
Introducing Asana: The Modern Way to Work Together - philfreo
http://blog.asana.com/2011/11/introducing-asana-the-modern-way-to-work-together/
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dreamdu5t
Asana is yet another tasklist. Trello is an innovation. I get the feeling that
Asana is built for the people who built it, whereas Trello was built for
everyone. Despite this, Asana should be praised for utilizing keyboard
shortcuts.

I see no feature beyond the basic tasklist features that all PM software has.
Not even velocity like Pivotal Tracker.

What is innovative about Asana? The customer doesn't give a shit whether it's
done in Luna.

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davidu
My tweet is actually all I have to say about it:
<https://twitter.com/#!/davidu/status/131738215227981825>

_"Asana is beautifully designed. Seems too generic for bug, applicant or
project tracking but it's going to be my new To-Do list manager."_

But to expand a bit -- I have a hard time seeing this replace specific
purpose-driven tools (JIRA, Cerberus, etc.) even though it's gorgeous,
functional, and has a cool off-line mode. It's just too generic for me. But
for people who aren't _coming_ from one of those products and have nothing
today, it's a great way to introduce productivity. I'm surprised they didn't
build in an SSO / LDAP kind of integration...

Finally - Salesforce focused on CRM as a use-case before branching out and
getting less specific (support, chatter, etc.). Starting out generic requires
your users to figure out how to apply it to their life, which I think is the
wrong strategy.

~~~
aymeric
> Starting out generic requires your users to figure out how to apply it to
> their life, which I think is the wrong strategy.

It worked for Trello.

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omfg
How has it worked for Trello? Trello exists. It's free. That's a success?

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aymeric
Trello.com has become the new cool product in the (crowded) project management
space in less than a month from its release.

It is definitely a success in terms of awareness in our community.

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snprbob86
I've been in the Asana beta for a while & while it's a nice product, as far as
I can tell, <http://www.getflow.com/> is better in nearly every way. I just
logged into Asana again today & it looks like they have started copying some
elements from GetFlow, like the tabbed projects/tags/people bar on the left.

Anyone seriously use both tools & have an idea of their comparative strengths
and weaknesses?

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metalab
Just Flow, not GetFlow ;-) Appreciate the kind words.

~~~
barrkel
The iDevice emphasis is a big turnoff for me. I'd have been more inclined to
try it out if it only had a web mode, rather than touting its Mac and iPhone
integration.

Hard to explain why. It almost feels like an elitist snub, or something.

~~~
metalab
Hm. We do have an awesome web experience—it's our primary focus—and we're
working on a mobile-friendly web version as well.

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luser001
I watched both Joel's trello video and the asana video. I came away from
Trello's video really understanding what the product was about.

With this one, I didn't really understand what the product does. The
repetition of "this is not micromanagement hell; instead you'll have more time
to do the really fun stuff" in the video made me suspicious.

But hey, maybe that's just the over-literal cynical nerd in me who wasn't
touched by the "emotional" impact of the video.

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shuzchen
This looks pretty great. Signed up and taking a tour of the internals.
However, I don't think I'll be using this unless the following are addressed:

1) doesn't appear to support external users. I can't seem to give a client
access so they can comment on tasks, answer my questions or track my progress.
All people you invite to a team appear to have unfettered access to all
things.

2) no spec/pricing sheet on what's included. blog says "is and will remain
free for teams with up to 30 members", but how much will it cost afterwards?
Also, for the free plan, how many attachments can I add? What's the max size
of an attachment? I don't want to invest my time into a new thing and then hit
some invisible limit. (Yes, I've tried to look in the support/help faqs)

3) import/export. will you make it easier for me to move in from my current
system? once I'm in the system am I locked in?

I'm currently using Apollohq, and it's been doing pretty well. It has all the
features I mentioned above, as well as time tracking. Only thing is it costs
money (a bit too much for my small team) and they've been slow to get a phone-
friendly version. The interface has also slowed down since the beta, but for
the time being I'm overlooking it because I expect growing pains.

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ghc
Now that I've switched to Trello, I can't see trying something new. Looks like
the space is getting crowded though.

