When people work as a team,
they can do great things,
whether it's creating life-saving medicines, or technology for clean energy, or support
to local communities.
But historically, collaboration has been a chaotic mess.
Today, knowledge workers literally spend
less time on the real work,
the actual thing they're trying to do,
than on the work about work.
The scheduling, the planning, the coordinating,
all the stuff that just is about keeping everyone
on the same page.
All of this work about work is holding teams back.
Even at Google and Facebook, Dustin and I felt constantly
frustrated by it, so we started Asana with a
mission to help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly.
Now that millions of people are using Asana, we wanted to know from them:
How much more effective does Asana make your team?
The average response was 45%.
That's like completing two extra days of work every week.
That's what happens when everyone on a team has clarity on
who is doing what by when,
and we're just getting started.
We've been asking ourselves questions like
what would it take to make teams and organizations
100% more effective, or 200%?
What if teams could do in weeks what now takes months?
What if people could take on goals that, today, feel impossible?
Now, to get there, we realized we would need to
build a whole new generation of tools.
Intelligent, predictive tools that are effortless to use.
At first, they're going to seem like magic, but in a few years,
they'll just be a part of everyday life.
In a minute, I'll show you what our vision for
what a system like that could look like.
But first, I want to show you the newest addition to Asana,
which launches today: Timeline.
Timeline is a beautiful living view of how all your work fits together.
It lets you map out projects and easily adjust plans
to help you hit your deadlines.
We think it's quickly going to replace spreadsheets and slide decks
and certainly overly-complicated
project management tools
because it's so easy to set up, and more importantly, it's so useful in helping you stay on track
as your work progresses.
Let's look at one example from one of my favorite Asana customers, Meals on Wheels.
Every year, their events team plans a massive conference with thousands of people.
It requires a ton of coordination of
schedules, responsibilities, logistics.
Here's how Timeline can make that work
so much easier.
To map out the work between now and the event,
the team lead can just draw out a high-level
schedule as easily as they could make a
simple PowerPoint slide.
Every task the team had on their
Asana list or their board can
be dragged right onto the Timeline to schedule it.
They can spot dependencies and
adjust the schedule to accommodate
those dependencies before work even begins.
Within minutes, the project lead has
created this beautiful Timeline
that she can share with her team
and all her stakeholders.
And then, once everyone's on board,
the creation of the conference begins.
Gone are the days when someone has to e-mail every
member of the team and explain each
isolated piece of the plan,
because Timeline puts tasks right on people's
homepages on just the correct day.
They can even see those tasks on the go
with our mobile app.
As team members complete work,
the Timeline updates in real time.
Of course, some things don't go according to plan.
Let's say a caterer delays the dessert proposal.
These kinds of unexpected changes happen
constantly on complex projects.
Some things inevitably need more time.
Others need de-scoping to stay on budget,
and sometimes, big changes are required.
But no need for the team lead to
constantly e-mail updates,
because changes are reflected in Asana automatically,
and the task owners are notified in both Asana
and in e-mail.
So, thanks to Timeline, the events team,
their hundreds of partners,
and everyone at Meals on Wheels right up to the CEO
has confidence that everything is actually
on schedule for success.
This is going to make planning the event so much easier,
and, because so much time is freed up for the team to focus on what really matters,
it's going to be their best event ever.
This is technology that would've helped Egyptians build pyramids.
But now is an especially good time for Timeline to be born,
because the world is getting more complicated, and so is everyone's work.
But Timeline is just the beginning, because our mission is to
enable teams to work together effortlessly.
So, we've been asking ourselves questions that,
at first, sounded mind boggling or sci-fi to us.
How much more effective would our customers be if Asana
was their company's all-knowing, logistical coordinator?
Could we make algorithms that actually automate
the cumbersome coordination and let people focus on the work that only people can do?
Can we marry human intelligence with computer intelligence
to turn Asana into a kind of GPS for your organization,
where you just tell Asana where you want to go and Asana gives every
team member the optimal, step-by-step directions to get there?
So I'd love to show you our North Star for our product development.
Let's start with how the work of an individual team member could be different
with a future Asana.
This is Natalie, a research scientist at Vaxall, a fictional pharmaceutical company
that's invented a low-cost Malaria vaccine
and is working to bring
it to the millions of people whose
lives it could save.
