Inside the Build: How Asana makes complex rules work everywhere

A growth marketing team builds an intake rule in Asana that handles their repetitive tasks. The rule handles every incoming request: One branch for high priority requests spins up and assigns subtasks so that the team can get straight to work. Another for medium-priority tasks uses AI to summarize the request and suggest next steps. A third routes low-priority requests to the team's backlog with a due date. The rule is complex, and it works beautifully.

Then the sales team wants to use it too. And customer success.

Until recently, every team would have had to rebuild this rule by hand.

That's the challenge that kicked off Asana's update to the rule builder. With rule duplication, branch duplication, and branch reordering, the automations that already work for one team now work for everyone.

The customer requests behind rule and branch duplication 

The friction was sharpest for power users: the teams building sophisticated, multi-branch logic across multiple projects and portfolios. But the feedback didn't come from a single conversation. It built up over months across community forum posts, customer calls, and feature requests. 

“I kept hearing how painful it was to recreate some of these really complex rules that people were trying to build," says Julio Buendia, the product manager at Asana who leads this work. “It was tough to manage all these complex rules, and folks were interested in the ability to easily copy rules from one project to another.”

Inside Asana's new rule duplication and branch management features

There could have been a simpler version of this launch: just reorder branches, and maybe allow duplication within a single project. That would have been a useful improvement, but it wouldn't have solved the real problem.

"We wanted to answer our customer's biggest pains, which was around the duplication of complex branch logic as well as the duplication of complex rules to other projects," Julio says.

The update introduces four closely related capabilities inside the rule builder:

• Rule duplication within the same project: Click the three-dot menu on any rule and hit duplicate.

• Rule duplication across projects: Copy a rule from one project into any other project where it would be useful.

• Branch duplication inside a rule: Reuse the logic of an existing branch without rewriting it—especially handy when a branch contains detailed task creation steps or AI instructions.

• Branch reordering: Move branches up or down to organize complex rules in a way that makes sense to the team maintaining them.

Making rule duplication work across mismatched projects

Two challenges shaped how the feature came together.

The first was a design challenge. Rule duplication had to be obvious without cluttering an already-dense builder. The Rules Experience team made targeted tweaks to how branches are added and duplicated, and worked to clearly communicate what gets carried over when a rule is copied into a new project. This includes things like custom fields and sections that the target project might not yet have.

The second was a technical one. A rule often depends on specific pieces of a project—a custom field it checks, a section it moves tasks into. What happens when someone copies that rule into a project that doesn't have those pieces yet?

The Rules Experience team built the feature to handle those gaps, so duplication works across projects that aren't perfect mirrors of each other.

Rules are less scary now. If you create a complex branch, you don't have to worry about having to rewrite that logic by hand.”

Asana's customer-first product development

The story of this launch is the story of how Asana builds: listen closely, share what's coming, and adjust based on what customers tell us.

“Our customers are our biggest sources of inspiration,” Julio says. “The feedback they share—whether in product, on forums, on social media—those are some of the things that we as PMs at Asana really watch and listen to and make sure we actually incorporate into Asana to make our customers' lives a lot better.”

This feature came from the forum. The next one could too. Try rule duplication and tell us what to build next.