Assignee field should only show members of a project or team

[Kyle_I]

Similarly, a division-level toggle would be fantastic. My department is on a division license within a university Asana instance, so the problem with every single user who has an Asana account tied to our university email showing up in this field is that if we accidentally assign a task to someone, it will also automatically add them to the division paid account (having the same email domain means they are not considered a “guest”) and take up a seat on the division license, costing the division money. It’s wild that Asana doesn’t have an easy way to prevent that issue for division licenses.

[Jessica_Scotten]

Upvoting here, how many votes and years of something being asked for does it take to get it on a pipeline? Asking because it’s WAYY too easy to assign a task to someone who’s not in the project when clients names are very similar.

[lpb]

@Jessica_Scotten,

It depends! There’s not a simple answer that applies to all. For an overview:

How Asana co-creates our product with customers

At Asana, your mission is our mission. That’s why we co-create our product roadmap with our customers, and value customer feedback across the development process. As Chief Product Officer, I often get questions on how we develop our roadmap and how we use your feedback, so wanted to provide an overview of our approach to product development. We start with our most important resource: Customers At Asana, our customers are co-creators of our product’s story. We continually listen to feedback thr…

Thanks,

Larry

[saturdayrepublic]

Please limit options for assigning and tagging users to only those actually on the project, with an option to “Add new user to project” if you want to assign or tag someone not already on the project. It’s too easy to accidentally tag the wrong person with a similar name, and even if you delete them immediately, they will get an email with the ticket name and sometimes ticket details depending on how you’ve added them / their settings.

[Bastien_Siebman]

@saturdayrepublic

Please limit options for assigning and tagging users to only those actually on the project, with an option to “Add new user to project” if you want to assign or tag someone not already on the project

I feel like it kinda goes against the whole “no more silos with Asana” philosophy

[Greg_Jones1]

Has there been any progress on this @Asana!?! It has been difficult to manage the amount of times this is happening! We are already exploring other options just based on this one issue. SMH.

[Apsara]

Really need this

1. Assignee is only listing people part of the project as viewer, editor, or commenter
2. Adding collaborators can be anyone in our asana directory

It’s really difficult searching for people who have similar names and sometimes the wrong people are being assigned. We’re also working with guests and they are picking the wrong people. Please help

[Brian_Wendt]

It would be an enormous help if at least the people within the project were listed first. Currently, the autocomplete for mentions and the assignee field are sorted by string match and then seemingly random (see below). If the results put project and then team members first, I think it would go a long ways to improving the experience.

I want to note that “c.card@” is sorted before “C.Camb@” when I search “C”. Mayby c.card@ was added before C.Camb@ and it’s just using the index’s order. This creates a seemingly random sort.

[Xenia_Cubrac]

The ability to assign a task to anyone in Asana now pays a really cruel joke on our My org, as a wrong assignee may cause a leak of sensitive data. And not only

[Shawn9]

when assigning or at replying a user, if I write a name
it gives the option to invite
userx@companyname.com
this has caused someone on our team to invite dozens of
userx@companyname.com’s
How do I disable this invite from the assignee field?

[Richard_Sather]

Hi @Shawn9 , unfortunately you cannot. However, you can control user provisioning using SAML available on Enterprise plans.

[Jennifer_Kordosky]

Adding a current enterprise perspective here as this issue has evolved beyond a visibility concern into a day-to-day operational problem.

In our environment, we now have 1,800+ employees surfaced in the assignee dropdown due to directory sync. Only a small subset of those users are actually part of our Marketing and Creative workflows in Asana.

This creates real execution issues:

• Assignments are slower because users have to sift through an overly broad list

• There’s a high risk of misassigning tasks, especially with similar names

• Users can accidentally trigger invites to people who are not part of the workflow

• Teams are seeing names that are intentionally out of scope, which creates confusion and breaks trust in the system

Earlier comments in this thread focused on security. That’s still valid, but for me, at scale, the bigger issue is loss of precision in task routing, which directly impacts productivity.

Recommended product improvement:
Allow admins to control the default scope of the assignee field, such as:

• Project members only (default)

• Team/workspace group

• Full organization (optional expansion)

Right now, the product is optimized for broad collaboration, but many teams operate in tightly scoped environments where accuracy and speed matter more than discoverability.

Given how common enterprise directory sync is now, this gap has become more pronounced over time.