~~~
8ig8
We've been using Fogbugz for a while at my company, but we've been playing
with Trello recently. I think Trello is wonderful and I hope that some of the
newer UI features get incorporated into Fogbugz (i.e. inline editing).

The problem we're having with Trello is that we can't get a good view across
all projects. Trello requires me, as a manager, to constantly hop in and out
of projects. I hope they can offer something to get a higher view. I'd love to
use Trello more.

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jonmc12
I've been enjoying Trello as a collaborative tool for general task management.
Where does Asana shine vs Trello?

~~~
pavs
Much better UI, IMO.

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NewMonarch
I much prefer Flow by Metalab (<http://getflow.com>). It's virtually the same
product only much more fleshed out including a Mac app, an iOS app and more. I
tried Asana several months ago but Flow is just miles ahead of where Asansa is
today. Not to mention constant iteration in all of their apps (web, Mac, and
iOS). Big A+ for the Metalab team.

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irunbackwards
I really like your proposal. Everyone else should definitely read.

<http://www.asana.com/kittens>

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derwiki
<http://www.asana.com/kittens> if anyone missed it

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rafd
Tips:

Take advantage of keyboard shortcuts, it's what makes Asana feel so quick.

Asana lets you do things your own way (ie. it doesn't dictate a project
management style), but a little structure is useful. Read their 'Best
Practices:' [http://help.asana.com/customer/portal/articles/84980-best-
pr...](http://help.asana.com/customer/portal/articles/84980-best-practices-
how-to-use-asana-for-project-management)

~~~
aymeric
How would you manage the different stages of a development task in Asana:
backlog -> in progress -> pending deployment -> deployed

In Trello, changing from one state to another is a matter of drag and dropping
to the next list. How would you do that in Asana?

~~~
rafd
1\. A task can belong to a number of projects. You could have projects for
backlog, in progress, etc. and move a task between these (no drag/drop, but
can be changed in the task panel)

2\. Use tags instead, and use the tag filtering options.

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deweller
What is the business model for this product? Are they counting on
organizations needing more than 30 users?

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pbreit
If they are able to build something that people like, it's an easy app
category to monetize.

~~~
mattmanser
Is it? That's incredibly hand wavy.

For example I tried remember the milk but it immediately crippled itself with
the iPhone sync. Not like they're billionaires either.

And their strategy includes leaving out a massive proportion of users by
making IE a no go area.

What are their prices? I can't find the damn things anywhere. Am I going to
get a £1000 bill when I reach 30 users?

They've a long way to go.

Product is great BTW, if a little programmer centric with the shortcut
obsession, just pointing out great product doesn't mean great profits.

~~~
nl
I think you're right - on it's own it probably is hard to monetize well.

BUT - there are good options available to them.

Once you have more than 30 people using it, if it jumps to say $5/person/month
it is over $10000/year for the next 30 users.

There's the Yammer model: Free to use, until you want things like security
controls (think "who sees which task"), customization ("match your company
color scheme") and integration ("single sign on, Salesforce integration etc
etc")

The truth is though that this is a feature for an enterprise software company.
It makes perfect sense for someone like BMC, Citrix, VMWare/EMC, or even
Atlassian (if they could afford them?) to buy them out to fill holes in their
offerings. Their sales channels can push an enterprise version to existing
customers and then is makes sense for everyone involved.

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mbertrand
Very clean product. Love the shortcuts, and key at the bottom. Looks like a
great tool for development and business teams. Took a look through the site
and didn't see any future integrations (i.e. dropbox, github issues etc.).
Does anyone know if there are integrations in the pipeline?

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Cieplak
Does anyone have experience using Emacs Org-Mode in a distributed manner?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Org-
mode#Distributed_issue_trac...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Org-
mode#Distributed_issue_tracking)

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BvS
Has anyone tried it already?

~~~
mitchellh
NOTE: I don't know anyone who works at Asana, I have no relationship at all
with the company, investors, etc. I am purely a happy user.

Our organization (Kiip.me) has been using Asana for a couple months now. We've
tried a variety of tools for task management and project planning: Basecamp,
GitHub issues, Pivotal. With each of these tools, up until Asana, we didn't
find it helped our team very much.

