New to Asana: Is it worth it and being actively developed?

I’m still new to Asana, and I’m in my premium trial. Do you think it’s worth it, and is the platform being actively developed? I see a lot of user requests for pretty simple and obvious things, and they have gone unresolved for years. I’ve found tech support to be pleasant, but they generally don’t have a solution since some basic features have never been implemented and are not on their roadmap.

Some of my issues:

  • The calendar printing is useless and cluttered.

  • The calendar view on screen is meh.

  • Subtasks don’t show in the calendar.

  • The idea of custom fields is great, but it’s not well implemented. No ability to select multiple entries? No ability to have an “other”? No default selection(s)? This is pretty simple stuff.

So, what say you more active and long-term users? I really cannot pay for and onboard a program that’s not going to work for me.

HI @Stanford_Griffith, I think the answer to the question of wether or not it is worth it really depends on what your core needs are in a product and what problem you are needing it to solve.

I personally 100% believe it is worth it…
Yes it is being developed and they are releasing updates regularly…
Does it have short falls yes it does, and they do seem to being addressed… As fast as we all would like probably not.

Jason.

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One of those features is coming. The ability to select multiple items in a custom field.

For the others the question is, can you find a work around to use with Asana or is there a different product that better provides what you need.

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I think it is definitely worth it. However if what you list is a deal breaker, you should think twice because they could not get implemented for months. For most requests, there is a workaround or an external solution :slight_smile:

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Ack, please don’t add subtasks to the calendar! That would render it unusable for us.

We’ve been premium for over a year and a half and I’d say it’s definitely worth it. I don’t think the perfect project management software exists, but Asana does most of what we want it to do, and I like the ethos and team at Asana. This Community makes a big difference too. Not all organisations would provide such comprehensive support.

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A smart developer would make the calendar more flexible, allowing users the option to include or not include subtasks.

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Thanks. I think I’m going to have look at those external solutions too.

In my humble opinion the biggest limitation of Asana is if you are a Project Manager that needs to stay on top of more than 7/10 projects. In this case the notification system in Asana became rapidly unmanageable due to its inability to sort or filter notifications (mentions, replies, comments, likes, questions etc) by project. So you will end to look for notifications about a specific project you are interested, in a mixed stream of notifications coming from all projects you are involved in. After many years of being premium users our project numbers grown
and we are now seriously and regretfully considering to leave Asana since they have no plans in this directions, as confirmed by support team.

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I’ve been using Asana for several years, after having tried an excruciatingly exhaustive number of other to-do-list/productivity/gantt-chart programs. Asana is the best I’ve tried, and I like it a lot. I use it for my small company and for my personal productivity.

My main advice is to stick with Asana only if the current features work well for you. Don’t get your hopes up that your desired improvements will come. Yes, Asana is still being worked on, and feature improvements do trickle in at a fairly constant rate. But overall progress is slow.

For example, my main bugbear when I first started using it were the inconsistencies between the desktop version and the android app. This is clearly an issue they identified, and they’ve fixed many of the problems over the years. Yet there are still certain actions that you can do on desktop but, inexplicably, not on the the Android app.

Another example is the new homepage view. It’s incredibly rudimentary for how much hoohaa Asana has given it, and one feels that it may be years before it truly offers anything particularly remarkable.

To sum up: I think Asana is great, and my sense is that the team work on it with enthusiasm and in good faith. But its evolution can be glacial, so what you see is what you get. That’s actually pretty good if you already have your workflow set in stone and don’t want the distraction of frequent UX overhauls.

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You hit it on the head, second sentence in. I don’t think anything more needs to be said, but I will anyway.

There are too many basic functionalities that you expect with these app, that are just non-existent with Asana. For one example, the notifications system - this is the single biggest mind f*** I’ve experienced so far. How can I and my team be all online and working inside of Asana, and I have no idea what they are changing or commenting on, I literally have to rely on a third party app (Slack) to notify me of the most basic things. And to re-iterate on why I quoted the above, is because literally hunderds of people since 2017 have requested this basic feature, and… Nothing.

