Data Driven Leadership

Where Creativity Meets Data: Inside Asana’s Marketing Strategy with CMO Shannon Duffy

Guest: Shannon Duffy, Chief Marketing Officer, Asana

In this episode, Shannon joins Jess Carter to share how she drives marketing that delivers real business results. She explains how data brings credibility to creative work—and how creativity can move the needle on key business goals. They also talk about setting expectations for long-term efforts like brand building and events, helping leaders understand the value of patience and the metrics that matter.

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Overview

Marketing is often misunderstood, seen as either all creativity or all data. In truth, it’s both. Great marketing lives at the intersection of bold ideas and sharp analytics, and few leaders navigate that space better than Shannon Duffy, chief marketing officer at Asana.

In this episode, Shannon joins Jess Carter to share how she drives marketing that delivers real business results. She explains how data brings credibility to creative work—and how creativity can move the needle on key business goals. They also talk about setting expectations for long-term efforts like brand building and events, helping leaders understand the value of patience and the metrics that matter.

Stick around ‘til the end of the episode for a sneak peek at something special we’ve never done before! Want to be part of it? Check out Jess' LinkedIn post or DM her to submit a question—we might feature yours in the upcoming episode.

In this episode, you will learn:

  • The importance of aligning marketing goals with broader business objectives
  • Metrics that matter for brand and event performance
  • Ways to balance creativity with data in marketing leadership

In this podcast:

  • [00:00-03:46] Introduction to the episode with Shannon Duffy
  • [03:46-07:22] Key business metrics every marketer should know
  • [07:22-11:09] Helping executives understand marketing
  • [11:09-15:19] How to prove ROI for large-scale events
  • [15:19-19:40] Aligning creative marketing with company goals
  • [19:40-21:55] Using data and instinct to know when to pivot
  • [21:55-27:16] Brand awareness beyond advertising

Our Guest

Shannon Duffy

Shannon Duffy

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Shannon Duffy is the Chief Marketing Officer at Asana, leading global marketing efforts, including corporate, product, growth, revenue, and engagement. Prior to Asana, Shannon held the role of Executive Vice President Cloud & Industry Marketing at Salesforce. In this role she guided messaging, experiences, and go-to-market strategy for their flagship products. A technology marketing veteran, Shannon has held leadership positions in the industry since 2003. Shannon graduated from Boston College with a B.A. in Communications.

Transcript

This has been generated by AI and optimized by a human.

Show ID [00:00:04]:

The power of data is undeniable. And unharnessed, it's nothing but chaos.

The amount of data was crazy. 

Can I trust it? 

You will waste money. 

Held together with duct tape. 

Doomed to failure.

 

This season, we're solving problems in real-time to reveal the art of the possible. Making data your ally, using it to lead with confidence and clarity, helping communities and people thrive. This is Data-Driven Leadership, a show by Resultant.

 

Jess Carter [00:00:34]:

Welcome back to Data-Driven Leadership. I'm your host, Jess Carter. Today we're diving into the intersection of marketing leadership and data with a guest who's at the forefront of it all, Shannon Duffy, chief marketing officer at Asana. If you're in the business world, chances are you've used Asana or worked with someone who has. Asana is one of the leading work management platforms, helping teams at companies of all sizes streamline collaboration, boost productivity, and stay aligned on strategic goals.

 

Jess Carter [00:01:01]:

With deep integrations across tools like Microsoft, Google, and major CRMs, Asana is redefining how organizations manage work at scale. And here at Resultant, we're big fans of Asana. Our marketing team has been using it for years and it's at the center of our workflow, helping us stay organized, collaborate seamlessly, and keep our projects moving forward. As CMO, Shannon is responsible for shaping Asana's global marketing strategy, ensuring that brand awareness, demand generation and customer engagement all tie back to the business outcomes. With an impressive career spanning leadership roles at Salesforce and Facebook, she brings a data-driven mindset to marketing, emphasizing that great campaigns aren't just creative, they need to perform. In today's conversation, we'll explore what it means to lead with data and marketing and how to align marketing efforts with business objectives. We'll also dig into brand awareness strategies, conference ROI, and how marketers can better engage with data-driven executives. Let's get into it. 

