How do you define a team?

I am in the midst of launching Asana org-wide across my 600 person company, and unsure where to draw the line for what should be a team vs. a project/portfolio. On the one hand, I could make a single “Marketing” team, but that is over 100 people. On the other hand, I could make Creative, Deman Gen, Lifecycle, Partnerships, SEO and Strategy teams.

While the single Marketing team seems simpler, all the organic usage that triggered this adoption formed around even more finite versions of teams (e.g. partner development & partner operations).

Can anyone share their experience and how they thought about what it should mean to be a team? Has anyone regretted their decision and have too many teams, or have too few and wish you could break them up? Thank you!

I would look at the teams as groups of people that would most likely work on the same projects together. Since you have 100+ people in Marketing, breaking that up (like you said) into marketing areas or types would make sense to me. Then when projects are added to that area, the members would be included that are to be involved. If, occasionally, one or two other people are involved for a specific reason, they can always be invited to a specific project.

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When we first starting using Asana, we took a bit of a wild, wild west approach allowing completely unrestricted team creation and found it quickly spiraled out of control for us, too many teams meant too many options and no cohesive way to organize our work. We’ve since moved from 130+ teams, down to 12, with each major department of our business as a team, and all the projects aligned within those teams accordingly. This has helped create clarity, ease of use and still completely enables cross-functional team work across projects. We certainly learned that less is more when it comes to teams.

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My upcoming ebook includes a chapter written by @lpb addressing this issue :slight_smile:

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