Futurasana: brainstorming 2016
Imagine this: the year is 2016. It’s the beginning of the day and you’ve just arrived at work. You sit down at your desk (assuming that having a desk is still a “thing”) and open Asana. What do you see?
We spent the past week thinking about this question as part of our first-ever, company-wide brainstorm, “Futurasana”. Considering that our company is only 3 years old, fast-forwarding two years was a big leap.
Our goal was simple—to develop big, bold ideas for the future of teamwork, our product, and our company. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day work of improving what already exists but sometimes it’s hard to find time to think about what should exist. There were no parameters or constraints, no idea was too big (or too small), and our only limitations were our imaginations. Plus, we all had a chance to get out of our comfort zones; operations teammates could dream up big product ideas and engineers had an opportunity to weigh in on revenue growth and marketing.
We even asked you to imagine Asana in 2016 with us on Facebook and Twitter, and many of those ideas were presented to the entire company (thanks to everyone who participated!). Your requests for Asana drones and free ponies might not make it onto our task lists, but as for new mobile apps—we hear you and are working to deliver them much sooner than 2016.
Our trip to the future was a success—we imagined stunning new interfaces, invented novel ideas for how you can interact with your team, and even thought of new ways that Asana can interact with you. After brainstorming, we had a 2-day hackathon called “Hack to the Future” to bring some of our ideas to life (and it also gave us an excuse to make t-shirts).
In addition to giving us a glimpse into our product’s future, Hack to the Future resulted in a new integration you’ll see next week, our “Snaptask” April Fool’s feature, some upcoming additions to the hacks tab, our “30 days without email challenge” video and competition, and a new project template that will debut soon.
We highly recommend doing a brainstorm like Futurasana with your team, even if you take an hour to brainstorm or just share an Asana project for future ideas. Now that our heads are back in 2014, we’re more excited about the future than ever before. Believe us, there’s a lot to look forward to!