 

Welcome back to Data-Driven Leadership. I'm your host, Jess Carter. Today we have Shannon Duffy, chief marketing officer at Asana. Let's get into it. Shannon, welcome.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:02:10]:

Hi. Thank you for having me.

 

Jess Carter [00:02:12]:

Yeah, thank you for being here. Has anyone told you why we were really excited to have you on the podcast?

 

Shannon Duffy [00:02:17]:

Uh, I don't. Ah, no. Please tell me. I would love to hear why.

 

Jess Carter [00:02:21]:

I'm so excited to tell you this. So our marketing team went to Inbound, the HubSpot conference, and they were just like, she did such a phenomenal job talking us about. I think they said it was good isn't good enough the CO secrets to leveling up your team and they just were so inspired. So impressed about some of your concepts of like, better, not best. So I did not get to participate or attend, though I wish I could have. Would you be willing to share like one or two of your favorite things from that talk before we get further into things?

 

Shannon Duffy [00:02:52]:

Yeah, I, sure. And it was, it was a while ago, so hopefully I remember. So. I adore Kip, who's the CMO of HubSpot. And we had a great time just kind of riffing on what it's like to be a marketer. And you know, we talked about the concept of how you take on feedback because everyone's a marketer, how you sort of motivate and inspire teams. And how do you, from a culture perspective, get people to embrace this concept of better, better, never best, which means we take a moment, we celebrate what we do, but we give feedback in the spirit of making the work better. And instead of that feedback being like we did something wrong or it could have been better and we did something bad, people are actually inspired by that because they see the path making it even better next time.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:03:34]:

And so this concept of better, better, never best, it's something that's been instilled in me from past leaders that I've worked with and something that I really embrace in my team around how do we continually keep doing the best marketing we possibly can do?

 

Jess Carter [00:03:46]:

That's so cool. And I appreciate you even acknowledging early in this conversation everyone's a marketer. In general, I wanted to talk to you about what does data-driven leadership mean to you, especially in your role at Asana? Because I do imagine that you need data, data to also help sort of silence the noise around you. Because everybody's opinion, there is one, everyone has one. How do you do that? I don't know, it’s an open-ended question.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:04:12]:

Yeah, I, I, I mean it's a great question and it's something I think about. And I, and I always say, like, the reason I love marketing is because marketing is a mix of art and science, right? Like you have some professions that are more science and some that are more art, but to be a CMO, you kind of have to be good at both. And I will say, like, when I interview people for marketing jobs, they like draw a spectrum. It's like on one side you have analytical and one side you have more creative. And I say to people, put yourself on the spectrum, right? Depending on the role, like some people who are, you know, marketing analysts, like in marketing science, they'll be more on the analytical. And usually your brand people are kind of more on the side of creative, CMO has to be kind of in the middle.

 

Jess Carter [00:04:46]:

Right.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:04:47]:

But it's hard to be in the middle. And if I look at myself, I'm more on the creative side. And so I learned early on that to have credibility, especially when you're talking to your boss or, or your peers on the C-suite or whatever sort of leadership team you're part of, you have to have the data to make your marketing credible. And so, yeah, how do you hire? How do you find the KPIs, how do you find the key metrics that you can feel really comfortable and speak to on a regular basis? Otherwise people will kind of wave you away as like the word-and-picture lady, right? And so you don't see that because marketing is incredibly strategic, especially modern marketing, and especially with AI. Like, we're only getting more strategic in what we can do as the humans that run marketing. And without the data, you have no seat at the table a lot of the time.

 

Jess Carter [00:05:30]:

Well, here's the good news. You just teed up every question that I had today. So we're going to get into like layers of this, I'm hoping, because, you know, so first of all, you were talking about how to balance the creative and the more strategic or analytical. My first question is if you started and found yourself on the creative side of that spectrum, what are some tips or tricks you might have to help other people who are on that side kind of walk their way toward a more balanced spectrum placement?