Asana has changed all that. Our whole team, including BD/Sales, have been
using Asana to coordinate various tasks. The biggest thing: Asana is _fast_.
It doesn't get in your way! You can tab over and add a task in less than the
time it takes to even load the tasks page on something like BaseCamp. Some
additional features that make it great:

* Followers - You can add followers to a task if you want other people involved. This emails them and notifies them of the task.

* Comments - Comment streams are very nice. They provide a nice timeline of activities happening on a task.

* Keyboard shortcuts - I never touch the mouse in Asana. Ever. And this increases productivity by tons. You can fly around multiple projects, tasks, etc in seconds.

So there is some reasoning behind our use of Asana, here are some reasons we
didn't like other options:

* BaseCamp - Had all the features we wanted, but it got in the way too much. No keyboard shortcuts, slow page loads, etc. Taking 30 seconds to add a task == too slow.

* GitHub issues - All the issues are on each separate repo. It is difficult to quickly navigate between them and to get other people in the company to look at them.

* Pivotal - The UI was completely non-intuitive to us and didn't jive with the way we wanted to work. We didn't want a tool that forced us to work with IT, we wanted a tool to work with US.

That being said, I wish there were some other features that Asana would
implement:

* Dependent tasks - It is not possible right now to have a hierarchy of tasks towards various goals. This makes it weird to have one big task that is like "Ship the whole product v1" then have a ton of little tasks that are related but not obviously so.

* Multiple assignees - There are some tasks that just make sense to have multiple assignees.

Hope that helps.

Mitchell

~~~
koevet
My team (aestasit.com) has also been using Asana for the last 3 months and,
overall, we are satisfied. I'm not going to summarize the good and bad aspects
because the previous comment does it egregiously. Asana is fast and it feels
like a native application on both my Mac and Win box.

The feature I miss more is the possibility to assign tasks to multiple team
members. I'd also love to see a native iOS application. Asana team recently
released a mobile-compatible version of the site that works great but I'd
still prefer a native app.

I have also tried out Trello but it has a "toysh" feeling to it and Asana just
has more features.

~~~
biot

      > I'm not going to summarize the good and bad aspects
      > because the previous comment does it egregiously.
    

I think "egregiously" is probably not the word you're looking for.

~~~
GBond
Technically it is an Antagonym which positive meaning has be obsoleted.

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evolution
Very intuitive interface. You might want to help increase speed adding/editing
tasks by providing many possible ways of adding due dates. See todoist,
they've done it very nicely.

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scarmig
Weren't Asana the guys working on Lunascript? I remember being pretty excited
about it, and it'd be awesome if you built off of it for this.

What's the status on Lunascript?

~~~
rosenstein
Asana is indeed built on top of Luna, our sweet in-house programming
framework. <http://asana.com/luna>

(Luna _script_ was a DSL we were initially writing for coding against Luna; we
ended up deciding that wasn't worth optimizing and going with a JS syntax
instead)

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paolomaffei
Anyone else using <http://www.thymer.com> ? Super easy 2d (team members and
projects) task list!

Any feature comparison?

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usaar333
Cool product, but a lot of lag on my 3Ghz Core 2 Duo. What is the recommended
system requirement? An i7?

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kunalmodi
one of my biggest issues with asana is that it doesn't make it easy to see due
dates, weekly to dos etc. for tasks (let alone real prioritization). I really
suggest they put in a facebook-notification style section so I can see what I
have due in my near future

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zsherman
I think Moskovitz has another winner on his hands.

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jonheller
I love Asana, and feel it's finally some worthy competition to Basecamp, which
has always been way, way too slow for me.

~~~
aymeric
Asana is closer to getflow than basecamp in my opinion.

~~~
metalab
Just called Flow ;-)

~~~
GBond
Buy the flow.com domain already :)

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natarius
Did anyone of u guys give workflowy.com a shot...its really awesome.

Very lean. Shortcuts. Mobile Html version.

I really like it a lot.

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thedangler
I signed up. Haven't received an email yet.

I'm bored at work and I'm very impatient.

