Asana

Asana was the first program I ever used that made me feel old. But not in the actually rather good sense of it making me say &quot;wow, they can do this now?&quot;<p>Rather, it made me feel like an old fart using a computer for the first time, bewildered more often than not, most of my instincts rendered useless.<p>There are many examples in Asana of this. Each, taken alone, is banal: kind of annoying, but maybe not too bad. Taken together, though, we have something that a nicer person than I wouldn&#x27;t wish on his worst enemy, but I&#x27;m just not that nice of a person.

Asana is ... fine. Having used it and JIRA at the companies I&#x27;ve worked for I can say that each has their own set of useful and annoying features and quirks.<p>Obviously Atlassian had a nice exit so and I&#x27;m guessing there&#x27;s plenty of room for growth in this industry (what % of teams actually use a dedicated task-management software? I bet it&#x27;s not a lot!) so this could be a wise investment. Nonetheless the rhetoric—&quot;Asana is the kind of lever that could someday massively increase the productivity of hundreds of millions of people around the world&quot;—is kind of overblown.

For myself, using Asana falls into the the don&#x27;t love, but don&#x27;t hate, category. The UI is pretty nice, but I always feel it just doesn&#x27;t have enough teeth for complex project&#x2F;collaboration. I mean, I see it has a lot of features to facilitate that need(project, hierarchical tasks, attachments, commenting), but it doesn&#x27;t convey &#x27;serious business&#x27;.

I like Asana&#x27;s product design a lot, my one complaint is that (at least as of when I most recently tried it a few months ago), it was so slow. I like for my personal todo list have very fine-grained breakdown of tasks and having each page of the UI take several seconds to load so I could check of one task and navigate to the next one managed to kill the sense of flow I had between tasks.<p>In the end I went back to Workflowy (YC S10 for life!), which doesn&#x27;t have as strong team-collaboration features (as well as email integration and several other bells&#x2F;whistles), but few of my teammates were already using Asana anyway, and Workflowy is delightfully fast and simple-yet-flexible enough to support a hierarchy that roughly maps to how I had projects set up in Asana.

I just skimmed through some of those Glassdoor reviews. They were all quite positive, but I find it interesting that the vast majority were posted Feb-Mar 2016.

At my last job we used Asana and one of our PM&#x27;s was an internal &#x27;Asana Champion&#x27;. He made sure we did things &#x27;the Asana way&#x27; and stuck to a structured process for getting things done. I think this is required to get a whole organization using Asana efficiently - otherwise it&#x27;s too easy for everyone to use Asana &#x27;their own way&#x27; and it becomes a mess.<p>I always hated that there was no &#x27;doing&#x27; status for tasks - we always had to hack around that.

Asana&#x27;s interface is cluttered especially when the number of projects and tasks get more.<p>While we like its collaboration features like easy sharing, its task details is really a let down when we worked as a team.<p>Which is why we decided to build our own project management tool &#x2F; issue tracker from scratch that overcomes its shortcomings, also we recently gave our internal tool - a public release now available at taskmail.io

I&#x27;ve been using Asana for a while and have recommended it to various companies &#x2F; customers. I think it is a good tool for collaboration and reducing email clutter, especially when coupled w slack.<p>One thing that is sorely lacking is the agile &#x2F; product management piece. You can sort of make it work, but it just doesn&#x27;t fully cut it. I&#x27;m currently using Asana AND an agile tool (not Trello). They overlap in so many areas, but there are some missing features from Asana for scrum&#x2F;agile work, that if added would make it work for a broad set of use cases even beyond agile development:<p>a) ability to create categories within categories in a project: With Asana, I can create one level of categories in a given project. Ideally, I&#x27;d like to have different buckets like: Backlog, Sprint Todo, In Progress, Deploy. Within each of those, I&#x27;d like to categorize by &quot;Epic&quot;. E.g. &quot;Backlog -&gt; Reports&quot;, &quot;Backlog -&gt; User Auth&quot;<p>b) ability to show categories horizontally, instead of showing a stacked vertical list: This would be similar to the way Trello does it. (Note that Trello also lacks in other areas, and is not ideal either, but it comes close.).<p>c) ability to have more options for prioritization &#x2F; sort order<p>d) ability to have labels in the summary view for things like tags, epics<p>People&#x27;s mileage may vary in how they use scrum&#x2F;kanban&#x2F;etc., but the basics are mostly the same. I would think that with the rise of &quot;software eating the world&quot;, addressing the agile&#x2F;scrum use case represents a good market opportunity.<p>It would allow our teams and many teams to compress their tools from asana + agile tool to one tool. It might also take market share away from Trello for some use cases.

