Jon Dobrowolski joined Asana as Product Leader, Core Experiences with a belief: conversations with customers shouldn't be slowed down by research tools.
It was a philosophy that worked for him at Grailed and Hired, where he had seen Great Question change how product teams interacted with users. It just needed to work bigger at Asana, where product managers had a quota of four to six customer conversations a quarter. For a company with a mission to help the world’s teams work together effortlessly, that wasn’t enough.
The numbers tell the story. “Product managers used to take two weeks to get in front of customers for research. Now it only takes 2-3 days,” Jon explains. That change didn’t happen by accident.
Asana had a solid UXR team working on strategic, long-term research. But when it came to direct conversations with customers, product teams weren’t having enough of them. Four to six a quarter was common. That’s weeks, sometimes even a month, before you could validate an idea with real customers.
“Before Great Question, it was hard for us to even know how long it was taking us to find and schedule research participants,” Jon recalls.
The process was manual and took up everyone’s time. Setting up emails and hoping they get to customers, tracking down who had active accounts, and chasing no-shows. Friction at every step.
Missed conversations mean missed opportunities. As an organization transforming assisting small businesses to enterprises, every single conversation with a customer was more valuable than ever before.
But the best performers were hacking the game. When Jon looked at who was getting top marks in performance reviews, he saw a trend.
“When I went to those folks and asked them what it was that was helping them to be our top performers, access to customers and doing their own customer research was a big factor in their success,” he discovered.
The message was clear: give everyone the same access, and performance would improve across the board.
Jon had previous experience partnering with Great Question at other companies. “I was pretty skeptical about research tooling at first,” Jon admits.
It wasn’t a specific feature that changed his mind. It was the operational side of Great Question and what it could do holistically for research ops. He’d seen, at both Grailed and Hired, one research ops individual suddenly empowered to serve an entire company.
The platform handles everything from scheduling to participant compliance to no-shows and follow-ups, even incentives.
“Seeing what Great Question did to extend that one person to be able to seem like they were five people, or give the team the ability to self-serve research themselves, made the biggest difference,” Jon explains.
When it comes to Asana, serving 45 teams with just one ops person, that scalability was a must-have. The team began referring to Great Question as their “customer concierge.”
Here’s how it works: Product teams specify who they’d like to talk to. Our data scientist pulls that list and loads it into Great Question. The participant recruitment platform takes over at that point.
“Folks just end up with conversations on their calendar. They get to do their generative research with our customers, and get those insights into action,” Jon says.
A lot of work is automated by Great Question, and that matters for an enterprise company serving other enterprises. No manual checking to do. No requirements are being missed. Just scheduled conversations with qualified participants.
Speed wasn’t the only requirement. Asana also wanted to scale research beyond the UXR team to product managers and designers. But democratization without guardrails is dangerous. This was where the UX research platform’s governance features became important.
Great Question's AI capabilities became central to the vision of scaling research.
“What we're able to do is run AI workflows on top, that actually helps us to interrogate the quality of those conversations and give people great tips and best practices,” Jon explains.
The team is constantly reviewing tapes in the same way as their sales team is. That’s quality control at scale.AI research analysis also changed how quickly teams can go from conversation to action. Jon even notes that his team was unsure about research repository solutions until the AI layer came into play.
“I was pretty bearish in the past on research repositories, but I've actually found with the addition of LLMs and how hard Great Question has leaned into AI, that there's a lot of value in making sure that we have everything in the same place,” he says.
"We've had no complaints, everyone's been able to jump in the tool and get going," Jon said.That ease of use matters when a company is democratizing research. The best tool is one that teams can easily use.
Asana’s transformation has three key lessons for product leaders who are rethinking how they do research:
Jon brought Great Question in to three different companies because it solved a fundamental problem: research operations shouldn’t bottleneck how often teams talk to customers. At Asana, that belief enabled a 10x increase in customer conversations and a culture where evidence-based product management happens at the speed of AI.
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