Asana's story begins at Facebook.
 
The founders, Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, who ran an engineering team at Facebook, realized that engineers spent more time coordinating work between themselves than actually working. This not only hurt team morale, it also hurt the company's ability to grow. They found themselves building a tool called "Tasks" to manage their team's work.
 
"Tasks" was so effective that it quickly spread across the whole company (some pointed to it as part of what helped Facebook grow so fast). Dustin and Justin thought that every team, not just at Facebook, should have access to similar tools, and so they left Facebook to found Asana.
 
The problems Asana solves:
Today, the main thing slowing teams down more than anything is the fact that they spend more time coordinating work than actually working. According to a McKinsey Global Institute study, here is how the average employee's time is divided across tasks:
 
●    28% answering emails
●    19% searching for information
●    14% internal communication and collaboration

That means they spend only 39% on work directly related to their role. Imagine how much faster teams could work if we could raise that number.
 
Software and features like messaging and file sharing were supposed to solve the problem— but they didn't. Research by Michael Mankins from Bain & Company argues that while the volume of cross-team collaboration grew exponentially, the rate of actual output struggled to keep pace with inflation.
 
In 2019, we commissioned a study to dive deeper into these insights, called The Anatomy of Work Index. Following that study, we found that knowledge workers spend almost two-thirds of their time on "work about work" — activities that take time away from the meaningful work they specialize in, such as communicating about work, searching for information, switching between apps, managing and prioritizing tasks, and chasing the status of work. The result is endless project delays, missed deadlines, and "spinning your wheels" throughout the year.
 
83% of teams said they could be more efficient if the right processes were put in place. Clear, well-defined processes are the key to increasing efficiency. More efficiency means more time for strategy, problem solving and creative thinking. And it also means teams will be happier and more productive.
 
We believe the growing gap between collaboration and real productivity is partly the result of unclear plans, unclear processes and unclear areas of responsibility.

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Why aren't the existing tools enough?

Effective collaboration between teams is made up of three C's, as we put it:
 
●    Content
●    Communication
●    Coordination

Teams invested heavily in the first two: Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and for messaging in Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Gmail and Slack. But in many cases, they didn't invest in the coordination layer, the third C.
 
Coordination is a critical component of teams' ability to work together effectively. Coordination answers an important question that file-sharing and messaging tools don't: who does what and when?
 
To coordinate work between themselves, many teams turn to improvised solutions, such as meetings, presentations and spreadsheets. But none of these solutions work at large scale. In other cases, teams invested in traditional project-management tools. But those tools require special training before adoption, and team members who aren't professional project managers don't really use them. Another drawback of these tools is that they aren't connected to the work at a basic level.
 
This is where Asana comes in. Dustin and Justin built Asana to solve the coordination problem between teams, creating an entirely new category in the software world called "work management". Asana is designed to give teams clarity in planning, in processes and in areas of responsibility.