I’m kinda surprised @KellyB is (one of?) the only one(s) mentioning all of us many unhappy users over in the Why-The-Heck-Are-Projects-Suddenly-With-No-Explanations-Or-Warning-Showing-Up-Below-Variable-Length-Description-Field thread.
While I didn’t ever really use Dashboards much, so wasn’t personally bothered by the idea of them disappearing, I’ve been following this thread with disappointment. The gloss-over/upsell approach Asana is taking makes me glad I hadn’t yet shelled out for upgrading my personal free account I have for non-work related projects (like tracking a side gig and planning a family reunion). To give you a perspective on that and how much I valued the product, I’d been seriously considering personally paying for 5 users seats (the minimum size for the paid plans), just so I’d have my own personal access to Asana and still have custom fields.
My paid work for a company of about 40 users (most of us with paid Asana seats) has been going in the direction of leaving Asana for JIRA, ever since my newish boss was hired who is much more familiar with JIRA. I’d been dreading this change in a way, since traditionally I’ve been a major Asana enthusiast, since starting to use it almost 2 years ago.
But seeing the way Asana dealt (or rather chose NOT to deal) with the mistaken UI direction they took (as detailed in the above-linked thread), and now how they are treating their once-loyal-and-enthusiast users, I’m starting to look forward to the moment we can extricate ourselves from a company that I don’t feel loyal to or excited about anymore.
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I’m seeing the trend shaping up where the most vocal users (who surely should represent even more users who aren’t taking the time to speak up) are essentially being ignored about the important core issues we are trying to have a dialogue around. In my opinion, upselling is not the same as a discussion about loss of trust.
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I’m seeing a lack of proactive, clear communication coming from Asana about major changes. They did slightly better on communication this time around, since at least I heard Dashboards were being deprecated, but as KellyB noted, we weren’t told ahead of time that we should expect a price increase for the replacement feature.
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I’m seeing a lack of ability on Asana’s part to recognize when they have made a mistake, and take actual steps to address and fix the mistake. As so many have mentioned here, if Asana needs the price increase to cover the costs of the Portfolio feature development and more, then grandfather the existing users in, so they remain the loyal fan base they once were, and continue all the word-of-mouth recommendations we all used to give, and all those new users taking our word for how great Asana once was could have come in on the higher pricing tiers without feeling frustrated by a bait and switch.
I’ve worked customer support before, and I get it that the Asana support team has to tow the line and offer the limited-time, expires-in-a-year discount to only the most pushy and/or in-a-bind customers. But I also know the pain of seeing that the company I worked for at the time was in the wrong, and the customers were in the right, and that I wasn’t allowed or empowered to help fix it for the customers.
In my experience of customer support:
- 1 user saying something is an issue is (cynically) likely because they don’t know what they are doing.
- 2 users saying it’s an issue might still be due to user error.
- 3 users all saying the same thing is an issue for them is no longer due to user error, but at least due to something that could (and IMO should) be fixed, even if it’s a small UI adjustment to make the proper workflow more clear, etc.
- 130 + users all saying it’s an issue (or in the case of the of the other thread I mentioned, ~200 users) means that the company has definitely made some sort of mistake, should acknowledge the mistake, and make the effort to actually make amends.
Amends can look like a lot of things, and in the two cases I’ve mentioned here, Asana has many opportunities for lots of different ways they could choose to apologize and make amends. I don’t see them doing that however.
It’s really too bad, as this is the kind of thing that can make a company stronger, both by strengthening the trust and support of the user base, and also by showing your staff internally that it’s a good company to work for. When one has a good work ethic and cares personally about providing good value to one’s customers, it’s painful to see that the company you work for isn’t doing right by the customers.
I assume most of the people who work for Asana could read this thread and the other, and would fall into that camp. To all of you, thanks for caring about us, and I feel for you.
I assume that it’s the Asana leadership which is putting assumed/real fiscal profit above all else, and I’d argue that a lot of companies do that, anyway, so that’s not the issue (at least not in this thread). The issue is that effective companies that are good at what they do make a profit while also making the user feel as though the profit is not the only thing that matters, and that our needs and concerns are what the company is there to help us solve. And Asana is not making me feel that way anymore, and hasn’t been for awhile.
As such, Asana isn’t being very effective anymore, at least in terms of user perception. And I don’t want my data with an ineffective company, nor do I want other people I know associating me with having recommended an ineffective company. I won’t recommend Asana anymore, which is a sad turn of events. Sounds like a lot of us are saddened that what we thought was a good company is turning out to not be something we can recommend anymore.
