I’m excited to announce that today we’ve begun rolling out a new feature called Goals to help you set, track, and achieve your most important company goals.
With Goals, aligning your teams around clear objectives and prioritizing the right work is easier than ever. Goals are public to everyone so that individuals across every level of your organization have clarity on the company’s priorities at any given time.
Goals can be linked to projects and Portfolios for real-time visibility into progress and Goals are also visible and accessible within the progress tab of an individual project or Portfolio. For more information on how to use Goals, check out the Asana Guide.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be making this feature available to all our Business and Enterprise customers so don’t worry if you don’t have access to the Goals feature today, we are rolling it out gradually.
We are always open to customer feedback and would love to hear from you. Please fill out this feedback form so we can keep track of customer requests. And of course, if you have any comments or questions, feel free to post them in the comments below. We look forward to hearing what you think!
Thanks for the update! Saw this show up in our demo account a few days ago. In initially playing with it, started to feel a bit overwhelmed as there’s so many “project status/portfolios/milestone” type features already within Asana.
We are a small team, 2-3 users. With that, do you envision that Goals won’t be of huge use to smaller teams? Even project status is a bit overkill for such a small team because we are all on the same page most days and it is.
I think actually being shown good use-cases for goals for example in a smaller team would help with adoption and open up our eyes a bit to use-cases.
Feels like much of these features are being developed for large organizations and not so much small teams.
Any guidance would be incredibly helpful and appreciated
We’ve been waiting for this!! Hope it fits all our OKR management needs! We’re looking forwar to having this feature in this organization, we can’t see anyhting yet Good job and thank you
We are also using OKRs a lot, but in my opinion before Asana fixes Portfolios I do not see how Goals can be tracked properly. Otherwise interesting idea, could have spent time on more important issues all around Asana.
Great question! I think Goals can be useful for smaller teams too as it provides a central place for team members to align on their objectives and what you’ve set to achieve as a team. For small organisation, they may feel less obvious at first, but we believe they make strategic planning clearer and easier, no matter the size of your company. They can also be super useful as your company scales (team and/or business).
To help you visualise how tasks, projects, portfolios and goals fit together and ladder up to your mission, I’ve added below Asana’s pyramid of clarity:
I have a feeling that I will have more clarity come the 15th for the Future of Asana event. I tried a pretty top-level OKR that our team is working on over the next year, and for now, it appears that only 1 project plays a role in that. Though it seems quite manual for giving progress/status updates to report on it.
It doesn’t seem that much is automation regarding pulling in status/percent complete/etc. based on project completion or anything (which seems to be more of the Portfolios). I suppose it feels more useful to larger teams because the status updates are quite manual.
Trying to explore a bit right now and I suppose at a top-level, our team wants to build a productizable process over the next year:
In that, I don’t feel like it really brings to light really any insights. I’m definitely trying to think through a way to use this. I think maybe we just need to be inspired a bit
I tried to play around a bit with Goals and would also like to give my feedback, admittedly from a very short trial.
Looks like a nice idea and I can see the idea of value behind it
Needs a lot of manual clicks, administration and oversight
Does not link in any way to what you do in the projects or portfolios and thus someone has to oversee all three in order to report manually on the goal
I have to fully agree with @abass that it does not really bring so much added value or clarity, rather it creates one more area that needs to be managed and maintained.
I can see how it can be used for really small goals, like “Increase website visitors with 10,000 per month” or something like that so ideally if you use it like 1 project > 1 goal it will be great. I personally would add goal in the project level rather than on such top level separate section. As it is now I personally do not see an application beyond setting a specific goal for a specific project, maybe specific portfolio or 2-3 projects.
The reason it is also not very useful at the moment is that:
Portfolios is still hugely underdeveloped - you cannot add projects to portfolios from the project itself (Asana please fix this, I imagine it is not 10,000 developer hours to solve it), a lot of the actions are very manual, etc. I am not even starting on workload since it is not relevant here
If you use Goals for small goals which are projects or portfolio specific maybe you will end up with 100 goals - if they are public people will get lost, reporting will not be done, because no one wants to maintain additional things, etc.
So from my side 10 for effort, 10 for idea, 4 for execution, 1 for opportunity cost (there are a lot a lot of things that everyone in the forum has been asking for for years now and have not been addressed)
@abassThe Future of Asana event we’re organizing next week should definitely give you more insights into our vision for the next couple of years, hope to see you (virtually) there! This is our first shot at Goals and based on your feedback we will work on some iterations over the next couple of months, so thanks for sharing your experience with us!
@IvanStaykov, if you haven’t yet, I would recommend sharing your feedback through this form so our team can review it and take it onboard for the next Goals update!
Asana is getting really good at rolling out half baked ideas. I don’t see how this is any more useful than creating a normal Project (which we currently do for OKRs) and would much rather see custom user permissions for Enterprise customers.
Hey @Tim_Jasper, great feature list and we can all get behind it easily. Unfortunately most of things are not at all in the feature list that Asana considers, so I would not hold my breath.
Hi @Marie just a heads up that the link on the new Goals feature page for Asana Academy connects through to an old Goals lesson which teaches how to set these up in a project.
Definitely confused by Goals, how it correlates to portfolios (which was originally supposed to track goals?), what is a subgoal and its purpose, how projects are related to portfolios vs. goals.
Is there a demo video for this for an actual use case? Seems like a necessity before rollout for a complicated feature like this. The guide article explains some functionality but doesn’t really empower the user to use it with the best practices the product developers must have had in mind.
+1 here. I would have loved to play around with GOALS but turn it OFF for my organization (on a business account). I dislike that anyone can add any goal they want.
Available on the business plan… Does that mean that Premium (paying!) users have another link in the menu that has no function? Portfolios also leads to “please upgrade”. Now Goals is added to take up precious space in the sidebar…
Thank you so much for all the feedback you have provided so far, we really appreciate it.
@Todd_Cavanaugh, Goals should represent the outcomes you’ve set to achieve that support your organization’s top-level objectives. They’re the public-facing commitments of the team, that often ladder up to your org’s top goals/priorities. These outcomes are supported and driven by the work in your projects and Portfolio. We recommend you use Goals to set and track the progress of strategic goals, while Portfolios should be used to manage, monitor the health of a collection of projects, and keep your team updated on the progress of work.
@IvanStaykov, thanks for taking the time to share your feedback, we appreciate the details and your candor, and will definitely keep it in mind as we continue working on Portfolios and Goals. The good news is that this is just the beginning for Goals and we have a long roadmap of exciting updates on the horizon. At the Future of Asana event, you’ll learn more about Goals and our multi-year product vision. If you haven’t yet, you can still register for our event later today (all details are available in The Future of Asana - you can also use this thread to chat during the event itself!).
I’ve taken note of all the feedback shared so far, but if you’d like to share more I’d highly recommend this feedback form to escalate your feedback directly to our Product Team.
I am happy to see this, I wish It had been released about a month ago, when I setup Goals & OKRs as projects linked to everything in the description. To that point, I am going to migrate over to the new Goals, but I am curious if the concept is to use subgoals to represent Key Results or if that is a future feature so I can make the migration most effective?
I saw in the Future of Asana presentations that the goals has key results red buttons like milestones do in projects. Is this a soon to have a or a next year feature just trying to decide what to do with KRs for now?
Good job and thank you 
