Inside the build: How Asana made goals work the way your team does

Clear expectations and a sense of mission make work meaningful—yet data shows both are harder to achieve than it seems. Only 46% of employees feel clear about what’s expected of them at work, according to a 2025 Gallup poll. Meanwhile, only 31% of managers feel engaged. Asana Goals was built to close that gap by giving teams a structured way to connect daily work to the results that matter.

Asana Goals gives every team a single place to define what success looks like. This feature lets workers set measurable outcomes, track progress automatically, and see how individual tasks contribute to company-wide priorities. It's the difference between a team that's busy and a team that knows exactly what they’re working toward.

“Asana has had tasks, projects, and even portfolios for a really long time, and that's all about tracking day-to-day tasks,” says Tammy Liu, a software engineer at Asana. “But we realized workers needed to understand what they’re working toward. Goals adds in the why behind the what.”

As more teams inside Asana started using Goals, it became clear that every team tracked their goals a little differently. Some goals were organized by department, others by initiative, or owner, or quarter. There was no structured way to add metadata to a goal inside Asana.

That's what kicked off the build behind custom fields for Goals.

What are custom fields for Goals, and why do they matter?

Asana has had custom fields for tasks, projects, and portfolios for years. The ability to tag, filter, and sort based on structured data is fundamental to how teams make Asana fit their specific workflows. The product team knew from the beginning that Goals would eventually need custom fields, too.

But when the engineers started designing the feature, they quickly realized that adding custom fields alone wouldn't be enough.

Tammy says. “It's not that you only need to tag your goals—you also need to be able to organize, filter, and sort them.” That insight changed the scope of the work. What started as a plan to add a field type became a much larger effort, including:

• A new list view built for accessibility and scale

• Saved views that let teams filter and sort goals their way

• Custom fields that tie it all together

The team built all three at once because shipping one without the others would have left the real problem unsolved.

Here's how it works:

Step 1: Add custom fields directly to each goal

On a project in Asana, adding a custom field applies it to every task in that project—every task gets the same fields, no exceptions. Because Goals are more varied by nature, a one-size-fits-all approach would limit useful tracking.

Think about what a company's goal list actually looks like: a product launch goal sitting next to a hiring goal sitting next to a regional marketing goal. Each one needs different information attached to it. The product launch goal might need "launch date" and "lead team." The hiring goal might need "headcount" and "department." Applying the same fields to all of them would create clutter, not clarity.

So in Asana, custom fields attach to individual goals, not to the entire view. Users can add fields from the right pane of any goal, pull from a shared company-wide library, or create new ones from scratch.

Step 2: Use saved views to filter and sort by those fields

Behind the scenes, filtering and sorting goals by custom fields runs through saved views—the same engine that powers views elsewhere in Asana. For example, teams can build a view that shows only Q2 goals in EMEA, sorted by the responsible party, and save it to share with stakeholders. The consistency is intentional. If you know how saved views work on projects, you already know how they work on goals.

"It's not that you only need to tag your goals," says Tammy. "You actually also need to be able to organize them and filter them and sort them."

Step 3: Use the list view to see everything at once

The list view gives goals the same column-based layout that tasks and projects already use. Users can show, hide, and reorder columns, and scan metadata across dozens of goals in a single screen. And because the list view is built on the same foundation as the rest of Asana, future improvements to list views across the platform automatically apply to Goals too.

That last point future proofs the product. "If there are improvements to list views everywhere and saved views everywhere and custom fields everywhere, we don't have to rebuild them three or four times over," says Tammy.

Building for how teams actually set goals

The deeper lesson from this build is about meeting users where they are. Clarity doesn't come from having goals—it comes from having goals that reflect how individual teams work. Some follow OKR methodology, some organize by business unit, and some by a custom taxonomy that only makes sense inside their walls. No single feature could fit every team, so the Goals team built one that adapts to all of them. Now you can define your own fields, filter by them, and share those views across your organization.

"Custom fields for goals is really for the users to make Asana their own, and we want to empower that,” says Tammy. “There's so much a team can do now."