 

Shannon Duffy [00:05:58]:

So I think first and foremost, before you get into the marketing metrics, you need to understand business metrics. And now let me be clear. If you're sitting in a board presentation or you're reading someone's earnings call, there are a lot of metrics. If metrics isn't a data isn't your happy place, you don't need to know all of them, but you need to know a few. You need to know things like growth rate. You need to know things like NRR, which are first churn. You need to know a couple key metrics that your leadership team or your CEO is going to look at on what matters for the business. You need to understand those first.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:06:31]:

And then once you understand those and what they mean, just what they are in the definition and maybe some of the factors that move them, then you need to know the key marketing metrics that play into those. So for example, for a lot of marketers, pipeline and pipeline growth is a metric that matters a lot to a company's growth rate. So you need to understand that and you need to understand three-to-five metrics that go into that or are related to that. So there's the growth of pipe, there's pipe in segments, there's pipe coverage. Like, you need to really understand a few of those. And once you understand those few, you can build from there, you can go deeper. But you need to understand those key ones. And again, I'm not. Data is not my happy place. Metrics are not my happy place. Like sometimes I'll sit in meetings and for me it's hard for me to pay attention, but I know the ones that are really important and that's a good place to start.

 

Jess Carter [00:07:22]:

Okay, then here's my other question. I don't come from marketing background though I have people in my family that are in marketing. Actually several. It was really hard for me. I was in a business at one point in my career where the business didn't really understand marketing. I don't know if you've ever been at a company where you kind of realize like the leaders don't really get it. It is just a different animal. It really works differently than the rest of the business.

 

Jess Carter [00:07:45]:

There's a lot of like, long-term plays and everyone expects them to like, hey, we need something in the next month. And it's like, that's not really how a lot of it works. It's not how campaigns work. What are your thoughts on how you help executive leaders who maybe don't know how to manage marketing or leverage it? How did you help them kind of walk across that bridge and learn how to leverage it appropriately?

 

Shannon Duffy [00:08:08]:

Yeah, I will say it's a journey. And I will say marketing is very subjective. And there used to be a stat from several years ago. I don't know how recent it is now, but it's like the average tenure of a CMO is like 18 months, two years. And I believe the reason that is because it's subjective. It's like I either like it or I don't. Now that doesn't mean marketers don't generate results. We're not strategic.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:08:28]:

We don't have metrics. We do, but a lot of what we do is really subjective. Again, I like it. I don't… focus group of one. It's either good or it's bad. Based on my opinion, when I'm in situations like that, it is being really clear about what people can expect when. Right, like you're right. Like you cannot build a brand overnight.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:08:47]:

You cannot see results from a campaign. Like, a good example is prior to me joining Asana, the company I work with had never done, like, customer events before. And I was really clear, like, we will do the event and it will take us at least six months because it takes time for the relationships to happen, the conversations to happen, the deals to get piped, all the things like, so I can tell the results, like how many people came and how much people like the event, you know, a few days after. We're not going to call success or defeat on the event until six months, right? And I think just setting that expectation and kind of educating on, like, this is why we do the event. These are the metrics that will move and this is when we'll see results. Helps people kind of get behind. Like, oh, we're not going to know 24 hours after a campaign or an event or something, or a brand launch that something was successful.

 

Jess Carter [00:09:37]:

That makes so much sense to me. Like, that setting the expectation. I've watched a few marketers do a great job of that. And then I watch people kind of say, like, well, like, why? Why does it take time? How do you answer that question? I mean, for me, it's like, you're literally trying to change minds and get attention from human beings who are already busy, distracted, and maybe you got them at an event. To me, it's obvious when you think about it that marketers are trying to change human behavior, which has to be the hardest thing on earth. When someone's like, well, why? Why can't I just go get this campaign and get the results next month? I want to see them like, what's your answer?

