Manage your projects, tasks with Asana - Leon Kilat: The Tech Experiments

🌈 Abstract

The article discusses the launch of Asana, a productivity app created by Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, who were previously involved with Facebook. Asana is a web application that allows users to manage teams and projects.

🙋 Q&A

[01] Overview of Asana

1. What is Asana and who created it?

• Asana is a productivity app created by Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook, and Justin Rosenstein, who led the team that built Facebook's Like button.
• Moskovitz and Rosenstein left Facebook in 2008 to work on Asana, a project management system that they envisioned as a "home screen for work."

2. What are the key features of Asana?

• Asana allows users to manage teams and projects, with free access for teams of up to 30 people.
• It provides a centralized platform for teams to see ongoing projects, answer questions, and get updates on work progress.
• Asana integrates email functionality, allowing users to mark tasks as completed or create new ones directly from email.
• The app has a fast, HTML5-based interface with keyboard shortcuts, and a mobile version that works well on Android devices.

3. How does Asana compare to other project management tools?

• Asana offers more generous free account options compared to other services, allowing users to set up multiple workspaces.
• It integrates email functionality better than some other tools, such as ProjectPier, which had issues with email notifications.
• The author found Asana to be the best fit for their writing, coding, and web development workflow compared to other project management systems they had tried.

[02] Founders' Background

1. What is the background of Asana's co-founders?

• Dustin Moskovitz is the co-founder of Facebook and was the company's first chief technology officer before becoming vice president of engineering.
• Justin Rosenstein led the team that built Facebook's Like button.
• Moskovitz is listed by Forbes as the world's youngest billionaire, being eight days younger than Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

2. What motivated Moskovitz to create Asana?

• When Moskovitz was still at Facebook, he had to endure meeting and reporting cycles that left him knowing about "what was going on the previous month" only after a four-week cycle.
• This experience led Moskovitz to create a system to better manage tasks and projects, and he built an app for internal use at Facebook in 2006.
• By 2008, Moskovitz was working full-time on the project, and he and Zuckerberg agreed that it would be a distraction from his Facebook tasks, leading Moskovitz and Rosenstein to leave Facebook and focus on Asana.