The story behind... Asana

Asana is a game-changing tool for managing teams and workflows. It's a web and mobile app that helps bring your team together, making communication and collaboration effortless. It all started in 2008, when two former Facebook co-founders, Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, were on a mission to build a tool that could foster effective teamwork. They knew firsthand the struggles of working together on a large scale and decided to build their own solution. And that's how Asana was born, a tool that makes teamwork feel like a breeze.

How it all began

When they first met, Dustin and Justin worked on engineering teams at Facebook. They noticed that as the company was growing quickly, everyone was spending so much time in meetings, answering emails, and looking for information that it was hard to get actual work done. They realized that all the small details were becoming a huge distraction, and important projects were falling behind.?

In our combined experience at both Google and Facebook, we became frustrated with seeing teams of tremendously smart people get stuck not doing the work that mattered but spending the majority of their time doing "work about work."

Justin Rosenstein.

So they created a tool to help teams coordinate work more efficiently. The result not only gave teams clarity on what to do and why, but it also allowed them to get back time to focus on big ideas. Dustin and JR were fired up. Soon after, they founded Asana to dedicate their time to creating solutions that would help more teams do great work without wasting time on unproductive tasks.

Focus on user’s needs

While we were at Facebook, we collaborated on a way to solve this problem for the company by building an internal task management tool called "Tasks." In many ways, this was the prototype for Asana, though we didn't realize it at the time.

Dustin Moskovitz.

Dustin quickly realized that he needed help to keep up with all the new ways Facebook teams wanted to use this tool and started focusing on Asana's development full-time. He and JR knew that this couldn't just be a side project anymore; it had to be its own thing. That's when Asana officially became a standalone product, and they never looked back.

The growth of Asana happened in the same way we see with countless digital products: users adapted the tool to their own needs, and the tool gradually incorporated new features, learning from the user experience.

They understood a basic problem: losing focus and time due to a lack of organization. And so, they attacked the pain point by creating a tool to streamline tasks and provide direction and efficiency for teams.

Though we built it originally to solve a few use cases within engineering, it was adopted by teams all across the company and started being used for things we never anticipated, like meeting notes and agendas (which could then easily be turned into action items).

Dustin Moskovitz.

Because workers spend most of their time with a laptop, so they started by making the asana.com web experience a first-class experience. Then developing apps for iOS and Android as well, prioritizing three aspects of the product: to be faster, efficient, and beautiful.

The name they chose, Asana, a Sanskrit word that refers to the place and bodily posture that a yogi adopts to meditate. A pose is the result of the combination of form and fluidity to stay focused. The founders chose it to describe their aim to build a product that simplifies things.

Thinking about how to make life easier for people who use our product, is a quality of user-centered design.

The biggest roadblock on the way

Once you build the product, you need to educate people on the habit of using it, which requires a lot of attention. It's not just about having a user-friendly and accessible product but about becoming a part of their daily lives. Users start a journey to adopt the tool; they have to develop the habit of opening it, using it, returning to it, solving some of their problems through this tool, and making it part of their processes.

The biggest impediment is the inertia people have with their existing tools and processes. It's hard enough to create a real behavior change with a single person, so catalyzing that for a whole group at the same time requires that team to be highly motivated.

Dustin Moskovitz

How did they solve it? They worked hard to make their early adopters super successful. They knew their future customers would become motivated by hearing stories about how Asana improved their ability to pursue their mission. They spread the word and let happy customers do the talking. Asana has become an essential tool for many teams.

Strengths

• They found something that compelled them to throw themselves at it entirely and positively impacted the world.

• They prioritized creating and sharing content about all the best ways teams and individuals can get up and running and have published many of them in the Asana Guide.

• Integrations: Asana has integrations with third-party software providers and links into productivity tools, including Google Drive, Jira, OneDrive, Dropbox, and Slack.

Asana was born to find comfort in dealing with projects.

The success of Asana relies on its simplicity. It keeps sophisticated and minimalistic, with a friendly user interface, where users can keep a clean workspace and collaborate in a timeline, providing feedback.