On Thursday, the $1.5 billion work management software startup Asana launched new products for operations, sales, and account management teams.

Earlier this month, Asana announced that it filed to go public with a direct listing — an alternative to a traditional IPO in which companies like Slack and Spotify have turned.

Asana has been focusing on building software for specific teams and industries as it goes after bigger customers.

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The $1.5 billion work management platform Asana just launched new business products as it prepares to go public through a direct listing.

Earlier this month, Asana announced it confidentially filed an S-1 with the SEC that said it plans to go public with a direct listing – the same route that Spotify and Slack took. And last year, Asana announced that it had reached $100 million in annual revenue, and that it has 75,000 organizations as paid customers.

Now, it's getting into new markets as it prepares for that direct listing, with the launch of new products for operations, sales and account management on Thursday. It's designed to plug into common tools like Salesforce, the Salesforce-owned Tableau, Microsoft's Power BI, and Atlassian's Jira, and automate common tasks with that data.

It's not the first time that Asana has built out its appeal to specific industries. About a year ago, Asana launched a version specifically for people working in marketing and creative fields. Asana's head of product Alex Hood says it's part of a broader strategy of making it easier for workers in all industries to work with their peers, by building the necessary backend plumbing to make it useful in each market.

"The broader push is based on what we see from Asana customers," Hood told Business Insider. "They choose Asana because they're trying to bridge the gap between teams. When that gap isn't bridged things fall through the cracks. That's often when project risk occurs."

'Things slip through the cracks'

Asana conducted a survey of 10,000 workers and found that they spend 60% of their time coordinating tasks like emailing and status updates, rather than their actual work. In addition, 83% of respondents said their teams are not as efficient as they can be, and they said over 10% of their day is spent on tasks that have already been completed.

Alex Hood, Asana's head of product Asana

"Things slip through the cracks," Hood said. "People don't know the status of how these pieces are coming together."

That's what inspired Asana to launch these new products, Hood says. The first new product, Asana for Operations, helps teams with onboarding vendors and employees, set agendas, and the like. It currently works with Atlassian's Jira Cloud, Salesforce's Tableau, and Microsoft Power BI, so that customers can create custom reports.

The other new product, Asana for Sales and Account Management, integrates with Salesforce Sales Cloud so that salespeople can conduct tasks to help them close deals, provide customer service, and manage customer data.

"That's been fascinating and exciting in terms of our momentum at Asana," Hood said. "It reinforces our goal of making work management really really easy to use and well designed so it spreads across teams that use it."

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Source: Business Insider

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