Here at Asana we use the Asana product to manage our work all day every day. We’re working creatively with Asana to manage our workflows, just like you are! So, with this post we’re beginning a series about how Asana uses Asana. (Meta, we know 
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How Asana’s Marketing Team Uses Asana
In this post we’ll tell you about how the Marketing team at Asana uses Asana. You’ve already seen thoughtful examples of content calendars in the Community, such as @paulminors’ informative post here. So, we’re going to showcase another type of workflow we rely on: communication design requests. We rely on our talented designers to make our product and all of our marketing collateral beautiful. We require a structured workflow to manage those requests so our designers have just the right amount of projects to work on and we have the design output we need. We use our Comms Design Requests & Sprint Plans project to organize this workflow. Take a look at the description of our structure and images of a demo Asana project below.
Our Comms Design Requests & Sprint Plans project is structured as follows:
- Project name: Comms Design Requests and Sprint Plans
- Project purpose: Team submits requests for a design, Asana project coordinator prioritizes and assigns design creation to designers, designers refer to this project to manage their work.
- Project structure:
** Template task for every new request - includes custom fields and description structure
** Custom fields for timing, priority, approver, tier, related to KR, and hours
** Sections for new requests, needs more info, and designers
- How the project is managed: one person (Lily in this demo) coordinates this project. When someone has a design request, they copy the template task, fill out all required fields, assign to Lily (project coordinator) and place the task in the Design Requests (put new requests here): section. At the beginning of each 3 week sprint, Lily prioritizes the requests, assigns them to designers, and puts them in the designer’s section in the project. If project timing is not distributed evenly, Lily comments on the task and adjusts or confirms timeline with the designer and the person who created the request.
What the project looks like:
PROJECT
DESCRIPTION
REQUEST TEMPLATE TASK
COMPLETED REQUEST TASK
Please let us know if you have questions!
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This is really great @Alexis. I like how the custom fields and really clear instructions in the template make it so that it’s really “idiot proof” i.e. if people follow instructions, you should get all information you need first time.
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Haha I’m with you, Paul! It’s hard to make a mistake when the instructions are explicitly clear. I really like the way our marketing team does this.
Love seeing this @Alexis. It helps me know that I’m on the right track with my own design request project (though the team is just me 
.)
Why does your team not utilize a “status” custom field rather than sorting into a section such as “needs more info”?
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This is very nice!!! I needed that when we had our rebranding project! 
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Glad you feel like you’re on the right track!
I believe the status custom field vs. sections is a preference thing. I, for example, find it a lot easier visually to see things in sections (along the lines of the agile methodology(, as opposed to having a long list of tasks with custom fields and no sections. However, some folks much prefer custom fields to sections!
Hope this helps. Let me know if you have other questions.
Thanks. I suspected it’s just personal preference. I can’t make up my mind regarding this same setup so I was curious. I’d like to be able to sort tasks by the requester so I am currently using a custom field titled “project owner”. We’ll see how this develops as our Asana use grows.
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Question for you, as I do something similar - a creative request comes in from another department (task). However, once I assign it to a designer, I don’t want that requesting person to be able to see my back & forth with the designer. Otherwise, that person continues to interject on drafts, and I don’t want them to see it until I finalize it and send it to them at that time for comments/changes. Any ideas for me?
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@Brigett_Lummel You could try removing the requestor a a collaborator, which means they wouldn’t get notifications about the updates. Then, when you’re ready for their review, you could @-mention them in a comment to add them back in. Do you think that could work?
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This is super helpful, @Alexis. Does “designer assignments:” (in the completed request task under Reference materials) link to a section in a project containing tasks with dimensions/specs?
Hi Caitlin! Yes, that’s one option. It might also be used to list each designer’s specialty. I recommend customizing the reference section to meet your team’s needs, so you link to whatever people will consistently need to be successful at creating these tasks.
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