Good morning! My name is Thi, and I am one of the Product Managers here at Asana.
I’m excited to announce the release of Portfolios, which help you track all of your team’s important projects in a single view. With Portfolios you can organize your initiatives, monitor progress in real time, and keep stakeholders updated on progress. If you’re already using Asana, you’ll see a new “Portfolios” tab in the the left sidebar.
Portfolios are available in Asana Business, our new plan that serves as mission control for work happening across projects, teams, and even your entire company. Asana Business also comes with the ability to lock custom fields, additional training and support resources, and, coming in the new year, Workload - Asana’s take on Resource Planning.
We’re so excited to take the next step in Asana’s product vision and can’t wait to see all the amazing things our customers will accomplish with Portfolios.
Is there a way to deactivate the “Portfolio”-tab in the black menu column on the left?
As it is, it doesn’t make much sense being there for companies not using the new paid model.
On a side note: ever thought about giving out information about upcoming major changes BEFORE releasing them??? Not everbody in the company necessarilly is an Asana power user and UI-changes always end up causing much confusion.
As it stands, it is not possible to disable the Portfolio tab, but this is definitely something we will keep in mind for future updates. Sincere apologies for the confusion generated by this UI change; we made sure to add in-product educational videos to mitigate any confusion, but we will look into additional ressources in the future!
As a Premium account user I used Dashboards a lot to get high level visibility into projects. Now my entire company has to pay $10 more per person for the same functionality that we had previously even though we are already a paid user…kind of frustrated by that. Pulling existing functionality from paying users to add to a higher level paid user.
I understand your frustration with this change, and want to make sure we do what we can to make this transition easier for you. Our team would love to chat with you about how to make Asana Business work for your company. Please reach out to our team, and our team will be in touch.
Okay, I have premium, and we are a small nonprofit, but we still should get this, if not, why waste my time looking at it, or seeing it, taking up space?!
However, we too are a small nonprofit and cannot upgrade to the business account from premium (having even premium for 1/2 of our team is a real coup!) I don’t mind portfolio being in the sidebar for a little while, but I do hope it eventually goes away. I don’t want Asana to start constantly trying to sell me something. I’m bombarded with upselling all day every day. The colorful “upgrade” button in the top-right will do the job.
Also making it so I constantly have an “Upgrade” call to action in the web app feels like I am not paying $25 a month already.
Very unhappy with the bring it to market strategy here.
Especially since the Asana team has taken an old function away and now to have (I’ll be it probably an even better solution to dashboard) it back you will have to pay much more.
This makes me really angry. First you take away Dashboards from us Premium users without replacing it and then you introduce a replacement feature that ist only available i a plan that costs 10$ pp per month!? Are you kidding me?!
First off, I’m really glad to see some new features coming. We’re a small team, paying for Premium, that depends heavily on Asana, and it’s always exciting to see new ways to manage the ever-increasing number of tasks.
I made use of Dashboards to track things for my team, and it was useful, though definitely had room for improvement. Portfolios seems like a nice successor. However, I must admit to feeling a bit nickle-and-dimed over this feature, due to having had it in Dashboard form until very recently. The big “Upgrade” link in the top-right threw me off at first – I thought our billing lapsed without my noticing.
If this were a one-off situation, and necessary to fund Asana going forward, fine. I can live without Portfolios (it’s not enough to get me to upgrade to Business at this point), but it brings to mind the abuse that us Evernote users have started to sadly get accustomed to, and I don’t want to see Asana go that path.
Evernote got into a nasty habit of taking away free features, making them paid-only, and then jacking up prices to justify “maintenance” on those features. It’s become so common, this shifting of free to pay and the over-the-top price hikes, that it’s turned Evernote from a company beloved by many to one that many feel keeps them trapped in an abusive relationship.
I say this only in the hopes that Asana doesn’t go down this path.
Maybe a good tradeoff for Portfolios would be to do what Dashboards originally did for the free tier – allow a capped number of projects to be tracked when not on Business, and then unlimited when on Business? Then it doesn’t feel as much like we’re losing something, and smaller teams paying for Premium can still get value out of the new feature, with incentives to upgrade as they grow.
100%. This is exactly how I feel too. Very disappointing to see what are very basic project management features suddenly become “special” and you have to keep shelling money out, AND then they rub it in your face every where you move on the platform with the “UPGRADE” buttons.
I had the same thoughts Micha, this new “feature” (a re-hash of what was already available) is hardly worth $10/person/month. I really hope that (as Christian also mentioned) Asana don’t go down Evernote’s route and make the subscription cost more than the product value (although looks like it’s already started…).
Thanks for taking the time to write all this out and give us your feedback on this launch. I’m glad to see that you’re excited about Portfolios, and we are too! That said, I’m sorry about the frustration in the change in our feature set as well as seeing the upgrade prompt in your Asana account. I’ll pass this feedback on to our team as they continue to work on Portfolios to make sure they take it under consideration.
I also appreciate you bringing up your concerns about how Asana will continue to develop features moving forward. I know that’s can be really concerning when a company changes its feature set and updates its pricing options. However, I do want to assure you that we do not have plans to systematically change our features, take them away, or shift their packaging.
We are so appreciative of all of our users, and have a product roadmap focused on developing and improving functionality for users across our Free, Premium, Business and Enterprise offerings. We have plans in the works to improve our new Homepage, add functionality to Timeline, and more and will share those updates as soon as they’re ready.
I know a fair amount of users on this thread are frustrated about this change or concerned about the increase in price for our Business tier. We’d love to have you reach out to us
through Support so we can figure out a solution for your team.
We’re also small companies, located in South East Asia, and our currency conversion to USD are just killing us. Premium plan is already so heavy on our overhead cost (we currently have 20+ members). With the business plan pricing, we simply can’t afford at the moment.
MAYBE everyone should just chill out and realize the Business Tier is NOT just paying more $10/month more for Portfolio. . . there will be plenty more features that make the 10 bucks totally worth it!!! Especially the OKR feature. THAT to me is the real selling point for Business Tier. The portfolio is cool but really it’s about the OKR functionality. That’s what will make Asana dominate everyone else!
