2019 Developer Survey Findings

Thank you to everyone who took the time to complete our 2019 Developer Survey. Over the coming year, your feedback will directly shape the evolution of our developer experience as well as the API roadmap. We wanted to share some of the survey results with you. Let us know if you have any questions about the findings.

Some of the overarching questions we were looking to answer with the survey

  • What resources have been helpful for the developer community?
  • How can we improve the developer experience?
  • Who uses the client libraries? How can we improve them?
  • Which API features should we prioritize building next?
  • What are our customers building with the API?

What type of developers answered the survey?
We branched some questions in the survey depending on whether respondents were 3rd-party or customer developers.

  • 82% were customer developers (i.e. works for an Asana customer and builds internal apps for their organization)
  • 19% were 3rd-party developers (i.e. builds apps or integrations for other Asana users)

How could we improve our developer experience?
There were a lot of thoughtful responses; the three main themes were:

  • More clarity in the documentation
  • Offering a developer sandbox
  • Better code examples

Which Asana client libraries are developers using?
Independent 3rd-party developers:

  • Node (17%)
  • PHP (17%)
  • Python (13%)
  • Wrote my own (13%)
  • JavaScript (9%)
  • Chose not to use them (26%)
  • Didn’t know they existed (9%)

In-house customer developers:

  • PHP (21%)
  • Python (21%)
  • Node (11%)
  • JavaScript (9%)
  • Java (2%)
  • Ruby (2%)
  • Chose not to use them (22%)
  • Didn’t know they existed (21%)

What API features should we build?

  • Better webhooks
  • More capacity to sort and filter
  • There was a long tail of other suggestions (e.g. more options to work with subtasks, tasks, sections, projects, templates, and users)

What are customers building with the API?

While the Asana apps page showcases the integrations built by 3rd-party developers, it’s less apparent what Asana customers are building. Here are a few examples from the survey:

  • Integrating Asana with other tools such as internal billing systems to track billable hours and automatically invoice clients.

  • Automating repetitive work with scripts that programmatically manage task details (e.g. assignees, due dates, collaborators, etc.) as tasks move across a board project.

  • Pulling Asana data into a database to create reports with tools like Power BI and Tableau

Next Steps
While we are only sharing some of the general findings from the survey here, we (the Developer Relations and API teams) have read every single response. Over the coming months, we will work to improve the developer experience and enhance the API based on your feedback.

Let us know if there are any other things you’d like us to ask the developer community in future Asana surveys.

Thanks again!
-Asana Platform Team

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