1 phone call with a recruiter followed by 1 phone interview with a PM
I used to think quite highly of Asana but the brief glimpse I got has made me realized they're quite sloppy, disorganized, and amateur. I can't imagine it'd be a great place to work. I was completely unimpressed and underwhelmed by the people I spoke with
Recruiter call: basic questions about my background and PM experience. I asked her standard questions about company strategy, growth, customers, competitors, etc. and she wasn't able to answer the majority of my basic questions. Huge red flag. I got a lot of "that's a good question, I don't know, but I can find out!" I left the call completely underwhelmed and shocked that a recruiter couldn't even answer basic questions about the company she works for! (this was a Asana recruiter that works at Asana, not a staffing firm or third party recruiting agency)
PM interview: I was specifically told (verbally and in writing over email) that the interview was a product sense/design interview: "this phone interview will be a thought exercise on building a specific product for a target audience (i.e. designing an alarm clock for the blind). The interviewer will be looking to understand your approach to product management and how you problem solve with design." However, the interview ended being having 3 parts: behavioral, design, and analytics. I was totally thrown off.
The interviewer was also a poor communicator and clearly reading off a script. He seemed very amateur at interviewing.. he was unable to have a conversation or listen, just ask questions off a list and take notes. When it came to the analytics portion and he asked me to triage why X metric was down Y%, he completely didn't know how to conduct the interview. In both the design and analytics portion, I would ask clarifying questions and he would either not answer or say "I don't know."
Design: After explaining reasons, I asked "can I focus on X persona?" him: "I don't know yet"
Analytics: Asked clarifying questions about timeframe, geography, device type to isolate the root cause. Again "I don't know" and ignored some of my clarifying questions (probably too busy typing notes, reading the next question off the list). I had to push the interview forward myself since he was unresponsive to most of my clarifying questions.
He asked about defining metrics for an ecommerce website and I mentioned GMV (gross merchandise volume) and he had never heard of it before. I had to tell him, it's like revenue. I'm shocked that the interviewer didn't even have a basic understanding of the topic he was even asking about
On top of all that, the canned rejection email I got sloppily included a link (to their internal recruiter portal) with the text "Reject and Don't Send Email." I understand that they copy paste the generic response, but they didn't even bother to proofread what they pasted before they sent it.