Asana introduces Asana Business for large enterprise customers

Asana cofounders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin RosensteinAsana

• Asana, a team productivity software startup, has announced Asana Business — a new product offering for big business customers.
• Historically, Asana has found its niche in selling to small-to-midsize businesses, but Asana Business comes with new features to help larger teams organize their projects and assign tasks.
• Asana Business is priced at $20/user/month.
• Asana, which was valued at $900 million earlier this year, was cofounded by Dustin Moskovitz, who’s best known for helping start Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg. 

When two former Facebook employees — including Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz — decided to create a tool to improve their team’s productivity, they didn’t realize this would quickly spread across the company and form the basis of a new company, Asana.

10 years later, Asana now has more than 50,000 paying organizations and millions of users across 195 countries. It kicked off 2018 with a $75 million round of funding that valued the company at $900 million. Now, it’s taking the next step, as it goes after even larger companies with the launch of a new product called Asana Business. 

“This is meant for folks who have a certain level of complexity where just tracking a handful of projects in Asana starts to become more cumbersome,” Alex Hood, Asana’s head of product, told Business Insider. “It lends itself to larger enterprises or teams who have several projects running at once.”

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Historically, Asana has been known for catering to startups and midsized companies. With Asana Business, however, the company is introducing new features to help teams at those larger scales of complexity. Those features will cost, though: Asana Business is priced at $20 per user per month.

A feature called Portfolios, which is expected to be released on Thursday, makes it easier for teams to organize their tasks and projects, as well as prioritize the most important ones. This can help customers who are running multiple projects at once, as they can monitor the status of all these projects in one place.

It also aims to reduce the time wasted tracking down information and project updates that may be outdated, as it shows real-time statuses and progress of what a team is working on, like marketing campaigns and product launches. And it’s not just project leaders who can use Portfolios; it’s for anybody.

Hood says to think of Portfolios as a “mission control” for company strategies.

Asana PortfoliosAsana

Another flagship new feature for Asana Business, called Workload, optimizes work across an entire team, and it will roll out in early 2019. It will connect the actual work to people’s skill sets and schedules to help teams figure out the best people to work on a project.

“When enterprises reach a level of complexity, they need a way to bubble up their information or they start to drown,” Hood said.

The next main focus for Asana Business will be to help companies better track objectives and key results, as well as company-wide initiatives.

“Then you’ll have clarity all the way from the mission of the company down to all the projects portfolios for that whole year,” Hood said. “We think teams work best when they have a line of sight as to what they’re working on.”