of advice or one idea, either about marketing or about life in general that you keep coming back to?
Prachi
I already said this, but I'll say it again. Take big risks. Don't shy away from that fulfilling work, and you might end up making some of the best life decisions. So I'll go back to that.
Ali
I love that. Thank you. And such a good time for it as well. Now is the time to be ambitious, isn't it? Very good. Prachi, thank you so much for being with us today.
Prachi
Thank you, Ali. This was a pleasure.
