11 ms·

Asana

166 points by s4chin 11y ago

mckilljoy 11y ago
I just skimmed through some of those Glassdoor reviews. They were all quite positive, but I find it interesting that the vast majority were posted Feb-Mar 2016.
- shas3 11y ago
  I wonder, earnestly, on a tangent: how do you ensure the authenticity of Glassdoor reviews? What's the guarantee that people are not faking good reviews? They should probably implement a system of employment verification.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    I apply the same metric I apply to online product or service reviews. If they appear on a regular cycle, or if they appear in some of there kind of statistically improbable clumps, or if there are no negative comments at all, then they may not be entirely plausible. Employment verification won't help on Glassdoor, because it would be the easiest thing in the world to hint to a group of the most settled employees that maybe they could leave positive ratings. It would help against malicious negative reviews - which can also be a thing.
    - shas3 11y ago
      Websites with reviews are doing a disservice to users by not giving us tabulated reviews and tools to view detailed statistics. I'm reminded of 538's impressive interactive data exploration pages.
  - marcog1 11y ago
    I think it requires a company email? I can't recall. They also have a verification window, reviews don't post for a couple days.
    - gk1 11y ago
      It's not difficult for a company to create new email addresses or use past employees' email addresses. I know at least one company that does that.
  - qaq 11y ago
    Fake reviews are generally written by PR/Marketing people so they never look authentic.
  - SuperKlaus 11y ago
    A lot of companies ask their employees to write positive reviews so employment verification doesn't necessarily help guaranteeing authentic reviews.
  - gceck9 11y ago
    Relatedly, I'm not convinced Glassdoor doesn't delete or hide posts that are unfavorable to the employer. I've kept tabs on the reviews and scores left on my previous company's page and at least several negative reviews are nowhere to be found.
    - mattlutze 11y ago
      It doesn't to my knowledge. I see both good and bad reviews for my company come hit my email inbox regularly.
  - malz 11y ago
    Many valid reviews are written by former employees, so I'm not sure how you could verify those. A subset of those are from people with an axe to grind. Look at any company that's had layoffs, for example. In general, I've found Glassdoor to be incredibly biased, either shills (in a small company, nobody's going to publicly trash their employer with the risk of being identified), or trolls (any company, once large enough, has former employees who didn't get along with their boss and choose to escalate it).
- marcog1 11y ago
  That happened when someone noticed we were ranked #1 in the Bay Area and announced it to the company. Employees followed with more reviews.
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polysaturate 11y ago
For myself, using Asana falls into the the don't love, but don't hate, category. The UI is pretty nice, but I always feel it just doesn't have enough teeth for complex project/collaboration. I mean, I see it has a lot of features to facilitate that need(project, hierarchical tasks, attachments, commenting), but it doesn't convey 'serious business'.
- buraksarica 11y ago
  Asana shows a simpler way to achieve a goal IMO. It always feels a bit "fundamental" but it never disappoints you, which is very frequent when you work upon a "serious" tool.
- tudorizer 11y ago
  Interesting argument. I'm using Trello and many people say something similiar about it, but my researched always showed me that those people either don't know how to use Trello to the full potential or they are generally bad at organising. What would make Asana convey "real business" ?
  - polysaturate 11y ago
    I think it feels as though it was created as a very simple task tracker at first, and project/collab features were tacked on later.
  - miseg 11y ago
    Each to their own, I suppose :) I've quickly reviewed Asana, and actually found it quite complex. Trello works nicely with our small team. People don't generally have full projects assigned to them, so a Trello card for a specific task to be executed works well.
- cwilson 11y ago
  As a very heavy day to day user, my biggest three complaints are: 1. Ability to "lock" a row. We often build lists in Asana that are not meant to be tasks. It's great for project planning or status boards. The problem is everything in Asana is very easily checked off or moved, which sometimes can happen by accident. This provides a feeling of fleetingness that I think makes some people (especially super detail oriented project managers) nervous. 2. Native Apps. I really need a great official OSX native app. The iOS app, while it has gotten better, has always felt like an afterthought to the company. 3. Notifications. This is the main reason I want a solid OSX app. I need notifications to work really well. If something is important and needs my attention, I need to instantly know about it (and knowing about it via a push notification on my phone isn't good enough). Slack has cut down on email usage for us, like many, significantly. I don't check email as much now, so I can't rely on email notifications for our primary project management tool. Overall Asana is great. I always end up going back to it after using other tools. I do agree however there are a few small things that would help to make it feel a bit more "grown up".
andrewfromx 11y ago
when I think of Asana I always remember this tweet https://twitter.com/davidsacks/status/34785257697980416 https://twitter.com/davidsacks/status/34785257697980416
- ph0rque 11y ago
  On the other hand, this is the one that comes to mind for me: https://twitter.com/dhh/status/714799846616657920 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/714799846616657920
  - gk1 11y ago
    Eh, I respect DHH but he's willfully misreading that paragraph, and it's hard to ignore his bias in the matter.
    - andrewfromx 11y ago
      ha, i love the "fancy todolist" description
- beeboop 11y ago
  Complaining about ripoffs in a marketplace is pretty much complaining about competition. How annoying.
ProAm 11y ago
Im surprised Asana is still considered a 'startup', especially to the degree that yCombinator is going to invest in, I thought their philosophy was to help ground level startups.
- andyeskridge 11y ago
  It sounds like Y Combinator is not the one investing, only Sam Altman.
  - ProAm 11y ago
    Ah, its a weird blur on his blog when he speaks for himself or for YC. But it makes sense if its just him investing and not YC.
- marcog1 11y ago
  Sam is investing personally, not YC.
  - bfwi 11y ago
    I don't imagine Sam Altman made enough money from the sale of Loopt to lead a $50m round (only guesswork though). Is he somehow leveraged by having raised a fund for "personal investments". The latter would be a really interesting. Maybe @sama himself could answer this, if it's not too personal.
