Hacker News Reader

Comment by fjp | Hacker News Reader

I use it at work and as far as I can tell it's just a web app where you can move cards around. I do like the fact that it's simple and snappy and doesn't have a shitload of options and features no one wants that cause it to load super slow (Cough cough Jira) However, some basic workflow enforcement would be nice (Cards marked done when you put them in the "done" column) In its current state it seems like it could be cloned in a week. Edit: cloned in a day if you wanted just the functionality and not a cute little UI

View on HN

It's easy to make a (poor) copy of the product. It's hard to execute the idea, take market share, and capture customer revenue.

Asana blogged this year about 50k organisations, 6 quarters accelerating growth [1].

Back in 2015 they blogged mentioning the heating up 'enterprise collaboration market'. There's countless office tools, diagramming tools, collaboration tools. Even in software there's more CI systems than I can count.

My guess is there's a big market which the VCs think is accessible to Asana in a way it's fundamentally not to a competitor. Combined with big growth it makes sense.

[1] https://blog.asana.com/2018/09/asana-company-updates-2018/

Taiga.io is a pretty good facsimile, but Taiga tries to incorporate too many of JIRA's Agile-related non-features rather than sticking to the basics. There is no good alternative (right now).

One persons “basic workflow enforcement” requirements is another persons “shitload of options and features no one wants” :)

It seems everyone has their own idea of what basic enforcement entails, and JIRA is pretty much ~20 years of trying to please everyone in this regard.

It seems that it’s fashionable to hate JIRA on this forum. I’m not sure how one can be so religious about a workflow management tool.

It should be pretty obvious to anyone that's used both JIRA and it's competitors that it's a piece of shit. It's missing basic functionality that competitors have like live updates (I guess I'll just telepathically guess when my teammates have made an update and hit F5), it's got basic UX problems that everyone else seems to have solved just fine (opening outbound links in a new tab etc), and their new redesign appears to have done fuck all to make any of it better.

I don't care how many features it's got for BAs/PMs to wank over. If the basic usability isn't there, the devs won't proactively participate, which means they'll either be forced to (incurring a big hit to morale), or they'll use other tools like Trello or physical boards to organise instead, and you end up with multiple sources of truth and synchronisation problems.

How it's ever become so popular is a mystery to me. I wouldn't inflict it on a team of my worst enemies.

Hmmm...I don't really share the same opinions about JIRA. Complex teams with a lot of stake holders and JIRA was light years better than what was used before. Maybe you just have super simple needs? I also don't see at all what's so complicated about using the tool, and my org has some super complicated customized workflows to get a ticket to flow efficiently through all facets of the org. Also, even on our smaller teams, that have simple processes right now, people can open up and create a ticket easily with most of the effort in filling out the description?

Even more concerning is that you state your devs would have negative morale by being forced to use this tool? You must have bigger issues?

Interesting. These seem like relatively minor issues to me. We switched from Asana to JIRA about a year ago. We spent about 2 years using Asana, and I hated working with it daily. JIRA is very far from perfect but like it many times more. We have significantly better understanding of where our team is and our projects now, and we scoured the web for every way to use Asana we possibly could find. To each their own...

One of the things that bothered me the most about Asana was how slow it was (also a UX issue).

>> (Cards marked done when you put them in the "done" column)

Well now we know how they pitched for the $50M.

weekend project

Cloned in a day? I could clone it in four minutes

> I use it at work and as far as I can tell it's just a web app where you can move cards around.

Are we adding Asana to the HN list “I’m Not Seeing Why This Isn’t Just a Weekend Project?” which includes: Twitter, Facebook, and DropBox among many others.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com