How to use Asana for agile marketing

List view in Asana with section dividers

What is agile marketing?

Agile project management techniques can help marketing teams improve their strategic alignment, team productivity and delivery momentum.

In this blog series we’ve been exploring which SaaS tools are the best at helping marketing teams structure their new agile approach. I’m happy to say that I’ve left the best for last - Asana.

Strong opinions, weakly held

Being able to change your mind about something shows that your prejudices don't govern your ability to assess a situation objectively. In other words, you should hold strong opinions but they should be weakly held. Embrace the pivot!

So, despite being a strong proponent of Atlassian JIRA for the past ~4 years, I'm happy to admit that Asana is now the best tool for marketing teams looking to be more agile in their project delivery. Here's why...

Lists and Kanban Boards

I last used Asana in production about 18 months ago. At the time I thought it was a good task tracking tool but lightweight compared to JIRA. Since then, Asana has listened hard to its users and rolled out a number of helpful new features.

Now Tasks can be assigned to more than one project board allowing you to maintain a backlog in List format (nicely arranged in quarterly sections) whilst displaying sprints in a kanban board format.

Each task can be tagged; sub-tasks, dependencies and documents attached; and commenting can be enabled for team collaboration. Once due dates are assigned, tasks can be tracked in Asana's beautiful calendar view.

If you upgrade to Asana’s premium offering you can also assign start dates to both tasks and boards. Used properly, Asana’s kanban boards can be time-boxed to visualise the completion of tasks during a specific sprint. A clear win for Asana over Trello.

Timelines

Another premium feature is expressing dated and dependent tasks in what Asana calls 'Timelines'.

Timelines is a living view of how your work fits together. It allows you to create project plans that show how all of your tasks connect and adapt as problems arise or work changes.

In my view Timelines are even more powerful than traditional GANTT charts because they’re tied to your underlying work in Asana and so are always up to date.

I also like this new feature because it lets you keep teammates and leadership up-to-date on plans, get buy-in, and showcase your team’s work. With the best will in the world, List views and kanban boards are visually difficult for those not in the weeds of a project to understand.

Portfolios

'Portfolios' in Asana let you to monitor the progress of your important initiatives and strategic objectives in one place.

When using a planning tool like Trello it's difficult to see how you’re progressing towards your strategic goals because your work isn’t being tracked in the same place as your strategy. With Portfolios, you can monitor progress towards these objectives in real time.

As such, Portfolios make it much easier for non-technical folk (like most marketeers) to understand their project velocity rather than using JIRA's somewhat abstract story points concept.

Third-party apps and community

Asana’s community eco-system is even more extensive than Trello with third-party apps covering everything from groupware, cloud storage, reporting, forms and email marketing platforms. You can even connect Asana to Trello and JIRA so that different teams can collaborate using their preferred tool.

“Asana’s app and integrations eco-system is even better than Trello”

Also of note is the excellent quality of Asana's online documentation and community collaboration tools (e.g. forums where you can make or vote for feature suggestions).

Mobile app

Unfortunately JIRA and Trello’s mobile apps leave something to be desired. The JIRA app is much like it's desktop cousin - feature-rich and a little intimidating. Trello's mobile app is functional but limited.

By comparison Asana's mobile app is powerful and highly intuitive. Lists and kanban-style boards are beautifully displayed. Asana’s calendaring view is also clear, intuitive and a joy to use. Less good is that its missing basic admin functionality (you can't use it to delete projects, for example) and Asana's Timeline and Portfolio views are also absent.

What next?

I’m confident that Asana will be more readily embraced by the majority of marketeers than JIRA (which now feels a little outdated by comparison).

The only reason why I think anybody would choose Trello over Asana is habit. Trello's much loved customisation features like choosing different background pictures for boards or applying cute ‘Stickers’ to task cards are hardly compelling.

In my opinion, Asana has a much more refined UX than Trello. In addition, the inclusion of agile new features like Timelines and Portfolios make Asana’s selection a no-brainer.

Asana has a freemium offering that will benefit anyone still using spreadsheets for project management. Its premium subscriptions start at £8 per user/month when billed annually.