Pain points
- Fake productivity in Asana: the Efficient team spent a lot of time setting up beautiful charts and dashboards in Asana, only to realize it was all fake productivity: "Asana was a graveyard. We put in a lot of work to set it up like, you feel great about it - kinda like Lego; it was perceived productivity. And you start being busy, and nothing gets updated. Weeks would pass and everything would be stale in Asana."
- Asana and Monday required hours of manual work each week to keep up-to-date: "we spent 30min a day just shifting deadlines around, and updating statuses. Asana wasn't helping me; I needed to constantly help it."
- Andra shares a similar feeling when she previously used Monday at her company: "Someone had to go in for each task, do 1:1 with each person, then figure out status and move it forward. I remember feeling "this was not working," so I left that company within 6 months."
- Disorganized structure: "the structure of Asana forced us to have a bunch of subtasks, which became very disorganized," Alex shares. Some subtasks would take days, others would be 15 minutes. And there was no way to group them into stages or timelines - there was no structure in Asana.
- Employees were not motivated to use Asana or Monday: "as project manager, I needed my team to use Asana. It was super difficult to sell to the rest of team. The truth of matter is: I don't even truly believe in Asana's value."
- "We also implemented Monday.com for my 30-person company previously," Andra shares: "It was really hard to get people to actually go in and update the work they were doing.
- Anxiety chasing people down for updates: "I hate following-up with people on our team - hate asking for status updates. No employee likes it either."
- Too much guesswork: Alex kept wondering if someone will finish a task on time, so that their projects can deliver by deadline. This gave him a lot of anxiety: "I noticed my eyes would twitch."
Challenges
Efficient helps many businesses, large and small, choose their collaboration software stack. As part of their consulting services, they previously onboarded dozens of businesses onto Asana as a certified Asana partner, but always felt something was off.
They were heavy customers of Asana for years, and were hesitant to switch software provider because they'd invested so much time and energy into making Asana work:
"I had to get over it mentally b/c of how much time I put into Asana, that didn't really yield much results," Alex shares.
They eventually realized it was sunk cost when they discovered Motion, and onboarded the entire team onto Motion within 2 weeks.
The Solution
Easy Onboarding for employees:
Alex was initially worried about how quickly can the employees onboard to Motion. He quickly realized there's no need to worry, because Motion makes the experience very simple for ICs (individual contributors):
"You can just look at the auto-prioritized task list, and ignore everything else as an IC. You don't need to worry about what I worry about - progression, setting up projects, and everything else. Employees used to be overwhelmed by Asana; Motion helps them focus on just a couple things."
Individual contributors actually use Motion, without having to chase them down
Alex's employees didn't understand why they had to use Asana.
"Whereas yesterday when we talked our new video editors to use Motion, it was really easy to sell them on the benefits that we'd get by them updating Motion - 'if you think x is gonna take longer, just change it in Motion - it'd just automatically re-prioritize everything else and predict new timelines, and alert us when necessary. ICs don't even need to update us: we'll just know where things are at."
"Other tools are solely built for managers; they are difficult for individual contributors to use because they force every employee to understand every part of how the platform works," Alex shares.
In reality, individual contributors don't need to do a lot of things managers do. Motion is built for both managers and individual contributors."
Motion feels like an intelligent partner, not a tool
"Motion meets me half-way. I feels like having an assistant and partner at work. I feel like I have a purpose: when I complete a task, it progresses the project automatically and the people I'm blocking can do their thing - there's a flow effect. It feels like I'm getting help; I'm no longer just on my own in this despair of tasks, managing them for my own entertainment," Alex shares.
Motion makes it easy to change processes
"Whenever I have a process change, I go into Motion to update workflows - because I know updating it will help me in the future. It's easy to change something inside Motion - and it can automatically update all existing projects too."
Motion is very structured, making it easy to track things down
"Asana doesn't think in groups of tasks and where they are in the process," shares Alex: "there a tons of subtasks and tasks all over the place." Whereas everything is very organized and structured in Motion: "you can see exactly which tasks belong to which phase of a project and how they tie together with timelines."
The Impact
- Feeling relieved: after switching to Motion from Asana, Alex and Andra no longer feel frustrated and anxious about where things are anymore: "It feels like we can breathe now - I get peace of mind. I can tell people 'we'd finish this in Q2' and actually feel confident about it. Whereas before, my eyes would just twitch."
- Motion helps Efficient achieve deadlines: Efficient finishes projects 30% faster by using Motion because Motion just moves projects forward automatically, alerting the necessary stakeholders as needed, without managers having to always manually close the loop by chasing things down.
- Faster onboarding for new hires: new hires are usually overwhelmed by the amount of tasks and knowledge they need to get up to speed. Motion helps them focus on just a couple things at a time, making onboarding feel simple and organized.