    - beeboop 11y ago
      Asana blog makes it clearer: >Today Asana closed a Series C financing round, raising $50M in new capital. The round was led by Y Combinator president Sam Altman. Sam participated alongside a number of other customers, investors, and leaders for whom we have deep respect. Sam is only part of that $50MM.
    - cellis 11y ago
      I'm sure he's made money as a partner/president of YC, too. Perhaps tens of millions?
heynk 11y ago
At my last job we used Asana and one of our PM's was an internal 'Asana Champion'. He made sure we did things 'the Asana way' and stuck to a structured process for getting things done. I think this is required to get a whole organization using Asana efficiently - otherwise it's too easy for everyone to use Asana 'their own way' and it becomes a mess. I always hated that there was no 'doing' status for tasks - we always had to hack around that.
- orky56 11y ago
  You can create a tag for "Doing" since that stays tied to the task rather than creating a section for "Doing". It's still a hack but gets the job done. As soon as you think of workflow, that extra dimension works better in Trello/Kanban systems since Asana nails the hierarchy via projects/subtasks.
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realbarack 11y ago
Asana is ... fine. Having used it and JIRA at the companies I've worked for I can say that each has their own set of useful and annoying features and quirks. Obviously Atlassian had a nice exit so and I'm guessing there's plenty of room for growth in this industry (what % of teams actually use a dedicated task-management software? I bet it's not a lot!) so this could be a wise investment. Nonetheless the rhetoric—"Asana is the kind of lever that could someday massively increase the productivity of hundreds of millions of people around the world"—is kind of overblown.
- dash2 11y ago
  My thoughts exactly, and I was reminded of this achewood panel: http://achewood.com/index.php?date=05182004 http://achewood.com/index.php?date=05182004 It's a todo list. Good! I hope it works.
hotcool 11y ago
I tried to like Asana. I gave it several tries over the years, but the UI is so uninspired it seemed to drain my creativity. It looks polished though.
- gk1 11y ago
  They launched a new UI a few months ago, complete with flying unicorns and rainbows (seriously).
  - hotcool 11y ago
    I tried it. It didn't do anything for me, but to each his own.
tsunamifury 11y ago
Open tickets, assign a priority and party, and burn them down. I'm always surprised that people keep thinking that putting a prettier UI on top of this is somehow the next billion dollar efficiency.
fiatjaf 11y ago
Why didn't you write good things about it before you were investing and now that you are you write? This post should come with a big fat disclaimer: "I'M AN INVESTOR IN ASANA, THAT'S WHY I WANT YOU TO LIKE AND USE ASANA."
- ryporter 11y ago
  The very first sentence begins with "I’m delighted to finally be investing in Asana."
  - fiatjaf 11y ago
    Isn't that pretty? I'm delighted!
- resu_nimda 11y ago
  Yeah, this feels pretty shill-like, even if he does make it clear he's investing. Though it's also the readers who are to blame for upvoting a low-content advertisement. From some random blogger this would have died or been called out as not worthy, from the Pres of YC everyone happily discusses Asana...kinda lame.
  - GuiA 11y ago
    > Though it's also the readers who are to blame for upvoting a low-content advertisement. From some random blogger this would have died or been called out as not worthy, from the Pres of YC everyone happily discusses Asana...kinda lame. To be fair, this is extends beyond just this post. While some of pg's/sama's essays are insightful, quite a few of them in recent memory were incredibly vapid, but still remained at the top of HN for a day or so. Would never have happened if they had been written by some random person. The mistake here is assuming that things on HN reach the top solely because of quality in the first place. After all, YC companies get to insert their job ads in the front page whenever they want. The only discussion boards were things are really "meritocratic" are the ones like 4chan, but most people don't find these very palatable for understandable reasons. Other than that, pretty much any online board tends to have a cult of personality around the people running it.
maw 11y ago
Asana was the first program I ever used that made me feel old. But not in the actually rather good sense of it making me say "wow, they can do this now?" Rather, it made me feel like an old fart using a computer for the first time, bewildered more often than not, most of my instincts rendered useless. There are many examples in Asana of this. Each, taken alone, is banal: kind of annoying, but maybe not too bad. Taken together, though, we have something that a nicer person than I wouldn't wish on his worst enemy, but I'm just not that nice of a person.
- kcorbitt 11y ago
  > Rather, it made me feel like an old fart using a computer for the first time, bewildered more often than not, most of my instincts rendered useless. This captures the way I felt using Asana for the first time as well, about three years ago as a (not-that-old) college student. It was really hard to internalize its expected data model/flow. My team ended up settling on Trello. I've always figured that Asana was meant for larger teams and more complicated projects than I've been exposed to, but it certainly felt confusing as part of a small team.
  - ececconi 11y ago
    I feel like Asana would be a mess with a large team of people (say 50+) marching towards one goal. I find it good for small teams. Once you need to roll up higher level reports that go out to C-Suite type management for the status of a major project, it starts to fall apart. With groups of about 10 people I think its great.
- deleted 11y ago
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- tnorthcutt 11y ago
  This has been my experience with Asana as well, both before and after the (a?) major redesign.
- 27182818284 11y ago
  It didn't make me feel old the way Snapchat did, but I tried Asana and was blown away by how unnecessary and cluttered the experience felt.
pbprabhuram 11y ago
Asana's interface is cluttered especially when the number of projects and tasks get more. While we like its collaboration features like easy sharing, its task details is really a let down when we worked as a team. Which is why we decided to build our own project management tool / issue tracker from scratch that overcomes its shortcomings, also we recently gave our internal tool - a public release now available at taskmail.io
komali2 11y ago
When it comes to investing, "I like how the teams work" is probably not the path you should be walking down in making a decision about where to drop a hefty chunk of change on.
- biot 11y ago
  Though this is Sam's personal investment, YCombinator has always stated they invest more in teams than ideas; do you have data to suggest a better approach for picking winners?
  - jbob2000 11y ago
    Doesn't matter how good the team is if the market doesn't want the product. To pick a winner, you need foresight. You have to know a lot about what people are doing today to predict what they are doing tomorrow.
    - biot 11y ago
      Of course, but a great team can adapt their product to meet the market demands and will execute well. A poor team, on the other hand, likely cannot come up with a great product or, if they can, will execute poorly. After all, if they have a great product and execute well then, by definition, they're a great team.
mgberlin 11y ago
There's a lot of people in this thread who sound a bit disappointed in using Asana for Dev work. I understand that, as well as frustration with the huge-ness of JIRA. If you agree, I'd appreciate it if you checked out my current project http://rowstack.com http://rowstack.com, and let me know what you think. We did ShowHN a couple weeks ago, and have been aggressively building out the features people asked for.
amackera 11y ago
Asana is a wonderful tool and it keeps getting better. I think this is more of an investment in the team and the future opportunity than it is in the current tool. There's a long road ahead! On a sidenote, we're working on a project that marries the best of Asana, Trello, and JIRA, plus with some super-smart integrations. It's designed specifically for dev teams, thought I'd drop this shameless plug here in case folks are interested. Check it out at: http://getcadence.com/ http://getcadence.com/
romanr 11y ago
If you don't like to be led into "doing things Asana way" try Hitask (hiTask.com) - it doesn't make you work in any particular frame of mind, you can actually do things your way.
qaq 11y ago
Any plans to use new found capital to provide ability to move projects between workspaces :)?
JofArnold 11y ago
If it wasn't for Instagantt I'd not use Asana. The non-devs love Asana, but the devs get very frustrated with the UI. Not sure what accounts for the divided opinion
spark3k 11y ago
As a long time, 'power' Asana user I can confidently say that it's a good task list manager and nothing more. "Project Management", or rather, at a higher level, "Work", is much more than a dynamic, shared, list of tasks. Asana has tried to create the killer app, the email beating, unified metaphor for project management and... it's not enough. I would not have invested without a very promising roadmap.
- nerdponx 11y ago
  Yup. We use JIRA for development, Trello for ideation, and Slack for communication. On top of all that, I use Asana as a personal to-do/task manager. So far, none of those programs has been apple to supplant any of the others.
fecak 11y ago
Question for Sam if he's reading. I've never seen someone speak about Glassdoor in reference to making an investment decision. Obviously, most Glassdoor references we would see might be regarding decisions to apply to a company or accept a job. As an investor, wouldn't you rather get the opportunity to actually speak to current and (perhaps more importantly) former employees, and do you usually get that opportunity? I'm not talking about executives, but rather software developers, managers, etc. TIA if you answer.
- ryporter 11y ago
  I think he's referring to Glassdoor posts made by current and former employees, not the ones about applying to work at the company. Even if there aren't any explicitly negative reviews, you can learn a lot by reading between the lines.
  - fecak 11y ago
    Understood. Perhaps my comment was ambiguous. My question is "Would you rather speak to current and former employees about their experience at the company than to rely on potentially faked reviews, and if so, are you usually granted that request when made?" I wasn't referring to any posts criticizing or praising a company's hiring practices, although those might be helpful too (coincidentally I believe they had an article here yesterday on their engineering interviews).
mathattack 11y ago
I've only been in one environment that tried to use it, and the sponsor struggled to get everyone to follow suit, and eventually it was dropped. I think adoption is as much a people and process ("How we do work") issue than pure technology.
bjoernw 11y ago
On the comment about sticky recurring revenue I think an important factor is the lock-in effect of having pretty much all your company's audit protection based on an app like Jira or Asana. How would a company that tracks git commits on the jira story level even move off jira?!
phodo 11y ago
I've been using Asana for a while and have recommended it to various companies / customers. I think it is a good tool for collaboration and reducing email clutter, especially when coupled w slack. One thing that is sorely lacking is the agile / product management piece. You can sort of make it work, but it just doesn't fully cut it. I'm currently using Asana AND an agile tool (not Trello). They overlap in so many areas, but there are some missing features from Asana for scrum/agile work, that if added would make it work for a broad set of use cases even beyond agile development: a) ability to create categories within categories in a project: With Asana, I can create one level of categories in a given project. Ideally, I'd like to have different buckets like: Backlog, Sprint Todo, In Progress, Deploy. Within each of those, I'd like to categorize by "Epic". E.g. "Backlog -> Reports", "Backlog -> User Auth" b) ability to show categories horizontally, instead of showing a stacked vertical list: This would be similar to the way Trello does it. (Note that Trello also lacks in other areas, and is not ideal either, but it comes close.). c) ability to have more options for prioritization / sort order d) ability to have labels in the summary view for things like tags, epics People's mileage may vary in how they use scrum/kanban/etc., but the basics are mostly the same. I would think that with the rise of "software eating the world", addressing the agile/scrum use case represents a good market opportunity. It would allow our teams and many teams to compress their tools from asana + agile tool to one tool. It might also take market share away from Trello for some use cases.
cellis 11y ago
I am curious; why doesn't Dustin Moskovitz fund Asana entirely on his own? Genuine question. It's not like he couldn't afford it, he's worth around 10 billion. If he truly believes in the company why not put some of his Facebook money into it?
- askafriend 11y ago
  It's good to have other people invested in the success of "your" company. Obviously if Asana needed extra cash and no one was willing to invest, Dustin could step in...but why do that when that's not the case?
- vickychijwani 11y ago
