Asana launches OKR goal-tracking to align teams around business objectives

Work management platform Asana is pushing out a new feature to help teams more effectively set and manage goals and meet broader company objectives.

Asana was built to help teams manage and collaborate on projects, including assigning tasks, managing deadlines, sharing feedback, and tracking milestones. Last year, the company launched a suite of automation tools to help businesses sidestep repetitive tasks. As with other tools that enable distributed teams to operate more cohesively, Asana is well-positioned to capitalize on the global shift to remote working precipitated by the COVID-19 crisis.

Objectives and key results

With Goals, Asana is now providing support for objectives and key results (OKRs), a goal-setting framework popularized by former Intel CEO Andy Grove that has been used to bring direction to many big-name companies, including Google. Asana itself is a major proponent of the OKR philosophy, building on the concept with a system it calls the Pyramid of Clarity to “align everyone on our high-level goals and the concrete results we expect our work to produce,” Asana head of product Alex Hood told VentureBeat. “The pyramid shows how our longer-term aspirations are built on top of shorter-term goals, whether we’re building our product roadmap or business plans.”

A core component of OKRs is transparency — everyone at a company can view their own and others’ “key results” (metrics for measuring progress), including status of goals and how they relate to the company’s overarching objectives. Through the main Asana Goals dashboard, everyone can view individual OKRs across the entire business, including why specific work is being prioritized and how that will further the company’s mission. This can be broken into larger company goals, which are typically longer-term aims, and team goals, which are shorter-term targets that contribute to the broader objectives.

Above: Asana now supports objectives and key results (OKRs)

Asana was founded in 2009 by Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and software engineer Justin Rosenstein, who led development of early Google products like Gmail Chat before going on to work at Facebook, where his credits include such key features as the Like button. The San Francisco-based company has managed to attract some notable backers through the years, including Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, and Peter Thiel, and it recently took its total funding past the $400 million mark with a reported $200 million debt round.

Asana quietly started rolling out Goals last week, and the feature will be available to all subscribers on the Business and Enterprise tiers in the coming weeks.