Company

Episode 11 Summary: June – September 2014

At the end of every “Episode” of work at Asana, each team writes a summary of the work they’ve accomplished to share with the company. We’ve synthesized the highlights from the episode into this post to help you follow along with our progress.

Episode 11 was undoubtedly defined by the launch of our new iOS app — a pivotal point for our company as we entered a new era of Asana’s visual design and further established ourselves as a multi-platform company. We made a lot of progress on a number of fronts, one task at a time, one project at a time, one Key Result (KR) at a time.

Product, product, product

When our mobile team started working on the completely new Asana for iOS, we knew it was going to be BIG. As we began testing the app internally, and then invited customers to beta test, we quickly realized it was going to fundamentally change the way we work, and we couldn’t wait to share it more broadly.

We reimagined the Asana experience on iOS, and quickly followed our iOS7 launch with a version for iOS8. We were blown away by the overwhelmingly positive response both from users, as well as Apple — we were featured in a list of top iOS8 apps for both business and productivity. If you haven’t tried the iOS app yet, you can get it from the App Store. And if you’re an Android user, stay tuned: our fully-staffed Android team is heads-down working on a beautiful new app for you.

Although our iOS app was our biggest product launch, we worked on a number of other product improvements simultaneously; one of our favorites was rich text. We also made API improvements for developers who build on top of Asana, which will, in turn, enhance the experiences of their users and add more functionality to Asana.

By the end of E11, we had another major launch — Dashboards, which gives you higher-level visibility across all projects in your Organization. Dashboards are already changing how team leads view, analyze, and communicate their work to company executives.

We also made significant investments in product performance, as defined in the long-term plan we introduced in our last episode review. While not outwardly visible now, they’ll result in a better Asana experience for you both on the web and in our mobile apps.

Education, awareness, and support

In E11, our user research team worked closely with product and marketing to help both new and existing users better understand how to get up and running on the new features and products we introduced. This work was reflected both in the development of our product’s new user experience, as well as in the new content produced, including a quick start article for iOS, videos, and a re-organization and updates to the Guide content. Once again, we achieved very high service levels across all support queues and maintained our unusually high customer satisfaction relative to industry standards.

22 new Asanas

E11 was our biggest episode on the hiring front. We welcomed 22 outstanding new Asanas to the team. We also produced a video that will acquaint you with some of the talented individuals who make up the Asana team and offer insights into how we are thinking about the future of work. Take a look.

Efficiency and internal scaling

Ensuring a great Asana experience for you involves doing a lot of work that’s invisible outside of the company, but incredibly important to helping us grow our team and scale our processes. In E11, we upgraded our testing infrastructure, got our data SLA under control, radically improved our data/metrics infrastructure and capabilities, introduced a business intelligence tool, added new employee benefits, and improved our physical and virtual environments in preparation for scaling the company.

“It changed everything”

We’re continuing to grow into our long-term vision, and one of the best reminders of this is the significant positive impact Asana has on our customers’ abilities to manifest their visions. One Asana user put it best when he said, “I didn’t think it was possible, but Asana really replaced internal email for us. We have this rule – it’s either in Asana or it doesn’t exist. [Asana has] changed everything about how we operate.” To further highlight these stories and celebrate the successes of our customers, we launched a #withasana campaign on social media to showcase the amazing products and services teams are building with Asana.

Few things make us want to work harder than knowing that our efforts continue to change the way you work, for the better.

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