  Dustin did put some of his money into this round: > Us (Dustin & Justin). We’re very bullish on Asana. We each pour a lot of effort into building Asana, every weekday. We speak frequently about our excitement for the company’s future, and we’re excited to put our money where our mouths are. Source: https://blog.asana.com/2016/03/asana-raising-50m-for-work-tracking/ https://blog.asana.com/2016/03/asana-raising-50m-for-work-tr...
mlinsey 11y ago
I like Asana's product design a lot, my one complaint is that (at least as of when I most recently tried it a few months ago), it was so slow. I like for my personal todo list have very fine-grained breakdown of tasks and having each page of the UI take several seconds to load so I could check of one task and navigate to the next one managed to kill the sense of flow I had between tasks. In the end I went back to Workflowy (YC S10 for life!), which doesn't have as strong team-collaboration features (as well as email integration and several other bells/whistles), but few of my teammates were already using Asana anyway, and Workflowy is delightfully fast and simple-yet-flexible enough to support a hierarchy that roughly maps to how I had projects set up in Asana.
- polysaturate 11y ago
  Yes, I believe Asana could be a strong use case for 'Just because React, doesn't mean it's fast'.
  - mlinsey 11y ago
    Interesting, didn't know they were using React. I thought they wrote their own framework. (Didn't they even have their own compiled-to-JS language at one point?) In any case, "Just because X, doesn't mean it's fast", where X is a technology choice, is probably true for all X :)
    - polysaturate 11y ago
      The Chrome React Inspector picked up the React. Which was the basis for my assumption.
      - pspeter3 11y ago
        We're switching to React and moving away from simulation on the server. We're close to converting our core views and should be rolling those out soon. If you're interested in our perf problems, I would check out https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Asana-so-darn-slow-to-load/answer/Phips-Peter?__snids__=1610983699&__nsrc__=1&__filter__=all https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Asana-so-darn-slow-to-load/answ...
whiddershins 11y ago
I'm astonished at the negativity in many of these comments. I use Asana for everything, as do many of the people I work with. Universally it seems people are at first a little uncomfortable with it, but then fall completely in love and use it all the time and can't imagine ever doing with out it again. It is fast and fluid to work in. It is simple and flexible enough that you can basically improvise a team workflow without formalizing it ... often the system just evolves naturally as the team uses it. Most of us were very sad about the new interface, it feels condescending and more cluttered. And there will always be more features to wish for. But I think it is a product in a class by itself.
mangeletti 11y ago
I love that Sam's post has a link to Asana's post which has a link to Sam's post.
- 6stringmerc 11y ago
  Synergy!
jbob2000 11y ago
Tasking, time and project management, and issue tracking is a really busy space. I am surprised Sam invested, given the crazy amount of competition. Trello, JIRA, Fogbugz, YouTrack, Basecamp, PivotalTracker... Not only that, but once a company chooses an app like this, they're pretty much stuck with it. My company is currently transitioning from FogBugz to JIRA and it is taking months, and we're still going to keep fogbugz around, just in case. So I'm curious how Asana will tackle the "stickiness" problem.
- trhway 11y ago
  no "stickiness" problem whatsoever :) Our department (and the departments i see around) switched back from JIRA to Excel (it good to be home Chewey!) the very moment our top management stopped pushing SCRUM down everybody's throat. It happened so easy and quickly that the last uttered word "SCRUM" hadn't yet stopped reverberating in the office :)
nlitened 11y ago
Finally created my HN account to post this comment :). Just wanted to share. I am an owner of a small IT business. We've been using Asana as our project management system for about 2 years, almost from the beginning of our company. I love it now. Initially, it took some time to get accustomed to the way interface works, and I tried several times to switch to something different, but I've always kept coming back — Asana fits our workflow perfectly: many simultaneous projects with numerous prioritized tasks each, partially remote employees with good sense of responsibility. I love the speed of entering new tasks and sorting them. I really appreciate the speed of switching between projects and task details. I am fond of the "spreadsheet" feel of the UI, where you can edit anything right away, without dancing around. I see only two major downsides. 1. Initial loading time of web interface is really slow. I have a habit of closing the tab every now and then, hence I get to see the loading screen at least 30 times a day. 2. Their free version is too functionally complete for me to switch to paid version. We have around 10 team members, and I stumble upon no restrictions in my workflow. I would love to pay for Asana, since it's bringing so much value to my company. But I in business, not a charity, and I will not do so until I have to. Recently, their technical support was even so kind to switch my company's domain name (not possible via UI) for free. Had they told me that the only way to do that is to upgrade my organization to paid plan, I'd start paying in a heartbeat :( My only wish so far: pre-render the React UI on server while prefetching first bunch of AJAX requests, so that it loads instantly. Please if you ever add this, make it a premium feature.
userium 11y ago
Asana is an awesome company. We recently created an employer profile with them on StayInTech: https://stayintech.com/info/asana https://stayintech.com/info/asana
tedmiston 11y ago
> Asana is the kind of lever that could someday massively increase the productivity of hundreds of millions of people around the world. There’s not only an opportunity for Asana to be a huge company, but also for Asana to materially increase the output for the planet—somewhat amazingly, software has not yet eaten this important part of the world. What important part of the world?
AstroJetson 11y ago
I was also surprised by the negative notes, so I went to the site to see what the product was about. I watched a 1:32 min video that said "what we are doing now isn't working". Really, 90 seconds to tell me that? From that point it was down hill. What happened to web sites that get to the meat of what they are doing quickly? I was very disappointed. As a project manager based on the website and the first 100 comments here it's unlikely that I would give this product a second glance. There are other project tools out there, I'd pick another. I only hope that this is an early April Fools joke, in which case "Ya got me Sam".

