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Asana has just rolled out a new suite of features that aim to remove repetitive tasks from the average working day.
Today (17 October), San Francisco-headquartered work management platform Asana announced the introduction of Automation, its latest suite of features built to automate processes to help teams focus on the work that matters.
The product is available for customers subscribed to Asana’s Premium, Business and Enterprise plans. Ahead of the launch, Siliconrepublic.com caught up with Asana CPO Alex Hood to discuss the new features and the company’s plans for Ireland.
Asana, which surpassed $100m in annual recurring revenue in 2018, is growing at 90pc year on year, according to Hood.
“We now have 70,000 paying organisations and millions of free customers. We have an expanding and growing team,” he added.
Automation
The company’s latest offering for those customers aims to help them cut down on the time teams spend coordinating in email, spreadsheets and meetings, rather than on the actual job that they’ve been hired to do.
Asana recently launched a study called the Anatomy of Work Index, which found that 83pc of employees don’t believe their team is living up to its full efficiency potential.
According to the survey of 10,000 workers across Australia, Japan, Germany, New Zealand, the UK and the US, workers said they spend at least 10pc of their time on pure duplication of effort. This would suggest that around 200 hours are going to waste each year per person.
Asana Automation enables individuals, teams and organisations to try and reclaim some of that wasted time, improving efficiency and productivity with the introduction of the new Rules, Vision and Voice features.
Asana Rules is a feature that helps businesses automate the manual steps associated with work intake, task routing and agile workflows. This is powered by an intuitive custom Rules builder, which enables workers to route new tasks to the right team members at the right time with curated preset options or a simple fill-in-the-blank editor.
An example of some of the recommended Rules that Asana can suggest. Image: Asana
Meanwhile, Voice and Vision are particularly useful for customers who use the company’s iPhone app.
Voice allows an individual to capture and transcribe an audio voice memo directly into an Asana task, and Vision, which uses optical character recognition, can capture an iPhone image in real time, such as a brainstorming diagram on a whiteboard, and automatically assign the appropriate subtasks in Asana based on the image text.
Growth in Dublin
Hood said that the company’s global headcount has been growing by around 70pc each year and currently stands at more than 600 employees.
“We’re going to double our team in Dublin from 50 to 100 this year, which is exciting. Dublin went from being a regional office to being an important centre of how we’re building this category and changing the way that folks are working in Europe,” he added.
“We had office space in Dublin that we quickly grew out of, so we’ve been growing our team there and it has established itself as a really important hub for how we are building this product out.”
When asked about Asana’s plans for 2020 and beyond, Hood said that the aim is to continue expanding and hiring for its Dublin offices.
“My next set of meetings is to figure out what our headcount plan is actually going to look like, but we’re in hypergrowth phase, which is fun. We’ve got a product-market fit and we see lots of opportunities for us to scale up in Europe and elsewhere. It’s a pretty exciting time!”
