Asana vs monday.com in Japan: One Built a Market, One Stalled Trying
Japan Market Entry
Both Asana and monday.com built credible Japan businesses, but their hiring sequences, partner choices, and leadership continuity reveal two very different ways to earn a position in this market, and one way to stall.
Murray Clarke
Japan is one of those markets where the entry strategy reveals as much as the result. When I look back at how Asana and monday.com each built their Japan operations, the contrast is sharp. Both ended up with credible local businesses, but they got there in very different ways.
This is not a winner-versus-loser piece. Both companies have visible Japan operations today. The interesting part is what their hiring sequences, partner choices, and public narratives say about how a company chooses to earn a position in Japan.
A short caveat before the data. The Aspiring Partners counts referenced below are directional, not a perfect census. I queried our pipeline and network data, then filtered for current and former roles with Asana or monday.com in the position or company fields. Some profiles are pipeline records rather than confirmed current employees. The pattern is clear; the exact headcount is not.
Asana: a patient, research-led build
Asana’s Japan story starts well before the Tokyo office. Asana itself says Japanese corporate customers had been growing since 2013, years before any formal local presence. The product was launched in Japanese in March 2019, and JETRO records show Asana Japan K.K. was established in Tokyo in the same month. JETRO also notes that Asana relocated to a larger office in March 2020 and used JETRO services for market information and recruiting introductions.
The founding Japan leader was Hajime “Jim” Tamura, appointed Country Manager from July 2019 and General Manager Japan from February 2020 to August 2022. He is named in Japanese PR Times partner announcements as the Asana Japan K.K. representative director and is interviewed by Techblitz as President and General Manager. He later moved to oVice as COO in August 2022. Ike Tateyama, formerly DocuSign Japan Country Manager, took over as Head of Japan from March 2023.
What stands out in Asana’s case is the breadth of the early Japan team. The first 18 months of hiring built a real operating layer, Akira Uchino as Head of Japan Marketing and Strategy from October 2019; Seiichi Goto as Customer Success Manager from December 2019, later Head of Customer Success Japan; Aya H. as Corporate Account Executive from March 2020, later Revenue Enablement Manager Japan; and Koichi Hoshino as Head of Enterprise Sales Japan from July 2020.
By 2021 and 2022 the team had added solutions engineering, channel customer success, renewals, BDR and SDR functions, and a second wave of enterprise sales. By 2023 the Head of Japan role had transitioned cleanly and a new Head of Sales was in place.
This is the classic shape of a serious Japan build: local GM, then marketing, then customer success, then enterprise sales, then solutions engineering, then channel and revenue enablement. Asana also published unusually rich market context, 39 customer and partner meetings before launch, a Tokyo community event, and an explicit set of criteria for choosing local partners. Customers like Japan Airlines, Ricoh, SoftBank and CyberAgent appear in the public record, and the Japanese launch referenced CAMPFIRE and Zaim case studies.
Asana treated Japan as a category-education problem and built the team accordingly. With over 70 people in Japan today, they now sit among the most successful enterprise SaaS builds in the market.
monday.com: a later, partner-led launch that ran into trouble
monday.com’s Japan story has a different shape, and a more cautionary ending. The company set up monday.com株式会社 in December 2021 and formally announced its Japan market entry in October 2022, with a Marunouchi office and a launch event at Andaz Tokyo. Dean Swan, the Regional VP for APJ, appeared alongside Koji Watanabe, the newly appointed Japan Country Manager.
The launch announcement was confident and commercially-led: 187% Japan ARR growth from 2021 to 2022, 500+ paying Japanese customers, full Japanese product localisation, and named customers including Eisai, Kumon Institute of Education, and Moneytree. ZDNet Japan’s interview with Watanabe repeated those numbers and emphasised Japan’s potential because of WorkOS applicability across departments and population scale.
The partner story was the structural centrepiece. Hitachi Solutions, NTT DATA Global Solutions, Gaprise and TalentA were named at launch. ZDNet quotes Watanabe explicitly on the partner thesis: Japanese companies rely on SIs and distributors for IT adoption, so the Japan plan was to build a partner ecosystem with depth, including a path for domestic ISVs to publish solutions through monday.com’s app marketplace.
Aspiring Partners data shows a tightly sequenced first team, Koji Watanabe as Japan Country Manager from May 2022 to late 2023; Yoshihiro Iwase as GSI Strategic Alliance Manager from June 2022, later in what appears to be an interim Country Manager role from September 2023 through to April 2025; Yuki Yamamoto as Senior Solution Engineer from August 2022; Tatsuo Nishigaya as Enterprise Sales Japan from September 2022; and Noa Miyajima as Country Manager Japan or Regional VP from May 2025.