 

Shannon Duffy [00:10:11]:

So there's a dated answer and there's like, or we say to at Asana like the above the line, below line. So, below the line, I'd be like, because it takes time. Because that's how it works. And I've been doing this 25 years and you need to trust me.

 

Jess Carter [00:10:21]:

Right.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:10:21]:

No way. I would. I would coach people to answer that question, is, look, use data back. It's like, okay, we launched a campaign. Realistically, we can expect this many people to click on it in any period. Most times they're going to fill out a form, they're going to do something depending on your business, and then something has to happen. I'll use a B2B example because this is what I know, okay. So we both fill out a form.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:10:43]:

It's going to take a few hours for an SDR to respond to that. Then they need to set up a meeting. And then our average deal cycle is X. So if we know that, we can again start showing, like, well, our Average deal size is 12 days, three months, whatever it is. Of course we're not going to be able to see how much money ARR, ACB, whatever your metric is, generates until we. A certain amount of time has passed. So that's the way. But I also be like, look, it's just, that's not how it works.

 

Jess Carter [00:11:09]:

I love it. Well, and you know, one of the other things we were curious about is now Asana throws some pretty large conferences too. Is that right?

 

Shannon Duffy [00:11:16]:

Yeah, we have. Our largest event is about a thousand people.

 

Jess Carter [00:11:19]:

Yeah. So those can be huge investments for companies. Like I'm at a conference actually right now as we speak, and I'm friends with somebody who's kind of put together the, the wraps on the doors or the bill. And I walked up to this building and the entire exterior is wrapped and they're telling me how much that cost. I mean, these can be depending on, you know, what level of conferences you either attend or host. That's expensive. That is a huge cost. And there's probably constantly marketers begging, arguing, negotiating for the right budget to do things the right way, right? When you think about conferences and the big investment for a company and then, oh yes, well, I need the money. And then it's going to be six months or a year until we know if it was successful. How do you pitch that well? Because it just sounds like again, if a leader doesn't know and understand how to leverage marketing, it's a really uphill battle.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:12:09]:

So as someone who had to do this recently, a few years ago. So Asana had never done customer events, or I shouldn't say that, like had never done large customer events at.

 

Jess Carter [00:12:17]:

Okay.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:12:18]:

Scale, in person.

 

Jess Carter [00:12:19]:

Right, got it.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:12:20]:

So for me, I knew, given our culture and also the fact that we had never done it before in our product, I didn't say like, hey, you know what we need to do? We need a thousand person event. So we started small. I said, okay, we're going to do this with 150 people and I'm going to show you it works. I'm going to show you there's ROI on it and then we're going to go from there. So we did. That's. We did, we did an event in New York for 150 people. The next year it was a thousand people.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:12:45]:

And that's because we showed that it worked. There's a much smaller investment for 150 than for a thousand, right? You know, just. People underestimate how much events cost so much money.

 

Jess Carter [00:12:55]:

Right.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:12:56]:

But we showed that 150 worked and we showed the ROI. So then again, using data, how do we extrapolate that out? Okay, we see this kind of results with a thousand people. What can we expect? If we expect this, we can spend X. Now I will say there's always a push and pull. And like, I loved every CFO I've worked with. They're like, do you need like the wrapping do you need? And like, some of it you need, some of it you don't need. And that's where the art comes in of it. Like, how much can we spend? And what are those little touches of delight that we can do that make our event feel high value but don't cost as much? That's what I'm pushing my team all the time.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:13:31]:

Like, what are the low-cost, high-value things? Perfect example are things like baristas. Like, people love that. That's cheaper than wrapping a thing. I'm not saying wrapping things bad, but like, if attendees are going to remember with low cost, high value.

 

Jess Carter [00:13:47]:

Okay. That's a really cool vantage point. Well, and so can you give me an example of like, a KPI and the ROI on a conference? I just, I could not do that on my own right now.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:13:58]:

So we look at a couple metrics. So our events are a mix of people who are current customers and who are our potential customers. And so we look at metrics differently for potential customers. We look at how much pipe was generated. So did, did they come to the event? Did they engage with sales? Did they pipe a deal, right?

