Having just attended the event i think the ambition is great. Asana will create a toll that will deliver what is required and provide solutions. It clear why they have taken the path and the data needs to create this level of automation is huge.
One thing from me…I love the discussion about auto creating a days work and filling your calendar. For this to truly work a significantly better integration to Micro soft and google will be needed. Companies wont just run through asana and meetings will sit out side of this.
I’m doing my second run now! Loving all of it! Great job everyone! Huddle’s for me and if I can really focus on one or 2 tasks a day, I would be happy. Right now I have 3k!
Getting into the details the Assistant feature for meetings and collaboration and focusing on the meeting and not necessary notes. Also, getting time back and notifications where you can bring it down to being distracted only by what’s important to that task you’re doing brilliant idea. Integration into all the systems I’m using and starting my day that would be so great I would love it. You can see the focus element is so key for me right now cuz I’m I have too many new projects, tasks, ideas, where I need to bring it down to some of the most key things that I need to finish.
Thanks for making the video available for those of us who missed the live event! I finally managed to give it a watch last night.
I have to say - i love the vision and i love the ambition. How it translates to practical terms is something i look forward to seeing. In my head, I get nervous about ceding control over what i see or how data is presented to me. My gut makes me want to have access to it all, triage it and agree the approach to take. So your challenge isn’t just a technical one, but also a behavioural one. And more so than just that, it’s a group behavioural one. When all the business trusts and uses Asana as it’s intended to be used then this can work, but if I still feel i need to check my emails, or go look something up on another third party resource, then my potential productiveness is attritioned. Please note I’m not saying that to discourage you - I love change and this vision, and I look forward to an opportunity to sell these ideas and bring others along on the efficiencies that can be gained, but it is a journey you’ll need to encourage people to take with you also.
I do have one concern: privacy. When you’re talking about smart algorithms, voice recording and automated annotation and focus modes - this all requires a vast amount of smart data aggregation, categorisation, OCR technologies and more. To achieve all that, you need to be using personal and confidential data in a ‘full’ way, and those are risks that could increase the perception and impact of a data loss event. Of course that is the worst case scenario, but it’s an important one for businesses these days. I hope that customers will still have control to opt in to some of these uses of data, and that the data privacy and uses of data conditions and details are clear, most especially if any concern exposing data to third parties to achieve this.
I’m sure it’s on your risk logs and that you’re discussing it internally and being responsible, but if you could keep your customers informed on this point too it would, i’m sure, be very appreciated!
Other than that, great job, and keep thinking outside the box!
I watched the video and indeed it was quite interesting. We are yet to see some of the good ideas of the similar video from two years ago, so lets see how many of those are delivered in any shape or form.
The ability to gather tasks from different products is a great idea, unfortunately geared towards bigger companies, I would doubt that most products that smaller companies use will be supported by Asana. Currently you can do that with some form of Zapier or alternative integration.
AI is a nice idea to bring up related work and information. My experience is that it makes us lazy to push ourselves to understand the bigger picture and over time we are left and happy with only what is presented to us. There was a clever term for this, I am not sure what it was, where your feed is determined from your actions and over time you end up in a self sustaining bubble, as you are not presented with anything outside your scope.
Huddle is a great feature and looks promising, unfortunately it seems to rely a lot on AI and on transcripts (understanding user speech and being able to understand action points in it). I am yet to see a single product that does this well for all languages and all speech patterns within each language. I think we will start paying equally for features that are “currently only available in US, Canada and Australia” or something like that.
Workflow store sounds great, but seeing the limited application for rules at the moment I would expect that those workflows would be quite simplistic. The true automation are a big thing if they can work it will be fantastic. I expect that you will need the higher tiers in the relative products which may not be available to most mid size companies.
Goals was presented nicely, I personally did not get a lot from how it is supposed to work, as it was quite conceptual at places. We will see how it is developed, currently I think it was launched prematurely.
The timeline fix is great, but until you can you see all people or teams at one place, basically workload is useless, a lot of people have commented on that and nothing has been done in that respect. Basically a business feature being paid for that cannot be used since it does not do what it says it does. Workload is only Portfolio Workload and I hope that we can all agree this is not the same. If one person has little work in a protfolio and a lot of work in another portfolio, you can see how he/she can be overworked as they will be given more tasks in the first portfolio.