Finally created my HN account to post this comment :). Just wanted to share.<p>I am an owner of a small IT business. We&#x27;ve been using Asana as our project management system for about 2 years, almost from the beginning of our company.<p>I love it now.<p>Initially, it took some time to get accustomed to the way interface works, and I tried several times to switch to something different, but I&#x27;ve always kept coming back — Asana fits our workflow perfectly: many simultaneous projects with numerous prioritized tasks each, partially remote employees with good sense of responsibility.<p>I love the speed of entering new tasks and sorting them. I really appreciate the speed of switching between projects and task details. I am fond of the &quot;spreadsheet&quot; feel of the UI, where you can edit anything right away, without dancing around.<p>I see only two major downsides.<p>1. Initial loading time of web interface is really slow. I have a habit of closing the tab every now and then, hence I get to see the loading screen at least 30 times a day.<p>2. Their free version is too functionally complete for me to switch to paid version. We have around 10 team members, and I stumble upon no restrictions in my workflow. I would love to pay for Asana, since it&#x27;s bringing so much value to my company. But I in business, not a charity, and I will not do so until I have to. Recently, their technical support was even so kind to switch my company&#x27;s domain name (not possible via UI) for free. Had they told me that the only way to do that is to upgrade my organization to paid plan, I&#x27;d start paying in a heartbeat :(<p>My only wish so far: pre-render the React UI on server while prefetching first bunch of AJAX requests, so that it loads instantly. Please if you ever add this, make it a premium feature.

As a long time, &#x27;power&#x27; Asana user I can confidently say that it&#x27;s a good task list manager and nothing more. &quot;Project Management&quot;, or rather, at a higher level, &quot;Work&quot;, is much more than a dynamic, shared, list of tasks.<p>Asana has tried to create the killer app, the email beating, unified metaphor for project management and... it&#x27;s not enough. I would not have invested without a very promising roadmap.

I tried to like Asana. I gave it several tries over the years, but the UI is so uninspired it seemed to drain my creativity. It looks polished though.

when I think of Asana I always remember this tweet <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;davidsacks&#x2F;status&#x2F;34785257697980416" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;davidsacks&#x2F;status&#x2F;34785257697980416</a>

I&#x27;m astonished at the negativity in many of these comments.<p>I use Asana for everything, as do many of the people I work with.<p>Universally it seems people are at first a little uncomfortable with it, but then fall completely in love and use it all the time and can&#x27;t imagine ever doing with out it again.<p>It is fast and fluid to work in. It is simple and flexible enough that you can basically improvise a team workflow without formalizing it ... often the system just evolves naturally as the team uses it.<p>Most of us were very sad about the new interface, it feels condescending and more cluttered.<p>And there will always be more features to wish for. But I think it is a product in a class by itself.

Asana is a wonderful tool and it keeps getting better. I think this is more of an investment in the team and the future opportunity than it is in the current tool. There&#x27;s a long road ahead!<p>On a sidenote, we&#x27;re working on a project that marries the best of Asana, Trello, and JIRA, plus with some super-smart integrations. It&#x27;s designed specifically for dev teams, thought I&#x27;d drop this shameless plug here in case folks are interested. Check it out at: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;getcadence.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;getcadence.com&#x2F;</a>

Tasking, time and project management, and issue tracking is a really busy space. I am surprised Sam invested, given the crazy amount of competition. Trello, JIRA, Fogbugz, YouTrack, Basecamp, PivotalTracker...<p>Not only that, but once a company chooses an app like this, they&#x27;re pretty much stuck with it. My company is currently transitioning from FogBugz to JIRA and it is taking months, and we&#x27;re still going to keep fogbugz around, just in case. So I&#x27;m curious how Asana will tackle the &quot;stickiness&quot; problem.

Im surprised Asana is still considered a &#x27;startup&#x27;, especially to the degree that yCombinator is going to invest in, I thought their philosophy was to help ground level startups.

Question for Sam if he&#x27;s reading. I&#x27;ve never seen someone speak about Glassdoor in reference to making an investment decision. Obviously, most Glassdoor references we would see might be regarding decisions to apply to a company or accept a job.<p>As an investor, wouldn&#x27;t you rather get the opportunity to actually speak to current and (perhaps more importantly) former employees, and do you usually get that opportunity? I&#x27;m not talking about executives, but rather software developers, managers, etc.<p>TIA if you answer.

If it wasn&#x27;t for Instagantt I&#x27;d not use Asana. The non-devs love Asana, but the devs get very frustrated with the UI. Not sure what accounts for the divided opinion

&gt; Asana is the kind of lever that could someday massively increase the productivity of hundreds of millions of people around the world. There’s not only an opportunity for Asana to be a huge company, but also for Asana to materially increase the output for the planet—somewhat amazingly, software has not yet eaten this important part of the world.<p><i>What</i> important part of the world?

I am curious; why doesn&#x27;t Dustin Moskovitz fund Asana entirely on his own? Genuine question. It&#x27;s not like he couldn&#x27;t afford it, he&#x27;s worth around 10 billion. If he truly believes in the company why not put some of his Facebook money into it?

I&#x27;ve only been in one environment that tried to use it, and the sponsor struggled to get everyone to follow suit, and eventually it was dropped. I think adoption is as much a people and process (&quot;How we do work&quot;) issue than pure technology.

Any plans to use new found capital to provide ability to move projects between workspaces :)?

I was also surprised by the negative notes, so I went to the site to see what the product was about.<p>I watched a 1:32 min video that said &quot;what we are doing now isn&#x27;t working&quot;. Really, 90 seconds to tell me that?<p>From that point it was down hill. What happened to web sites that get to the meat of what they are doing quickly?<p>I was very disappointed. As a project manager based on the website and the first 100 comments here it&#x27;s unlikely that I would give this product a second glance. There are other project tools out there, I&#x27;d pick another.<p>I only hope that this is an early April Fools joke, in which case &quot;Ya got me Sam&quot;.

Open tickets, assign a priority and party, and burn them down. I&#x27;m always surprised that people keep thinking that putting a prettier UI on top of this is somehow the next billion dollar efficiency.

There&#x27;s a lot of people in this thread who sound a bit disappointed in using Asana for Dev work. I understand that, as well as frustration with the huge-ness of JIRA. If you agree, I&#x27;d appreciate it if you checked out my current project <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rowstack.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rowstack.com</a>, and let me know what you think. We did ShowHN a couple weeks ago, and have been aggressively building out the features people asked for.

On the comment about sticky recurring revenue I think an important factor is the lock-in effect of having pretty much all your company&#x27;s audit protection based on an app like Jira or Asana. How would a company that tracks git commits on the jira story level even move off jira?!

I love that Sam&#x27;s post has a link to Asana&#x27;s post which has a link to Sam&#x27;s post.

Asana is an awesome company. We recently created an employer profile with them on StayInTech: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stayintech.com&#x2F;info&#x2F;asana" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stayintech.com&#x2F;info&#x2F;asana</a>

If you don&#x27;t like to be led into &quot;doing things Asana way&quot; try Hitask (hiTask.com) - it doesn&#x27;t make you work in any particular frame of mind, you can actually do things your way.

When it comes to investing, &quot;I like how the teams work&quot; is probably not the path you should be walking down in making a decision about where to drop a hefty chunk of change on.

Why didn&#x27;t you write good things about it before you were investing and now that you are you write?<p>This post should come with a big fat disclaimer: &quot;I&#x27;M AN INVESTOR IN ASANA, THAT&#x27;S WHY I WANT YOU TO LIKE AND USE ASANA.&quot;