Collaboration is beautiful: Introducing Boards in Asana

Editor’s note: We’ve made improvements to Boards since they originally launched in November 2016—including filtering tasks on boards.

We’re building Asana to be a place where everyone can work together effortlessly, no matter what role they’re in, how they organize their work, or what goal they are trying to reach. To that end, today we’re starting to roll out our first version of Boards in Asana, giving you another way to plan, prioritize, and track anything you’re working on, any way you want.

Teams have been visualizing their work in columns on a board for decades. From the giant whiteboard covered with sticky notes, to digital tools like Trello, the board layout is an intuitive, visual way to manage work that is moving through multiple stages.

With this initial version of Boards, visual thinkers can now organize and track their work from within Asana. Asana boards offer the simplicity of moving sticky notes across a white board, with the power of our full, integrated work tracking system, including advanced project management functionality and collaboration across projects. Our early access customers — from the product and marketing teams at Instacart and the business operations team at Lyft, to teams at Stance and USAA Bank — are already loving Boards. Boards are available on our web, iOS and Android apps.

All your work, all in one place

Customers are already tracking work beyond tasks and projects in Asana, on the heels of our custom fields launch earlier this year. With Boards, teams can now manage even more types of work organized in even more ways. Teams can create boards to track work through multiple stages, like the classic kanban board with columns for “Ready to do”, “In progress”, and “Done.” Or, teams can get an overview of related lists, like blog post ideas, with columns for categories like “Thought leadership”, “Customer stories”, “Guest posts”, and “Company updates.”

Here are a few other ways you and your team might want to try using Boards:

• Design sprints (with columns for phases like “Discovery”, “Prototyping”, and “Testing”)

• Newsletter planning (with columns for each week or month, depending on the cadence of your newsletter)

• Product roadmap (with columns for objectives like “Growth” or “Monetization”)

• Goals or Key Performance Indicators (with columns for each company objective that the goal rolls up to)

The board layout provides a simple and intuitive way for any team to manage projects small and large — right alongside all your other work in Asana. Many people have told us that they’re managing most of their work in Asana, but then sometimes have to use apps like Trello for more visual workflows. With boards in Asana, you can consolidate your team into one work tracking system — eliminating the need to support multiple tools, and making cross-team and cross-project collaboration easy.

In fact, one of the best things about Asana boards is that you can connect your work across projects. If you add a task, idea, or goal to a board, you can include it in other projects in Asana, and any changes you make to it will be reflected in real time across all the projects in which it lives. You can also mark tasks as waiting on others to indicate dependencies between different pieces of work, and use @mentioning to link to people, projects, tasks, and conversations across Asana.

The new boards feature in Asana gives me the flexibility to manage my projects the way that makes the most sense for me. ”

A feast for the eyes

Boards in Asana are simple and fun to use, and the interface is clean, modern, and beautiful. Adding work to columns is as easy — in fact, easier! — than jotting something down on a sticky note, and moving things around is intuitive. You can see tag colors and images right from the board to give you visual context about the work, and you’ll even experience some hidden delight from time to time 🌟

Boards makes it much easier for me to visualize and manage projects. I'm already having an easier time managing our holiday campaign.”

The power to grow with you

And unlike the lightweight boards tools people use today, your team won’t outgrow Asana. Asana has powerful features your team will need as your work gets more complex. Boards is just one feature of a complete system, with lots of other ways to manage and visualize your work, like lists, calendars, dashboards, and even gantt charts to empower your team to track even the most sophisticated workflows. Asana offers sophisticated reporting, status updates, automatically-generated progress charts, project and team conversations, a file gallery for each project, a My Tasks view with prioritization, and advanced project management features like merging duplicate tasks and robust subtasks functionality.

How to use Boards in Asana

To create a board:

1. Click on the orange “+” button in the top bar and select “Project” to create a new project

2. Give your project a name, and under Layout, choose “Board”

3. Click “Add columns” and name your first column. Just hit enter to keep adding more

4. Start adding tasks, ideas, goals, or anything you want to track.

5. Add an assignee or due date right from the preview, or click on the task name to pull up the details and add in other information

Note: For now, once you’ve chosen to create a project in board layout, you won’t be able to switch to list layout, and vice-versa. We’ll build this soon!

To learn more about how to use boards, check out the Asana Guide.

…and more to come

We’re excited about this first version of Boards, but we’re not stopping here. We have more work to do in order to provide the best possible board experience, and we will continue to build out more boards functionality over the next several months. In the meantime, go create a board and let us know what you think in the comments.

Asana’s mission is to help teams work together effortlessly. With today’s launch, we’re excited to get one step closer to a world where everyone in an organization can collaborate seamlessly, regardless of what people are working on, or how they like to work. We hope this helps you and your team accomplish your goals more effectively, with less effort.