How Asana’s digital team used work management to refresh our brand

As Head of Digital at Asana, I’m no stranger to complex projects that span multiple teams and tools. When we decided to launch a major digital brand refresh on Asana.com, I knew we needed more than great ideas to be successful—we needed clear communication, precise planning, and a solid execution strategy to get it done. 

Luckily, we had Asana’s capabilities to support us every step of the way. I’m excited to share how we leveraged our own platform to manage the cross-functional initiative from start to finish—and how you can use it to bring your big projects to life too.

Tackling brand refresh challenges

Before diving into the brand refresh, my team needed to get clear on the challenges ahead and flag any risks that could impact our success. We identified three key areas:

• The website’s structure: Asana.com uses a system of templates and components, which means everything on the site is interconnected. If you change one component—like a CTA banner—it changes on every page where the component is used, not just the page you’re working on. Because of this, we couldn’t update the site one page at a time. We needed a way to understand how each component was used on different pages to plan updates efficiently without causing unintended changes.

• The project timeline: Our marketing team had a hard deadline for launching an out-of-home campaign, which meant our updates had to align with that timeline to create a cohesive experience for our customers.

• The always-on nature of the website: Our digital team—and our partners on other teams—relied on the site being fully operational at all times. So, we couldn’t afford to “freeze” the site while making updates. Every change had to be done in a way that minimized disruptions and kept everything running smoothly.

“Keeping the lights on—pushing live updates while still activating priority projects—was an interesting challenge,” says Rachel Rosin, Asana’s Head of Digital Experience. “Visibility was so important, since we had pages still being created while we were doing the brand refresh.”

With these challenges flagged, we turned to Asana to map out a clear plan. 

A lot of projects we do in our day-to-day are predictable. But this wasn’t like that. We needed to build processes that could help us accomplish our goals faster and more efficiently. We used Asana to build a custom solution to track all this work. ”

Mitigating risks through visibility and cross-linking

Before we could start work, we needed to get a clear picture of all project dependencies, potential bottlenecks, and overlapping tasks to make sure we were using our resources wisely and minimizing risks. 

First, we set up an Asana project to serve as the master hub for all tasks related to the refresh. Then, we created individual Asana tasks for two main categories:

• Specific page components that needed updates (like a CTA banner)

• Individual pages that needed updates (like the homepage)

For each page, we made a list of all the components—like banners or buttons—that were part of that page. Then, we linked the component tasks in the corresponding page tasks. This made it easy to see which components were used on multiple pages, which helped us spot potential issues early on and decide which pages to prioritize.

As Rachel explains: “By cross-linking components to corresponding pages, we could see which ones were used most. That helped us see the updates that would make the biggest impact.”

“Asana helped us visualize what those first batches would look like, and manage the work and the dependencies,” she adds. “That helped us stay really focused on where we were within this really big project."

Planning and prioritizing with custom fields 

While our initial project setup gave us a better idea of which pages made the most sense to update from a component perspective, we also wanted to focus on the pages that would have the most impact once updated. For us, that meant pages with the highest traffic. 

To do this, we used Asana’s custom fields to tag tasks with two key points: 

• Page traffic: We labeled each page with its traffic level—very high, high, medium, or low.

• Component footprint: We marked how many pages each component appeared on, using labels like high, medium, or low.

This allowed us to sort tasks by which updates would have the biggest impact, so we could prioritize the most important pages first.

From there, we decided on a phased approach, rolling out updates in sequences that grouped similar pages together. By clustering pages with similar components, we were able to front-load our efforts—making the later phases easier since most of our component library was already updated.

Aligning cross-functional teams for effective collaboration

Once we had the plan and timeline locked down, it was time to kick-off work. Like with so many digital transformation projects, this required seamless collaboration between multiple teams including marketing, design, engineering, product marketing, and localization. 

Asana helped us coordinate between these teams in two major ways: by providing a central source of truth through our refresh project and by making cross-functional collaboration easier with multi-homing.

“Asana gave us a single source of truth where everything was tracked and updated as things changed," says Rachel. "It also helped us see how all the smaller tasks fit together to make the bigger project happen."

Keeping all the tasks related to the refresh in one master project created a central space for updates, status tracking, and clear communication. Then, to keep every team focused on their specific tasks while staying connected to the larger project, we turned to Asana’s multi-homing feature, which allowed each team to organize and track tasks in their own team projects without needing to duplicate them.

For example, the reband’s project manager needed full visibility into every part of the project. Our partners on the engineering team, however, only needed visibility into the specific tasks related to their work. With multi-homing, the engineering team could add these tasks to their own projects, keeping their work organized, while those same tasks also remained visible in the master project. This kept everyone aligned and gave individual teams the flexibility to work how they wanted without duplicating efforts.

“When it came to actually getting the work done, multi-homing was a game-changer,” says Rachel. “It let us stay connected and track progress without repeating work.” 

Staying on track with timeline view

Once we started work, we relied on Asana’s timeline view to track our progress. This gave us a big-picture overview of everything happening across the project, from sprint schedules to batch releases. It also provided a clear visual of when work started, stopped, and overlapped, which made it easy for us to spot any potential bottlenecks or overcapacity issues. 

Viewing the project timeline, Rahcel could quickly see if anyone had too much on their plate or if there was too much work packed into a single sprint. This visibility made it easier to have important trade-off conversations and shift work around as needed. Plus, it helped us maintain a steady pace of updates throughout the year—balancing short-term deliverables with long-term goals.

“When it came to having those trade-off discussions, the timeline feature really helped,” says Rachel. “It made it easy to spot when the workload was becoming too much.” 

Drive impact at your organization

Managing complex projects like a brand refresh can be challenging, and having the right project management platform can make all the difference. By using Asana’s features, we were able to deliver exactly what the business needed—rolling out our new brand across key pages on a tight timeline. We launched the refreshed website alongside our brand campaign, while still making important improvements to our tech platforms along the way.

For us, Asana provided the visibility, flexibility, and control we needed to keep everyone aligned, move the project forward, and achieve meaningful results.

If you’re a company that’s innovative, you’re doing things that people have never done before. Asana can adapt to support that. ”

Whether you’re handling routine tasks or tackling projects that require innovative thinking, Asana provides a flexible framework that can adapt to your needs.