Command by Asana targeted engineering managers. Asana is known by project managers and marketers. Neither the buyer nor the brand had a relationship with the other, and that gap shaped every marketing decision I made for the product.
The motion started sales-led, with a plan to shift to product-led over time. I ran Command's marketing as an awareness play from day one. If an engineering leader landed on our website mid-sales-cycle and found nothing written for them, they had no reason to trust that we understood their world, deal or no deal.
Building Credibility From Zero
Asana's brand equity lives with project managers. An engineering audience evaluating a new category of tool doesn't inherit any of that trust automatically. Command needed its own credibility, built from scratch, in a channel where it would actually be seen.
That meant branding distinct from Asana's own visual identity. I sourced an agency for the rebrand work, with a budget in the tens of thousands of dollars, because engineering buyers can tell the difference between a tool designed for them and a tool that got a new logo slapped on an existing product.
It also meant a real decision on where Command would live online. We debated a fully separate domain against a subfolder of asana.com, and landed on the subfolder for SEO. Asana's domain authority was an asset Command could borrow immediately. A brand-new domain would have started from zero on search visibility we didn't have time to rebuild.
The subfolder covered the full surface a developer-facing product needs: homepage, docs, pricing, blog, and customers, each built as its own company.
Showing Up Where Developers Already Are
Command's category, agentic orchestration for software development, put it in direct conversation with the coding agent and LLM ecosystem: Cursor, Copilot, and the major model labs. Engineering leaders were already forming opinions about that ecosystem before they'd ever heard of Command. Partner marketing became a core channel: relationships with coding agent and LLM lab partners, a presence at developer events, and hackathons that put the product in front of the audience directly.
Developers are protective of their tool choices. A product that locked them into a single coding agent would have lost the room immediately. Command needed to work alongside Cursor, Copilot, and whatever else a given engineering team had already standardized on. We built the message around that: infinite flexibility, a layer that sits on top of the tools teams already use.
We hired a dev evangelist whose job was presence in developer communities, building relationships and credibility in the channels where this audience actually spends time.
Thought Leadership as Infrastructure
We scoped more than 30 articles aimed at engineering leaders before launch. A single blog post doesn't build trust with a skeptical technical audience. A real body of work addressing their actual problems starts to.
Sales enablement is standard for any launch. Command's plan also included material built to introduce the engineering leader behind the product, because buyers in this category want to know who's building the thing before they'll take a meeting about it. We built an intro video in the spirit of "Hello, World": Command's own version of the first thing a developer sees when they meet a new tool.
We pursued a speaking slot at AWS re:Invent, a stage where the audience is already primed to evaluate developer infrastructure.
Every piece of this, the branding, the SEO structure, the partner presence, the 30-plus articles, existed to close the same gap: by the time sales had a conversation, the buyer had already encountered Command somewhere and formed an opinion worth building on.