Another example of a basic function, that you inherently expect, is to create hyperlinks (just like I did above) inside of project descriptions. And again, requested and ignored.

This one my take the cake for me though, empty tasks. This just poor code development on full display.

I can keep going, but you get the idea. Support is here to only maintain what they have, not to listen to your pity requests.

I don’t have an answer for the perfect project management tool, as I’ve tried every single one in existence. But to answer your question… “Is it worth it?” … Depends, can you spare time trying other apps? If yes then do it, if not then stay put because you’ll eventually do a full circle.

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Thanks for all your feedback so far; we’re trying to keep this forum as open as possible and always welcome feedback, whether it is positive or negative. Speaking of feedback, I’d like to clarify a few things. We definitely do not ignore feedback and in fact, we have robust processes in place to collect and process feedback; you can learn more about it in this post.

Our Product team is full of experts who have tremendous vision for Asana’s product and who spend their time listening to Asana’s customer requests and considering how those requests fit into our greater business strategy and product vision. As I’m sure you can imagine, with millions of Asana customers, we receive hundreds of requests on a daily basis. It is our product team’s job to prioritize those requests in the context of many other factors. Some request that might appear easy to implement actually require a fair amount of work in the backend; rest ensured that we do not ignore these requests, our Development Team has already started to tackle some of them, and I’ll update all relevant Community Forum threads as soon as I have some more updates to share.

Thanks again for you patience and for being very honest in your feedback, this is something we highly value as a company.

Happy Thursday!

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Thank you for the information. Is there a public roadmap you can share? I think everyone who submits feedback would like to know what they’re asking for is or isn’t being considered beyond that a team says they’re considering it. I’m not doubting your commitment or expertise, but the feedback loop here seems more like a dark hole where requests of all kinds simply go into a black hole. Or sometimes, team members comment they’re working on the request, and then nothing after.

Since you brought it up, I’m curious how the calendar printing in black and white b/c of a CSS style affects your business strategy. I mean, that style had to be created and implemented beyond what the browser would do natively. So, can you walk me through that one as an example of how your roadmap and strategy works?

Thank you.

Hi @Stanford_Griffith and thanks for the follow-up!

As it stands we do not have a public roadmap, but as I explained in my previous post, you can learn more about our ranking and roadmap process in this post. I would also advise you to take a look at this article (referenced in the post above too) in which one of our Product Manager, Jackie Bravo also walk you through our Roadmap process. Last but not least, you be interested into this article in which we tell you the whole story behind Asana Timeline.

Hope this helps, have a great Wednesday!

You have good instinct of looking at the forum requests for simple features that are still open literally for years. I would not count on Asana team to add new functionality quickly. They do not publish roadmap nor even the list of new features that are being worked on. They have ethos, coolness, aesthetics, friendliness, but not the agility, speed and determination to make feature rich product. Asana tries very hard to be easy, clear and friendly as a product and as a support team. You can also observe that lack of power features is supplemented by variety of external tools, plugins, browser extensions.

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I found you very hard on them. This is business, if you want every single desire to be answered, then do a custom tool and that will cost you a fortune.

Do they prioritize shinny features against bug fixing? Sometimes, looks like it. Has the product evolve dramatically over the years? Yes it has! For the unanswered threads “for years” that you see, there are literally millions of people using the product every day. We find work around and wait for the product team to make the right decisions to keep the product simple. People don’t realize that even if something is easy to do, you need to take into account the simplicity of the product. A simple toggle to customize a behavior is costing literally thousands of dollars down the road because of the legacy code, the bugs, the added complexity…

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Hi @Dariusz_Lis, and thank you for your feedback.

While we can’t promise a timeline or specific features, we can promise that we take your feedback seriously and we are considering it alongside other customer feedback at Asana. We share more information on why we do not share a product roadmap here.

We do our best to prioritize what is important to all customers and create features that will have the greatest impact on the customer experience.

To know more about our plans for the future, I invite everyone to join our upcoming event: The future of Asana.

You can find all the details in this thread: The future of Asana! Join us for an exciting event on July 15th 2020

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