166 points by s4chin 11y ago

I just skimmed through some of those Glassdoor reviews. They were all quite positive, but I find it interesting that the vast majority were posted Feb-Mar 2016.

shas3 11y ago
I wonder, earnestly, on a tangent: how do you ensure the authenticity of Glassdoor reviews? What's the guarantee that people are not faking good reviews? They should probably implement a system of employment verification.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  I apply the same metric I apply to online product or service reviews. If they appear on a regular cycle, or if they appear in some of there kind of statistically improbable clumps, or if there are no negative comments at all, then they may not be entirely plausible. Employment verification won't help on Glassdoor, because it would be the easiest thing in the world to hint to a group of the most settled employees that maybe they could leave positive ratings. It would help against malicious negative reviews - which can also be a thing.
  - shas3 11y ago
    Websites with reviews are doing a disservice to users by not giving us tabulated reviews and tools to view detailed statistics. I'm reminded of 538's impressive interactive data exploration pages.
- marcog1 11y ago
  I think it requires a company email? I can't recall. They also have a verification window, reviews don't post for a couple days.
  - gk1 11y ago
    It's not difficult for a company to create new email addresses or use past employees' email addresses. I know at least one company that does that.
- qaq 11y ago
  Fake reviews are generally written by PR/Marketing people so they never look authentic.
- SuperKlaus 11y ago
  A lot of companies ask their employees to write positive reviews so employment verification doesn't necessarily help guaranteeing authentic reviews.
- gceck9 11y ago
  Relatedly, I'm not convinced Glassdoor doesn't delete or hide posts that are unfavorable to the employer. I've kept tabs on the reviews and scores left on my previous company's page and at least several negative reviews are nowhere to be found.
  - mattlutze 11y ago
    It doesn't to my knowledge. I see both good and bad reviews for my company come hit my email inbox regularly.
- malz 11y ago
  Many valid reviews are written by former employees, so I'm not sure how you could verify those. A subset of those are from people with an axe to grind. Look at any company that's had layoffs, for example. In general, I've found Glassdoor to be incredibly biased, either shills (in a small company, nobody's going to publicly trash their employer with the risk of being identified), or trolls (any company, once large enough, has former employees who didn't get along with their boss and choose to escalate it).
marcog1 11y ago
That happened when someone noticed we were ranked #1 in the Bay Area and announced it to the company. Employees followed with more reviews.

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polysaturate 11y ago

For myself, using Asana falls into the the don't love, but don't hate, category. The UI is pretty nice, but I always feel it just doesn't have enough teeth for complex project/collaboration. I mean, I see it has a lot of features to facilitate that need(project, hierarchical tasks, attachments, commenting), but it doesn't convey 'serious business'.

buraksarica 11y ago
Asana shows a simpler way to achieve a goal IMO. It always feels a bit "fundamental" but it never disappoints you, which is very frequent when you work upon a "serious" tool.
tudorizer 11y ago
Interesting argument. I'm using Trello and many people say something similiar about it, but my researched always showed me that those people either don't know how to use Trello to the full potential or they are generally bad at organising. What would make Asana convey "real business" ?
- polysaturate 11y ago
  I think it feels as though it was created as a very simple task tracker at first, and project/collab features were tacked on later.
- miseg 11y ago
  Each to their own, I suppose :) I've quickly reviewed Asana, and actually found it quite complex. Trello works nicely with our small team. People don't generally have full projects assigned to them, so a Trello card for a specific task to be executed works well.
cwilson 11y ago
As a very heavy day to day user, my biggest three complaints are: 1. Ability to "lock" a row. We often build lists in Asana that are not meant to be tasks. It's great for project planning or status boards. The problem is everything in Asana is very easily checked off or moved, which sometimes can happen by accident. This provides a feeling of fleetingness that I think makes some people (especially super detail oriented project managers) nervous. 2. Native Apps. I really need a great official OSX native app. The iOS app, while it has gotten better, has always felt like an afterthought to the company. 3. Notifications. This is the main reason I want a solid OSX app. I need notifications to work really well. If something is important and needs my attention, I need to instantly know about it (and knowing about it via a push notification on my phone isn't good enough). Slack has cut down on email usage for us, like many, significantly. I don't check email as much now, so I can't rely on email notifications for our primary project management tool. Overall Asana is great. I always end up going back to it after using other tools. I do agree however there are a few small things that would help to make it feel a bit more "grown up".

andrewfromx 11y ago

when I think of Asana I always remember this tweet https://twitter.com/davidsacks/status/34785257697980416 https://twitter.com/davidsacks/status/34785257697980416

ph0rque 11y ago
On the other hand, this is the one that comes to mind for me: https://twitter.com/dhh/status/714799846616657920 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/714799846616657920
- gk1 11y ago
  Eh, I respect DHH but he's willfully misreading that paragraph, and it's hard to ignore his bias in the matter.
  - andrewfromx 11y ago
    ha, i love the "fancy todolist" description
beeboop 11y ago
Complaining about ripoffs in a marketplace is pretty much complaining about competition. How annoying.

