I am a generally very calm and roll-with-the-punches kind of person and absolutely understand companies needs to evolve and grow their product. I get that when offerings change there will be things that people don’t like (and sometimes that thing will simply be change). We experience that in our workplace all the time and it’s just part of business and life.
That said, I think the Asana team absolutely needs to hear how not-at-all-minor-or-insignificant these changes are going to be to peoples work flows. I mean this constructively but think there’s also value in sharing just how frustrated we are. It makes me wonder if the team at Asana truly understands the ways people are using their platform.
Until yesterday my biggest complaint about the Asana experience was, without any doubt, that the dashboards only showed a truncated view of the most recent STATUS UPDATE text block. (Timeline also needs significant growth but we’ve always chalked that up to an ongoing evolution that will eventually get there). Project overview options need to be more robust and deeply customizable. All companies need to be able to see all our project statuses in one place, and because of the hyper complicated nature of many projects often the only truly accurate way to present a project’s current position is with the STATUS UPDATE texts. My team absolutely needs a place to view those all on a single page.
I have dug more into these Portfolio pages (which apparently we won’t have as a small business using Professional plan?) and while they don’t even seem to provide this functionality they at least put all this information a click or two away.
What am I missing? Will this simply not be an option in Asana and we’ll be required to visit each individual page and open the status report during our weekly meetings? If so then Asanas usefulness is taking a significant hit in value for our workflow.
I honestly don’t understand and feel that I must be being dense and simply not understanding something. It seems like the most obvious, necessary, baseline expectation that a project management platform would include (in all versions of its offering) a tool that allows overview of all active projects. I am legitimately flummoxed.
I loathe that I’m finding myself being the guy putting this out there because it always seems so petty (but I get it now) - We’ve gone from 95% satisfied with Asana to starting to consider alternatives.
Can someone please provide me some clarity on what the thinking and justifications are here? In what line of thought was the conclusion reached that only enterprise customers would need to have access to total project overview and even then - wouldn’t need to see the most recent status updates at the front of their UX?
I’m open to be wrong about my assessment of the trajectory here. I hope I am. But either way I hope the Asana team is taking the opportunity to sit down and discuss either the value-impact their changes are bringing their customers or their messaging about this value because one of the following is absolutely true:
A. The changes being implemented are a significant value reduction for their customers and represent a misunderstanding of what those customers need
or
B. The changes do provide that value still but that has not yet been effectively communicated.
Thanks for your time. Wish my words were able to be more positive. Asana-crew your work has helped my business achieve great process strength and elevated success - I really look forward to seeing how you continue to do so. Thanks for all your efforts.