Asana's Adapted Double Diamond
by Paige Costello • Product Lead, Core Product at Asana
Paige Costello is a Product Lead at Asana, overseeing the core product experience including desktop, web, and mobile apps. Previously, she served as Director of Product at Intercom and spent over five years as a Group Product Manager at Intuit.
🎙️ Episode Context
Paige Costello shares her strategies for building trust as a young leader, coaching product managers through example, and evolving product processes at scale. She discusses Asana's unique planning cycles, their implementation of the Double Diamond framework, and how to deliver effective feedback using the SBI model.
Problem It Solves
Prevents teams from jumping straight to solutions or getting stuck in opinion-based debates without rigorous discovery.
Framework Overview
A structured process of going broad (diverging) and narrow (converging) twice: first on the problem, then on the solution. Asana maps specific review artifacts to these inflection points to ensure the thinking has the right quality before moving forward.
🧠 Framework Structure
Kickoff (Broaden): Gather context. As...
Problem Selection (Narrow): Define th...
Design Concept (Broaden): Explore mul...
Spec/Launch (Narrow): Define the spec...
When to Use
For complex features or ambiguous problem spaces. (Note: Can be skipped for rapid prototyping like their AI initiatives).
Common Mistakes
Selecting success metrics based on feature usage (teaching to the test) rather than actual customer outcomes.
Real World Example
When planning the 'Coordinate' area, the team focuses on healthy project use rather than just driving metrics, ensuring they solve the actual problem of 'who is doing what by when'.
That process of going broad, and going narrow... forces people to get out of their opinion-driven lens because so often, we need to be curious quantitatively and qualitatively.
— Paige Costello