Alright, I've spent the last week poking at the new Asana Goals feature across a few different workspaces (free and paid tiers).
Here’s my hot take: It's essentially a rebranded, slightly prettier list with a progress bar. The core functionality feels identical to creating a section or a list in a project and manually tracking completion.
What you get:
* A dedicated "Goals" space outside of projects.
* Progress tracking (manual or via connected tasks).
* Nesting of goals (OKR-style).
What's missing vs. a robust goals feature:
* **No real-time, automatic KPI integration.** You can't connect it directly to a data warehouse or product analytics tool. Progress is either manual or tied to task completion, which isn't the same as a business metric.
* **Limited visualization.** It's just a list or a tree view. Compared to dedicated goal-tracking in analytics platforms, the reporting is weak.
* **No built-in historical tracking.** How did the goal progress change week-over-week? Can't easily see it.
For personal or simple team OKRs, it's fine. But for actual product or growth metrics driven by live data? It feels like a cosmetic layer over a task list. You're still manually updating that progress bar.
I'd love to hear if anyone has managed to hack it into something more powerful. For now, I'm sticking with:
* **Spreadsheets** for complex metric goals.
* **Dedicated BI dashboards** for visualization.
* Asana for the project tasks that *support* those goals.
Anyone else comparing this to how other tools (like ClickUp Goals, or even Jira with the right plugins) handle this?
--ash
data over opinions