When Natalie comes to work in the morning,
she gets complete clarity on what she should
work on today.
I'm a huge believer in the power of mindfulness.
But typical software tools don't encourage mindful focus.
They're cluttered with hundreds of things to do.
So, Asana will offer Natalie a clean,
empty desktop
with only the most important things to do
and the tools to do them.
Of course, Natalie can override the priorities
that Asana suggests,
but she won't often, because these tasks flow
down from projects and processes
that are critical to her team's success.
Our algorithms can understand her, her colleagues
and her company's full intentions.
In the long run, we can even learn what times of day
Natalie works best on which tasks.
So Asana is curating the most useful thing
she can do right now.
Let's zoom out to see Natalie's work in context.
Natalie is part of Vaxall's 20-person
vaccine research team.
The team director needs to make sure
that researchers' time is optimally scheduled
so people are always working on
the most important thing.
Today, this requires working with resource planning software
that's totally separate from the director's project management tools
and totally separate from her researchers' individual task lists.
But in the Asana of the near future,
all these are built right in,
seamlessly integrated, and they're useful to anyone,
not just expert-level project managers.
This view works just like Timeline.
You just drag and drop to schedule work.
In the long run, we can make it even easier.
Asana could automatically identify
when people have extra capacity
or are overloaded and then use algorithms
to intelligently allocate everyone on the team.
Eventually, we could take into account
not only dependencies but vacation schedules,
variations in people's skills and their speed,
and even do this across the entire company
so that every person at Vaxall is scheduled optimally.
All this without managers needing to endlessly jigsaw calendars.
These tools will sharply reduce the need for meetings,
but when people do need to meet, Asana can make that far simpler, too.
I think manual calendar management is going
to go the way of manual car transmissions.
You just tell Asana what meetings need to happen
and it'll coordinate getting people
together at the right time.
No need for you to manually put things in your calendar.
And then, when the meeting is over,
it'll attach a meeting transcript to the task at hand.
If we zoom out further, we can see that
the vaccines team
is part of a larger research initiative.
Higher up in the organization,
there's a director who's responsible
not only for the vaccine team's output,
but the outputs of multiple teams
that are working on Vaxall's research efforts.
Asana uses intelligent algorithms
along with its detailed knowledge
of the status of everyone's work
to provide that director automatically
with a heat map of what's on track
and what needs attention.
This used to be done with
project portfolio management software,
but that requires running around,
nagging people for status updates.
Very soon, even enthusiastic project managers are going to
shudder at the memory of that, because we're working to incorporate
project portfolio management software right into Asana today.
With all these projects running seamlessly,
Vaxall is fulfilling one of its main functions:
designing and producing vaccines.
But a company is obviously more than one output.
It's logistics, HR, marketing, finance.
The whole enterprise needs to stay
on track and on purpose.
Asana does this not only for individuals, not only for teams and initiatives,
but for whole divisions, and even the entire company.
This is a dashboard showing every division,
every project, and every person at Vaxall.
The CEO can zoom from the company's mission
down to the individual tasks people are
working on in service of that mission.
Or, in the reverse, an individual contributor
can zoom all the way out
and they can actually understand
how their day-to-day work
ladders up to Vaxall's mission,
which is extremely motivating.
Asana can give the whole company
a real-time dashboard
of every high-level objective and key result.
Today, companies do OKR updates once a quarter if they're lucky,
and they're not even connected to the actual work,
whereas Asana can show
real-time reports of timelines,
progress toward key results,
and pull metrics from various data sources.
This executive level of transparency alleviates this age-old problem
where company leaders are the ones making the big decisions,
but they have the least visibility into the everyday challenges
of the people actually doing the work.
So, Asana will let leaders see
what's going well and
what needs attention because everyone
is collaborating on one shared data set.
It's like having a company-wide brain
that connects mission,
to strategy, to plan,
to every single action within the company.
We know that, no matter how far we take these tools,
companies like Vaxall will inevitably face problems.
But by giving everyone clarity and automating all that coordination work,
Asana will help Vaxall succeed in developing and delivering vaccines faster and with less struggle.
We're going to help millions of teams work at their highest possible performance.
So, together, we're all helping humanity thrive.
That is why we started Asana, and why I'm so passionate about building the
Asana of the future.