How Asana's Product Team Uses Asana

This is the seventh post in our “How Asana uses Asana” series! Our first post describes how Asana’s Marketing Team uses Asana.

How the Product team at Asana Uses Asana

Asana’s product team uses Asana in many different ways, so for this post we’ll discuss two examples: product opportunities and launch projects.

In this first example you’ll see a project style that you may not have thought of before. In the spirit of our product, Asana is a transparent company that collects ideas and suggestions from employees where possible. We use a Product Opportunities project in Asana to collect ideas from the team about where the product could go! In this demo screenshot, you’ll see divisions for new ideas, P0, P1, etc. Ideas are prioritized by the project owner within sections and details about each idea are discussed within the task.

In the second example you’ll see a launch project setup. We use sections for goals and reference at the top of the project, and sections for each launch phase within the body of the project. These types of launch projects can be especially helpful in template form, so you don’t necessarily have to reinvent the wheel every time you’re launching a new feature or a feature update.


Product Opportunities [demo]


Launch plan [demo]




You may also be interested in ways you can arrange a product roadmap in Asana. Take a look at this Guide article for examples: How to use Asana for product roadmaps | Product guide • Asana Product Guide

Let us know if you have questions!

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Great ! Thank you @Alexis for sharing those uses :grinning:

Last week we decided to create a project to collect ideas as in your first example. We sat up a project, almost the same as you did with a board : ideas, step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4 (=final validation). To become a real project, an idea needs to go through each step until validation.

To encourage responsibility, autonomy and motivation, the project manager can’t stop an idea before step 4, to avoid frustration for those who have ideas stopped by the manager. Nevertheless, one step is half a day, so you can’t spend too much time on a bad idea, and of course a very very very bad idea won’t be able to go very far before the whole team make everyone realize this is a bad idea …

I keep in mind the way you collect ideas if we have to adapt our project. Is the project manager taking the decision alone about which idea is worth working on ? or do you decide collectively ?

Thank you

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Hi @Julien_RENAUD!

I’m so glad to hear that this project setup is useful for you and your team. Great question about who decides which ideas are implemented. At Asana we have one or a few people manage the inventory of ideas in the project, but we have a much greater product review process and Voice of Customer process that helps us determine which features we’ll work on. Conveniently enough, our head of product, Jackie Bavaro, wrote a Medium post about how we build our product roadmap at Asana.

So, as you can see, managing the Asana project is one piece in a bigger product puzzle. Please let me know if you have other questions!

Thanks,
Alexis

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