ProAm 11y ago

Im surprised Asana is still considered a 'startup', especially to the degree that yCombinator is going to invest in, I thought their philosophy was to help ground level startups.

andyeskridge 11y ago
It sounds like Y Combinator is not the one investing, only Sam Altman.
- ProAm 11y ago
  Ah, its a weird blur on his blog when he speaks for himself or for YC. But it makes sense if its just him investing and not YC.
marcog1 11y ago
Sam is investing personally, not YC.
- bfwi 11y ago
  I don't imagine Sam Altman made enough money from the sale of Loopt to lead a $50m round (only guesswork though). Is he somehow leveraged by having raised a fund for "personal investments". The latter would be a really interesting. Maybe @sama himself could answer this, if it's not too personal.
  - beeboop 11y ago
    Asana blog makes it clearer: >Today Asana closed a Series C financing round, raising $50M in new capital. The round was led by Y Combinator president Sam Altman. Sam participated alongside a number of other customers, investors, and leaders for whom we have deep respect. Sam is only part of that $50MM.
  - cellis 11y ago
    I'm sure he's made money as a partner/president of YC, too. Perhaps tens of millions?

heynk 11y ago

At my last job we used Asana and one of our PM's was an internal 'Asana Champion'. He made sure we did things 'the Asana way' and stuck to a structured process for getting things done. I think this is required to get a whole organization using Asana efficiently - otherwise it's too easy for everyone to use Asana 'their own way' and it becomes a mess. I always hated that there was no 'doing' status for tasks - we always had to hack around that.

orky56 11y ago
You can create a tag for "Doing" since that stays tied to the task rather than creating a section for "Doing". It's still a hack but gets the job done. As soon as you think of workflow, that extra dimension works better in Trello/Kanban systems since Asana nails the hierarchy via projects/subtasks.

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realbarack 11y ago

Asana is ... fine. Having used it and JIRA at the companies I've worked for I can say that each has their own set of useful and annoying features and quirks. Obviously Atlassian had a nice exit so and I'm guessing there's plenty of room for growth in this industry (what % of teams actually use a dedicated task-management software? I bet it's not a lot!) so this could be a wise investment. Nonetheless the rhetoric—"Asana is the kind of lever that could someday massively increase the productivity of hundreds of millions of people around the world"—is kind of overblown.

dash2 11y ago
My thoughts exactly, and I was reminded of this achewood panel: http://achewood.com/index.php?date=05182004 http://achewood.com/index.php?date=05182004 It's a todo list. Good! I hope it works.

hotcool 11y ago

I tried to like Asana. I gave it several tries over the years, but the UI is so uninspired it seemed to drain my creativity. It looks polished though.

gk1 11y ago
They launched a new UI a few months ago, complete with flying unicorns and rainbows (seriously).
- hotcool 11y ago
  I tried it. It didn't do anything for me, but to each his own.

tsunamifury 11y ago

Open tickets, assign a priority and party, and burn them down. I'm always surprised that people keep thinking that putting a prettier UI on top of this is somehow the next billion dollar efficiency.

fiatjaf 11y ago

Why didn't you write good things about it before you were investing and now that you are you write? This post should come with a big fat disclaimer: "I'M AN INVESTOR IN ASANA, THAT'S WHY I WANT YOU TO LIKE AND USE ASANA."

ryporter 11y ago
The very first sentence begins with "I’m delighted to finally be investing in Asana."
- fiatjaf 11y ago
  Isn't that pretty? I'm delighted!
resu_nimda 11y ago
Yeah, this feels pretty shill-like, even if he does make it clear he's investing. Though it's also the readers who are to blame for upvoting a low-content advertisement. From some random blogger this would have died or been called out as not worthy, from the Pres of YC everyone happily discusses Asana...kinda lame.
- GuiA 11y ago
  > Though it's also the readers who are to blame for upvoting a low-content advertisement. From some random blogger this would have died or been called out as not worthy, from the Pres of YC everyone happily discusses Asana...kinda lame. To be fair, this is extends beyond just this post. While some of pg's/sama's essays are insightful, quite a few of them in recent memory were incredibly vapid, but still remained at the top of HN for a day or so. Would never have happened if they had been written by some random person. The mistake here is assuming that things on HN reach the top solely because of quality in the first place. After all, YC companies get to insert their job ads in the front page whenever they want. The only discussion boards were things are really "meritocratic" are the ones like 4chan, but most people don't find these very palatable for understandable reasons. Other than that, pretty much any online board tends to have a cult of personality around the people running it.

maw 11y ago

Asana was the first program I ever used that made me feel old. But not in the actually rather good sense of it making me say "wow, they can do this now?" Rather, it made me feel like an old fart using a computer for the first time, bewildered more often than not, most of my instincts rendered useless. There are many examples in Asana of this. Each, taken alone, is banal: kind of annoying, but maybe not too bad. Taken together, though, we have something that a nicer person than I wouldn't wish on his worst enemy, but I'm just not that nice of a person.

kcorbitt 11y ago
> Rather, it made me feel like an old fart using a computer for the first time, bewildered more often than not, most of my instincts rendered useless. This captures the way I felt using Asana for the first time as well, about three years ago as a (not-that-old) college student. It was really hard to internalize its expected data model/flow. My team ended up settling on Trello. I've always figured that Asana was meant for larger teams and more complicated projects than I've been exposed to, but it certainly felt confusing as part of a small team.
- ececconi 11y ago
  I feel like Asana would be a mess with a large team of people (say 50+) marching towards one goal. I find it good for small teams. Once you need to roll up higher level reports that go out to C-Suite type management for the status of a major project, it starts to fall apart. With groups of about 10 people I think its great.
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tnorthcutt 11y ago
This has been my experience with Asana as well, both before and after the (a?) major redesign.
27182818284 11y ago
It didn't make me feel old the way Snapchat did, but I tried Asana and was blown away by how unnecessary and cluttered the experience felt.

pbprabhuram 11y ago

Asana's interface is cluttered especially when the number of projects and tasks get more. While we like its collaboration features like easy sharing, its task details is really a let down when we worked as a team. Which is why we decided to build our own project management tool / issue tracker from scratch that overcomes its shortcomings, also we recently gave our internal tool - a public release now available at taskmail.io

komali2 11y ago

When it comes to investing, "I like how the teams work" is probably not the path you should be walking down in making a decision about where to drop a hefty chunk of change on.