The 2024 and 2025 hires added Partners and Customer Success, a senior account executive in Enterprise and Mid Market, and an implementation and partner project lead. A Head of Sales Japan hire from January 2026 is the most recent visible signal.
The structural problem is visible in those dates. The original Country Manager was gone by late 2023, barely 18 months in. The role was then held on an interim basis for nearly two years before a new appointment was made in May 2025. That is not the leadership continuity that Japan enterprise deals require. In a market where trust is built across multi-year relationships, sustained leadership churn is genuinely damaging.
monday.com currently has around 12 people in Japan. For a company competing in enterprise SaaS against well-resourced local and global players, that is an under-resourced operating model, not a lean one. The partner-led structure was the right thesis; the execution has not yet validated it.
One structural caveat on monday.com’s timeline. The company’s Japan entry was always going to be later than Asana’s, the product and commercial traction came later, but the timing was further compressed by COVID. Japan’s border restrictions ran longer and harder than almost any other developed market, with full reopening not arriving until late 2022. For a company trying to establish local leadership, build SI partnerships, and run enterprise sales cycles, those conditions created real drag. The October 2022 launch landed almost exactly as restrictions lifted. This is useful context that the raw timeline obscures.
What the Aspiring Partners data adds
There are a few things the hiring data shows that the public narratives alone do not.
Asana’s bench was deep early. By the end of 2021 there were already several named roles across marketing, customer success, enterprise sales, solutions engineering, channel customer success, renewals and account management. That is not a coverage model. That is a Japan operating company.
monday.com’s bench was smaller and the leadership has been unstable. The first hires, Country Manager, GSI and alliances, solution engineering, enterprise sales, map correctly to a partner-led enterprise GTM. But a GTM thesis only compounds if the people executing it stick around. The expansion in 2024 and 2025 looks more like rebuilding than scaling.
Both companies show what good Japan hiring sequences look like at the point of entry. The contrast in what happened next is where the lessons are.
What this tells us about Japan entry
Two patterns from these case studies are worth carrying into client conversations.
First, an office announcement is weak evidence on its own. The signal is what came before and what came after. Asana’s office came after years of Japanese customer growth, a Japanese product launch, and an internal Japanese bridge person validating the market. monday.com’s office came after measurable ARR growth and a 500-plus customer base built before formal entry. In both cases, the office was the formal recognition of a commitment that had already been earned. The difference is what happened once the office existed.
Second, the first five to ten Japan hires reveal the strategy. Asana’s hiring sequence reads “category education with broad enterprise coverage.” monday.com’s reads “partner-led commercial acceleration.” Either model can work in principle. What does not work is hiring without a clear hypothesis, or hiring well and then cycling through leadership before the business has had time to compound.
A third, quieter point. Country Manager quality matters, but so does continuity. Asana’s CMs operated inside a broader Japan team and transitioned cleanly. monday.com’s first CM was out in 18 months, the role went interim for two years, and the team remained at a fraction of Asana’s size throughout. The operating model was coherent. The commitment behind it was not.
Two ways to enter Japan, and one way to stall
In an earlier Insights post on Wiz Japan, I argued that Japan rewards seriousness, not slowness. Asana and monday.com support that argument from different angles, one as proof, one as a warning. The Insights post on the contrasting outcomes for Zscaler and Anomali may also be interesting for readers.
Asana built belief before scale. The Japan business was treated as a category to create, not a territory to test. The team was assembled to reflect that belief and has kept growing, 70+ people, a clean CM transition, and a compounding customer base that includes some of Japan’s most recognisable enterprises.
monday.com converted early demand into a partner-led local operating model. The commercial proof existed at launch. The structure made sense. But the execution has been inconsistent: leadership churn in the critical first three years, a team that remains at roughly 12 people, and no clear signal yet that the partner ecosystem is generating the compounding returns the thesis promised.
Japan is not slow. Japan is what you commit to, and what you keep committing to after the launch event is over.
There is no single right answer to Japan entry. There is, however, a wrong answer: a regional APAC overlay, a single sales hire, no marketing investment, no partner depth, and a six-month timeline to prove revenue. There is also a subtler wrong answer: a credible launch followed by inconsistent commitment.
Sources
monday.com press release, Tokyo office, Watanabe appointment, partners, ARR data
Research note: AI assisted with research and drafting. Murray Clarke reviewed the analysis and remains responsible for its conclusions. Public sources support the dates and reported results; interpretations of leadership choices are his own. Source links may later become unavailable if publishers move or remove their pages.