 

Shannon Duffy [00:14:13]:

That's pretty straightforward. For customers. It's slightly different. We look at two metrics. We look at if there's a deal in flight, like they're going to buy more. Does it accelerate the rate of the deal? Do people who come to our event, do they buy more? And the last thing that we're starting to look at now is we've done a few of these and it's been several years. Are they less likely to churn? Like, do they stay with us longer because they've attended an event?

 

Jess Carter [00:14:35]:

Interesting. Well, and I imagine again to your point, as marketing is getting even more data centric, there's probably so many things that, you know, back to your comment about there's people that are jumping ship all the time. So when they left and there's that longevity that's either extended or not, was the person who came to the event still still at the company, right? There's so much there to look at and analyze and play with. And I think that's even where I struggle to your point. I mean, marketing is so creative. There's always more you could do. You know, as you guide creatives too, there's at least some stereotypes about, you know, maybe there's procrastination or there's just they're trying to get as much value and creative into, you know, a piece as they can until the deadline.

 

Jess Carter [00:15:19]:

How do you help creatives appreciate when they ought to be done? Like, how do you help them manage when it's been it's creative enough, the outcome is done enough, even if it. You know what I'm saying?

 

Shannon Duffy [00:15:32]:

Yeah, I think first question and the whole like done is better than perfect sometimes. I have worked with some amazing creative teams and here's what I say about marketing, too. Going back, I know this is the data-driven podcast, but on the art side of it, like essentially most products, there's a lot of similarities between product and it's marketing and specifically creative that that's the magic. The creative is what separates a lot of things and makes customers have that emotional reaction. And so I have a lot of respect for the creative process and people who can take something mundane and make it emotional, extraordinary using creative. But I will say on the data side of it, I think it's really important when you're leading creative teams in particular that they understand how the work that they are doing aligns to the company's bottom line. And we're lucky, Asana, because I'm able to put all of my goals and everything that we're working on as a marketing team. It's very transparent.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:16:26]:

Everyone in the team, including my creative team, can see. And so they can see how their work is going directly into the programs we're launching and then how those programs are performing. And I think that helps. And again, and even if data might not be their happy place, for some, you know, that's a generalization. For some it is, they understand like, oh, the velocity of launching campaigns, assets in market helps us generate pipe, which helps us make sales, which contributes to our bottom line. And so having that transparency and speaking of things in those terms I think is helpful for people to understand, okay, this is something we need to ship versus this is something we have more time to get. Perfect.

 

Jess Carter [00:17:03]:

Yeah, that makes sense. This is truly, really helpful for me because I remember I spent a lot of my career in public sector consulting, which innately, they're mostly RFP drops. That's kind of the world at work there. And so it's just very different. I wasn't really leveraging marketing and didn't know much about it. It just felt like magic. It was like, so you throw a conference and suddenly your business grows, like what? And so you explaining some of the KPIs, it makes so much sense that you're able to measure that and understand if it was. Even if it doesn't work, it doesn't mean marketing doesn't work.

 

Jess Carter [00:17:32]:

It might mean that strategy isn't working for you, right?

 

Shannon Duffy [00:17:35]:

And look, I'm, I'm a big fan of like fail and fail fast. Like and I, and this is, again, especially as I get newer people on the team and we continue to grow. It's like look, me giving feedback or you telling me hey, we did it and it didn't work. Like, you're not going to get in trouble for that. We're figuring a lot of this out together and if we cannot talk openly and admit when we failed, like we will not grow. Being very transparent with all the things that weren't perfect, right? But one thing I want to say like so we actually at Asana, we have a lot of information on how we work and this is a stat for you.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:18:11]:

We do research with all different knowledge workers, marketers in particular. 30% of marketers know what their team's measurement plan is. So 30%, so that means 70% have no idea how their teams are measured. And again, if we think of how we're being better, better, best, how are we really pushing ourselves? If you don't understand where the goal is, your teams can't be getting better. And so what are you doing as a leader, as a team member, to make sure that's part of your culture, I think is really important.