biot 11y ago
Though this is Sam's personal investment, YCombinator has always stated they invest more in teams than ideas; do you have data to suggest a better approach for picking winners?
- jbob2000 11y ago
  Doesn't matter how good the team is if the market doesn't want the product. To pick a winner, you need foresight. You have to know a lot about what people are doing today to predict what they are doing tomorrow.
  - biot 11y ago
    Of course, but a great team can adapt their product to meet the market demands and will execute well. A poor team, on the other hand, likely cannot come up with a great product or, if they can, will execute poorly. After all, if they have a great product and execute well then, by definition, they're a great team.

mgberlin 11y ago

There's a lot of people in this thread who sound a bit disappointed in using Asana for Dev work. I understand that, as well as frustration with the huge-ness of JIRA. If you agree, I'd appreciate it if you checked out my current project http://rowstack.com http://rowstack.com, and let me know what you think. We did ShowHN a couple weeks ago, and have been aggressively building out the features people asked for.

amackera 11y ago

Asana is a wonderful tool and it keeps getting better. I think this is more of an investment in the team and the future opportunity than it is in the current tool. There's a long road ahead! On a sidenote, we're working on a project that marries the best of Asana, Trello, and JIRA, plus with some super-smart integrations. It's designed specifically for dev teams, thought I'd drop this shameless plug here in case folks are interested. Check it out at: http://getcadence.com/ http://getcadence.com/

romanr 11y ago

If you don't like to be led into "doing things Asana way" try Hitask (hiTask.com) - it doesn't make you work in any particular frame of mind, you can actually do things your way.

qaq 11y ago

Any plans to use new found capital to provide ability to move projects between workspaces :)?

JofArnold 11y ago

If it wasn't for Instagantt I'd not use Asana. The non-devs love Asana, but the devs get very frustrated with the UI. Not sure what accounts for the divided opinion

spark3k 11y ago

As a long time, 'power' Asana user I can confidently say that it's a good task list manager and nothing more. "Project Management", or rather, at a higher level, "Work", is much more than a dynamic, shared, list of tasks. Asana has tried to create the killer app, the email beating, unified metaphor for project management and... it's not enough. I would not have invested without a very promising roadmap.

nerdponx 11y ago
Yup. We use JIRA for development, Trello for ideation, and Slack for communication. On top of all that, I use Asana as a personal to-do/task manager. So far, none of those programs has been apple to supplant any of the others.

fecak 11y ago

Question for Sam if he's reading. I've never seen someone speak about Glassdoor in reference to making an investment decision. Obviously, most Glassdoor references we would see might be regarding decisions to apply to a company or accept a job. As an investor, wouldn't you rather get the opportunity to actually speak to current and (perhaps more importantly) former employees, and do you usually get that opportunity? I'm not talking about executives, but rather software developers, managers, etc. TIA if you answer.

ryporter 11y ago
I think he's referring to Glassdoor posts made by current and former employees, not the ones about applying to work at the company. Even if there aren't any explicitly negative reviews, you can learn a lot by reading between the lines.
- fecak 11y ago
  Understood. Perhaps my comment was ambiguous. My question is "Would you rather speak to current and former employees about their experience at the company than to rely on potentially faked reviews, and if so, are you usually granted that request when made?" I wasn't referring to any posts criticizing or praising a company's hiring practices, although those might be helpful too (coincidentally I believe they had an article here yesterday on their engineering interviews).

mathattack 11y ago

I've only been in one environment that tried to use it, and the sponsor struggled to get everyone to follow suit, and eventually it was dropped. I think adoption is as much a people and process ("How we do work") issue than pure technology.

bjoernw 11y ago

On the comment about sticky recurring revenue I think an important factor is the lock-in effect of having pretty much all your company's audit protection based on an app like Jira or Asana. How would a company that tracks git commits on the jira story level even move off jira?!

phodo 11y ago

I've been using Asana for a while and have recommended it to various companies / customers. I think it is a good tool for collaboration and reducing email clutter, especially when coupled w slack. One thing that is sorely lacking is the agile / product management piece. You can sort of make it work, but it just doesn't fully cut it. I'm currently using Asana AND an agile tool (not Trello). They overlap in so many areas, but there are some missing features from Asana for scrum/agile work, that if added would make it work for a broad set of use cases even beyond agile development: a) ability to create categories within categories in a project: With Asana, I can create one level of categories in a given project. Ideally, I'd like to have different buckets like: Backlog, Sprint Todo, In Progress, Deploy. Within each of those, I'd like to categorize by "Epic". E.g. "Backlog -> Reports", "Backlog -> User Auth" b) ability to show categories horizontally, instead of showing a stacked vertical list: This would be similar to the way Trello does it. (Note that Trello also lacks in other areas, and is not ideal either, but it comes close.). c) ability to have more options for prioritization / sort order d) ability to have labels in the summary view for things like tags, epics People's mileage may vary in how they use scrum/kanban/etc., but the basics are mostly the same. I would think that with the rise of "software eating the world", addressing the agile/scrum use case represents a good market opportunity. It would allow our teams and many teams to compress their tools from asana + agile tool to one tool. It might also take market share away from Trello for some use cases.

cellis 11y ago

I am curious; why doesn't Dustin Moskovitz fund Asana entirely on his own? Genuine question. It's not like he couldn't afford it, he's worth around 10 billion. If he truly believes in the company why not put some of his Facebook money into it?