Workgraph is a great idea and with a lot of promise, but if you keep only delivering top level tools, it will never be done properly as the delivery is in the small details, which currently Asana is very reluctant in addressing.
A lot of those solutions will need a deeper integration with tools like Microsoft Office, G Suite, etc. We are still waiting for more than a few years for one of the most voted features - two way calendar sync, so I am not sure how what was shown is feasible.
So I personally saw a lot more promise in the event two years ago, at least as it comes to real world application and benefit to our business. Here is a lot of AI and a lot of things that we will never see the light of day and will be another 10-15 years since our country business culture, business type, even law comes to a point where we can reap any benefit.
Asana look like made of nice people, but is a typical US product for US companies, that live in their own bubble and not the way things work in less developed parts of the world.
I personally will be happy with really simple things like:
being able to report on task progress. Currenly you can only report on project, portfolio, goal progress. However lets say that you have a project with 10 tasks, the report will say 0/10, when in reality maybe 50% of the work is done of all the tasks have been started (yes I know about tags and custom fields - I would like to have one less manual place to track). So this creates a degree of inaccuracy. Add this to a portfolio of 10 project, this inaccuracy multiplies, Add this to a goal it multiplies futrther. So you can see that reports are become more of a guideline than actual map the higher the reporting is done.
two way calendar sync - not even worth commenting on
real workload - for the love of god, how much time if ever? In what way did anyone ever think that tracking it in portfolios can work? You can add all your projects to a portfolio and this way it will work. Ok we have a bit over 1100 projects in our domain, a portfolio can hold only 200. So either I cannot do it since I cannot fit it or I need to personally have access to all 1100 projects and personally add them with 3 clicks each to a portfolio. I also personally need to make sure that I add or to make sure that someone adds any new project in any new team to this portfolio. Asana mission statement?
etc. etc. etc. etc. just browse the forum and you will see.
The reason I am spending so much time to write those feedback everywhere is because I considered myself an Asana fanatic, I loved the product, I loved everything about it, I showed it to my friends, customers, vendors and over time I feel betrayed. I was seeing people that care about their customers, but now I see a company that only cares about itself and its vision. There are only few products out there that have such an active, honest, detailed in their feedback fanbase and use base and it seems that no one is listening to it.
Hi @IvanStaykov and thank you so much for taking the time to share your feedback with us over the last couple of days, we really appreciate you!
As we’re still at a very early stage of this vision, I can’t comment on all points you’ve made just yet, but I’ll be happy to address them as we work toward executing this vision over the next couple of months/years. And rest ensured that while developing Asana is one of our priority, we’re also planning to dedicate a lot of time improving existing features (keep an eye on the announcements category over the next couple of weeks, we have some exciting news on the way).
Last but not least, if you haven’t yet, I’d highly recommend you to check our Community Program. It’s a wonderful opportunity to connect with other like minded people and Asana lovers, to engage with our team and to get access to upcoming product previews! For more details, check out Asana community • Asana and don’t hesitate to reach out to me via DM if you have any question in relation to our program!
Honestly I am super amazed at how you manage to always get back to my replies so calmly and positively. Hats down and my deepest admiration, it must not be easy to manage 1000 people with 1000 different opinions.
Hi @Alexander_Deeney and apologies for the delay in responding to you!
As this is just a vision for the Asana product, we have not yet dug in completely to all the nuances of these products, especially the ones we have yet to start building. That being said, our customer’s data privacy is one of our top priority and we will never launch something that intentionally compromises or risks that privacy. We insist that everything that we take to market is secure, and if there is world where these features do not meet that threshold, then they will not launch. Our aim is to provide clarity and ensure that our customers feel excited and secure in using our tool. As we continue to build these features out, we will make sure you stay informed. And, if you ever feel as if you’re missing information like this, please let us know and we will get your as much clarity as we can!
A cautionary tale for Asana: Evernote had big plans to add machine-learning-based intelligence to its product but had to back off due to users’ privacy concerns:
