Asana Impact:
- Reduced the time in weekly meetings by 50%.
- Accelerated employee integration as the company grew to over 100 employees in 2 years
- Built a culture of trust and accountability with cross-functional partners
The mission of Figma is to make design accessible to everyone. As Figma’s product manager, Badrul Farooqi’s role is to ensure that the product and engineering teams are building the right things at the right time and to coordinate market launches with the sales and marketing teams.
The company today has over 1 million signups, $82 million in funding, and over 100 employees, but when Badrul joined, the company looked very different. At the time, they were using JIRA to manage product development, but it was too complex for their workflows and created management overhead as the team and product grew. The teams needed an easy-to-use platform that could be extended and transported to the final release.
Finding a simple way to manage development backlogs
Badrul wanted to find a flexible and straightforward tool that could manage product and engineering backlogs. He needed to connect cross-functional teams across the company during major product launches. This would provide organizational transparency and create accountability through clear plans, responsibilities and deadlines.
Asana Testing and Implementation
Badrul Farooqi first tested Asana with just one team to confirm that it was easier to use than the existing system. So it migrated all the work of the product and engineering teams from JIRA to Asana and shared simple tutorials and documentation with them. Because of Asana’s flexibility, different teams can use it in the way that best suits their specific needs and workflows.
“One of the advantages I highlight most is that one team’s workflow doesn’t have to match another team’s.”
Building trust through transparency
When Figma develops a new feature, a product spec document is created and, the moment the team aligns, it is moved into an Asana project. To make this transfer faster, they use a project template that includes the essential steps for the product manager, designer, and engineers involved.
Tasks and schedules keep everyone aligned and accountable, because everyone can see who is working on what. For broader releases, cross-functional teams also manage tasks and deadlines in Asana and attach files to capture strategy and other details.
“Asana builds trust within and between teams. We know when the tasks are going to be done and who is going to perform them, and we hold each other accountable. That confidence is critical to a team’s success.”
As work progresses, Asana becomes a detailed record of tasks and projects, which provides a historical artifact for the organization and anyone who needs to understand why a particular decision was made. This speeds up employee onboarding, helps transition teammates to new roles, and even shortens meetings.
Product and engineering teams have been able to reduce meeting time by 50%, saving an hour or two a week, because they no longer need to share status updates about what they are accomplishing – all in Asana. Instead, the entire meeting is used to solve problems for the complexes
This case study provides insight into the importance Asana can have in the organization and growth of companies. Request a free consultation!