askafriend 11y ago
It's good to have other people invested in the success of "your" company. Obviously if Asana needed extra cash and no one was willing to invest, Dustin could step in...but why do that when that's not the case?
vickychijwani 11y ago
Dustin did put some of his money into this round: > Us (Dustin & Justin). We’re very bullish on Asana. We each pour a lot of effort into building Asana, every weekday. We speak frequently about our excitement for the company’s future, and we’re excited to put our money where our mouths are. Source: https://blog.asana.com/2016/03/asana-raising-50m-for-work-tracking/ https://blog.asana.com/2016/03/asana-raising-50m-for-work-tr...

mlinsey 11y ago

I like Asana's product design a lot, my one complaint is that (at least as of when I most recently tried it a few months ago), it was so slow. I like for my personal todo list have very fine-grained breakdown of tasks and having each page of the UI take several seconds to load so I could check of one task and navigate to the next one managed to kill the sense of flow I had between tasks. In the end I went back to Workflowy (YC S10 for life!), which doesn't have as strong team-collaboration features (as well as email integration and several other bells/whistles), but few of my teammates were already using Asana anyway, and Workflowy is delightfully fast and simple-yet-flexible enough to support a hierarchy that roughly maps to how I had projects set up in Asana.

polysaturate 11y ago
Yes, I believe Asana could be a strong use case for 'Just because React, doesn't mean it's fast'.
- mlinsey 11y ago
  Interesting, didn't know they were using React. I thought they wrote their own framework. (Didn't they even have their own compiled-to-JS language at one point?) In any case, "Just because X, doesn't mean it's fast", where X is a technology choice, is probably true for all X :)
  - polysaturate 11y ago
    The Chrome React Inspector picked up the React. Which was the basis for my assumption.
    - pspeter3 11y ago
      We're switching to React and moving away from simulation on the server. We're close to converting our core views and should be rolling those out soon. If you're interested in our perf problems, I would check out https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Asana-so-darn-slow-to-load/answer/Phips-Peter?__snids__=1610983699&__nsrc__=1&__filter__=all https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Asana-so-darn-slow-to-load/answ...

whiddershins 11y ago

I'm astonished at the negativity in many of these comments. I use Asana for everything, as do many of the people I work with. Universally it seems people are at first a little uncomfortable with it, but then fall completely in love and use it all the time and can't imagine ever doing with out it again. It is fast and fluid to work in. It is simple and flexible enough that you can basically improvise a team workflow without formalizing it ... often the system just evolves naturally as the team uses it. Most of us were very sad about the new interface, it feels condescending and more cluttered. And there will always be more features to wish for. But I think it is a product in a class by itself.

mangeletti 11y ago

I love that Sam's post has a link to Asana's post which has a link to Sam's post.

6stringmerc 11y ago
Synergy!

jbob2000 11y ago

Tasking, time and project management, and issue tracking is a really busy space. I am surprised Sam invested, given the crazy amount of competition. Trello, JIRA, Fogbugz, YouTrack, Basecamp, PivotalTracker... Not only that, but once a company chooses an app like this, they're pretty much stuck with it. My company is currently transitioning from FogBugz to JIRA and it is taking months, and we're still going to keep fogbugz around, just in case. So I'm curious how Asana will tackle the "stickiness" problem.

trhway 11y ago
no "stickiness" problem whatsoever :) Our department (and the departments i see around) switched back from JIRA to Excel (it good to be home Chewey!) the very moment our top management stopped pushing SCRUM down everybody's throat. It happened so easy and quickly that the last uttered word "SCRUM" hadn't yet stopped reverberating in the office :)

nlitened 11y ago

Finally created my HN account to post this comment :). Just wanted to share. I am an owner of a small IT business. We've been using Asana as our project management system for about 2 years, almost from the beginning of our company. I love it now. Initially, it took some time to get accustomed to the way interface works, and I tried several times to switch to something different, but I've always kept coming back — Asana fits our workflow perfectly: many simultaneous projects with numerous prioritized tasks each, partially remote employees with good sense of responsibility. I love the speed of entering new tasks and sorting them. I really appreciate the speed of switching between projects and task details. I am fond of the "spreadsheet" feel of the UI, where you can edit anything right away, without dancing around. I see only two major downsides. 1. Initial loading time of web interface is really slow. I have a habit of closing the tab every now and then, hence I get to see the loading screen at least 30 times a day. 2. Their free version is too functionally complete for me to switch to paid version. We have around 10 team members, and I stumble upon no restrictions in my workflow. I would love to pay for Asana, since it's bringing so much value to my company. But I in business, not a charity, and I will not do so until I have to. Recently, their technical support was even so kind to switch my company's domain name (not possible via UI) for free. Had they told me that the only way to do that is to upgrade my organization to paid plan, I'd start paying in a heartbeat :( My only wish so far: pre-render the React UI on server while prefetching first bunch of AJAX requests, so that it loads instantly. Please if you ever add this, make it a premium feature.

userium 11y ago

Asana is an awesome company. We recently created an employer profile with them on StayInTech: https://stayintech.com/info/asana https://stayintech.com/info/asana

tedmiston 11y ago

> Asana is the kind of lever that could someday massively increase the productivity of hundreds of millions of people around the world. There’s not only an opportunity for Asana to be a huge company, but also for Asana to materially increase the output for the planet—somewhat amazingly, software has not yet eaten this important part of the world. What important part of the world?

AstroJetson 11y ago

I was also surprised by the negative notes, so I went to the site to see what the product was about. I watched a 1:32 min video that said "what we are doing now isn't working". Really, 90 seconds to tell me that? From that point it was down hill. What happened to web sites that get to the meat of what they are doing quickly? I was very disappointed. As a project manager based on the website and the first 100 comments here it's unlikely that I would give this product a second glance. There are other project tools out there, I'd pick another. I only hope that this is an early April Fools joke, in which case "Ya got me Sam".