How HubSpot uses Asana to drive team alignment and scale

When a company grows quickly, it’s hard for teams to stay aligned. In today’s remote work environment, people require an increasing number of technologies to do their jobs effectively, but often lack a central place to coordinate work. As a result, the average person spends 60% of their time on work that’s about work—like writing status updates and sitting through alignment meetings—rather than on the strategic work they were hired to do.

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Aligning cross-functional teams—especially in a remote environment—is challenging. We recently spoke with Navi Singh, a Principal Project Manager at HubSpot, to learn how their marketing team drove cross-team alignment and scale with Asana. 

According to Navi, “For an organization to thrive in today’s landscape, teams need processes that allow for clarity, alignment, and scale. That’s where a robust work management platform like Asana comes into play.” 

Learn more about how Navi rolled out and drove adoption of Asana at HubSpot to bring teams together and drive greater business impact.

What made you realize it was time to look for a work management platform?

When I first started at HubSpot, we were using a number of different solutions to communicate and collaborate about work. After a while, the project management team realized that we were all communicating out to stakeholders and tracking our work streams in a very different and manual way. As a result, this lack of consistency led to more work for the project management team.

We needed a platform that not only allows stakeholders to have easy-to-digest information at their fingertips but also answers the needs of our creative partners. By worrying less about the day-to-day documentation, our creative partners would spend more time on the actual creative flow. 

That’s where Asana came in for us. It started as a work management platform to track design and marketing work and expanded to become our solution for reviewing, editing, and collaborating on work across the entire organization. Asana was first adopted by a few of us—the tech early adopters. We had no idea how much it could do for us, but we knew a change was needed. 

The adoption of Asana spread like wildfire. It started with just our events team, but our whole marketing department is now on Asana. And we’re still continuing to grow.

Navi Singh, Principal Project Manager, HubSpot

I remember saying to someone, “If Asana can help us this much without any proper training, what could it do for us if it was rolled out properly?”

How have your teams started to adopt Asana into daily work routines?

Project managers are always trying to make sure stakeholders and the teams actually doing the work have all the information they need at their fingertips. This becomes a problem when things are too manual for the project manager. So the question always is, “How can we make bridging the gap between stakeholders and our creative partners easier?” 

Asana allows me to set up projects in a way that the creative team and managers can understand. At the same time, Asana lets me set up reporting for stakeholders too. Asana’s Universal Reporting feature helps me create a custom view that let’s stakeholders consume only the information they are interested in. 

I also love using Asana’s reporting feature when I present project health to a wider audience. It puts everything into visuals that helps me explain and get through information much quicker. My stakeholders always want different views of the data, and Asana allows me to direct proper communication to each stakeholder with minimal manual effort.

Looking ahead, what are you most interested in using Asana for?

As we start to scratch the surface of Asana and what it can do for us, the question that I am always trying to solve is: what can we automate? 

For example:

• Can we take those stakeholder reports and automate them? 
• Can we turn the creative review process into a seamless integrated system? 
• Can we set up rules so that certain labels get added on to tickets as they move through the lifecycle of a project? 

Yes, yes, and yes! That’s what gets me so excited about this journey with Asana. We are now running our media projects exclusively through Asana as well as Q1 planning for most of our marketing initiatives. With Asana Workflows, you can take a project from intake to delivery while ensuring the right people are connected to the right data at the right time.

I’ve only just started exploring what the Asana Workflows solution allows. There are endless possibilities for what Asana can do for us here at HubSpot. I am excited for that journey and the business impact it will bring.

To learn more about how the HubSpot + Asana integration can help you automate processes and seamlessly hand-off work between teams and deal cycles, visit asana.com/apps/hubspot.