 

Jess Carter [00:18:38]:

That's unbelievable. And yet if I really think about it, that isn't surprising because so much of our conversation already is about the number of people who aren't in marketing that appreciate it. In my experience, anecdotally and of one, it's just there aren't a lot. It really takes education to be like unless you've worked with a strategic marketer, you kind of need like a 101 on how to do that. So that doesn't surprise me. It's just that's a bummer. And it makes even marketers’ experiences make sense to me because if you haven't been led by one of those people in your organization, it probably feels chaotic, right? And you've never had the experience of what does it look like to have. So then it sounds like marketing strategy, super important.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:19:20]:

Here's another stat for you. Because I came up with data. Only 39% of marketers are confident that their department's goals are aligned with the business objectives, right? So now think of those. And so we have 30% of people who don't really know, like what we're measuring.

 

Jess Carter [00:19:36]:

Yeah.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:19:36]:

And 39 are like, oh, we don't know if what we're doing really matters.

 

Jess Carter [00:19:40]:

Okay. This leads me to where I'm heading next. So you have a marketing strategy. Do leading indicators exist for your strategy? Like, how do you know if it's going well? How do you know what to pay attention to?

 

Shannon Duffy [00:19:52]:

So again, as a B2B marketer, if you're not looking at pipe, pipe coverage velocity, what are you doing? I do think for marketers, other types of marketers, there's a lot of other things you can look at, like side traffic, share of voice, conversion rates. So marketers have a lot of data. Like that's. But again, it goes back to like what is really important for your business and what are those leading indicators that are directly going to tie into your businesses ultimately objectives?

 

Jess Carter [00:20:18]:

I think what's interesting is when I started, when I jumped into the business world, to your point, there's so much data, there are so many different KPIs in the marketing world. And I really did some research to realize marketing is really what brought a lot of like, KPI standard metrics benchmarking into the business world. If you look back historically, in the last 70 years, marketing has been kind of ahead of the game. Like we're playing a game, we're trying to figure out what works. We're identifying metrics, we're leveraging those. But, here's my question. Have you ever been implementing a marketing strategy? Your leading indicators blow. You realize like, this is not going well, or as the kids might call it, sus.

 

Jess Carter [00:20:58]:

Have you had moments where you've had to be like, shoot, we gotta pivot?

 

Shannon Duffy [00:21:01]:

Yes. I mean, a better question is like, have I failed? Absolutely. 100 million percent. Like, absolutely. Now, the leadership challenge, or the marketing challenge is kind of what we're talking about earlier. It does take time. How do you give things enough time but also have the self awareness or the marketing chops to be able to call it? And that's kind of the art, too. And that's where the instinct comes in.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:21:26]:

And that's why like, and here's what I was saying, I think Kip and I, when in Inbound, when we were talking, it's like the people that wait for the data to tell them everything are going to fail. Data will tell you directionally where to go. It will help verify some of your assumptions or not. It's not going to give you all the answers. And that's why. So if something is failing, you need to be able to quickly assess based off a pattern matching gut, you know, marketing acumen, whatever it is, is this really failed and we need to pivot or do we need to give it more time?

 

Jess Carter [00:21:55]:

So similarly to brand awareness, I feel like brand awareness is a, can be a really long game. How do you decide when and how much to invest in brand awareness?

 

Shannon Duffy [00:22:08]:

Yeah, it is a fantastic question. And I think because when I joined Asana, everyone's like, we don't have brand awareness. We need billboards everywhere. And I was like, okay, you know, listening to that. And we actually have done billboards, they've worked. But what I will say, like, when you think of brand awareness again for, for our product for Asana, like, yeah, I don't necessarily need everyone to know Asana. I don't need my mom to know Asana. Like she does not buy enterprise software deals, right? What I do need is CMOs, CIOs, CEOs, to understand what we do.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:22:40]:

And so I want to lay that out, too. So it's like, who are you trying to drive brand awareness to, I think is a very important question. And then second of all, it's like there's other ways to build brand than just sort of like, out of home or advertising or people always ask me, like, would you want a Super Bowl ad? I'm like, absolutely not. Like, other than like, my own ego, like, I have work and scrutiny for, like, like, for us Asana, that wouldn't really work. That's not something to do. And for small companies in particular, don't underestimate how every interaction they have is a brand interaction. So and what that means is not just the ads they see, not just the website emails they get from support, the conversation they have with the salesperson. There's a great guru of brand and he would always say, like, your people are your greatest brand asset.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:23:29]:

Like, if someone calls and someone has a great experience or a bad experience with customer service, that is going to influence how they think of your brand way more than any email template or logo that you have, right? And I think smaller brands often forget that. It is how are you consistent? How are you speaking the language of your customers and how are your people showing up in the best possible way? That is going to build a brand way more so than a lot of other sort of traditional brand things.

 

Jess Carter [00:23:59]:

This is so cool. You have taken so many things that I was like, this is kind of a tough question. And you're like, breezy. Got it. Breezy. Got it. It's like your experience is speaking for you. Is there anything that I haven't asked today that you feel like it's a mistake? Like, we need to talk about X.

 

Jess Carter [00:24:18]:

Yeah.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:24:18]:

Here's what I will say. I. I view culture. We kind of touched on it briefly.

 

Jess Carter [00:24:23]:

Yeah.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:24:24]:

I am one of those culture eats strategy for breakfast people every ounce of my being. And culture is hard to create. It's hard to maintain. It's all the things. But I also think we're at an inflection point where the way people work is changing. And I've been at Asana about two years, and I joined because Asana is revolutionizing the way people work. It is creating the single source of truth. So everyone knows what is going on.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:24:45]:

Everyone knows how our work is laddering up to goals, right? You cannot build a healthy culture of people who feel empowered and motivated if they do not feel like the work that they are doing matters to the company's bottom line. So as much as organizations think, like, it's not just about doing the work, it's how the work gets done and how people are brought along. And this with AI is going to be more important than ever because as AI does more and more and becomes more integrated into our teams, having that human element of people feeling empowered along at the same time is going to separate the good teams from the great teams as you have these two forces working together. So I just think every marketer needs to be thinking about that.

 

Jess Carter [00:25:29]:

I so appreciate that. I think it's even more than marketers. I mean, to your point, it's been five years since COVID I think people kind of went home and there was this question of, can I just do my work and be accountable and do my. And then I think, Jess's perspective, not the company's, but I think that there's also now this. Like, I think a lot of people don't know how to feel seen at work or how to feel like their contribution matters or understand how do you have clear strategy and direction and understand how my role and activity this week leads to the company's success or lack thereof. And companies are trying to do that in a bunch of different ways. Asana, it's a really clean, clear way to understand that and have visibility to it.

 

Jess Carter [00:26:10]:

That's answering not just a marketing problem. I think it's like. Or even an industry problem, I think it's a human problem five years after going home, which is how do we create accountability that helps people strive for greatness and not fear getting, you know, hit with a stick? It's like it makes us all better. And so I think that visibility, accountability, and clarity about, like, when you do this, Jess, this will happen for the business is just. It's inspiring to feel like you've got purpose. You know what I mean?

 

Shannon Duffy [00:26:41]:

Absolutely.

 

Jess Carter [00:26:42]:

My gosh, this has been so much fun. So if people want to keep up with you, aside from following whichever conference you're speaking at next, how do they do that? What's the best way to stay in contact?

 

Shannon Duffy [00:26:51]:

I would say connect with me on LinkedIn.

 

Jess Carter [00:26:53]:

Awesome. Shannon, thank you for joining us today.

 

Shannon Duffy [00:26:55]:

Thank you so much. It was so fun.

 

Jess Carter [00:26:57]:

Thank you for listening. I'm your host, Jess Carter. And don't forget to follow the Data-Driven Leadership wherever you get your podcasts. Rating and reviewing, letting us know how these data topics are transforming your business. We can't wait for you to join us on the next episode.

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