How Asana uses work management to power digital roadmap planning

Digital roadmapping isn't just about creating a to-do list of projects—it's about making smart choices that drive real results. A clear and well-prioritized roadmap requires aligning with stakeholders, setting clear priorities, and making tough trade-offs. Dani Spires, Head of Digital at Asana, knows this challenge inside and out. 

“As a digital team, we have to support the evolving needs of the business while also pushing forward technical initiatives. Roadmap planning helps us find the right balance,” she says.

To achieve this, Dani’s team regularly reassesses their priorities and integrates feedback from across the organization to keep their roadmap aligned with strategic goals. It’s not easy—especially when working with multiple stakeholders. That’s where Asana comes in.

Four ways Asana simplifies roadmap planning

When done right, digital roadmapping helps teams prioritize the most impactful projects, setting the stage for growth and keeping everyone focused on what matters. As Dani says, the main goal is to “figure out the team’s priorities and determine how we can allocate bandwidth to drive impact while staying focused on other initiatives.”

To make this happen, teams need a central space to view potential projects, align on strategy, make decisions, and track progress—all while collaborating seamlessly.

Here’s how Asana helps Dani’s team get it done.

Centralizing roadmap work for visibility

One of the biggest challenges in building a digital roadmap is keeping cross-functional partners in the loop throughout the process. According to Dani, the digital team’s stakeholder list is “long and broad”—involving many people with different priorities and responsibilities who need to weigh in for accurate decision-making. And that means it’s a challenge to keep everyone informed.

To solve this, Dani’s team relies on Asana’s project feature to create a master roadmap project that houses all digital initiatives for the fiscal year. At the beginning of the roadmapping process, stakeholders and teams add their proposed projects to the master roadmap as Asana tasks, giving everyone visibility and a chance to weigh in. 

For example, let’s say the SEO team plans to refresh four pillar pages on Asana.com in Q1. To accomplish their goal, they’ll need digital support to redesign page layouts, upload new content, and push updates live. During the initial roadmapping process, the SEO project manager adds a task to the digital roadmap that corresponds to the SEO project, such as, “Q1 Pillar Page Updates.” Then, the digital team reviews the task directly in the roadmap and uses the provided information to decide whether or not to move forward with the project.

“By creating a centralized plan in one place, we’re able to give all our partners visibility and a voice in the process,” says Dani.

Making data-driven resourcing decisions

Once Dani’s team has created their digital roadmap project, the next step is deciding which projects should make the final cut.

But it’s not just about choosing the work to do. With so many stakeholders involved, requests can quickly push the roadmap over capacity. As Dani notes, there’s a delicate balance between prioritizing business-critical initiatives—like projects that drive sales leads or pipeline—and the strategic technical work needed to support long-term growth.

To make these decisions, Dani’s team relies on Asana’s custom fields. Each time a requestor adds a proposed project to the roadmap, they tag the task with custom fields designed to help the team see where the project fits into the bigger picture—and decide if they should take it on or not. These custom fields include:

• Delivery quarter: The planned delivery quarter when the work needs to be completed.

• Commit: Whether the project has been committed to and the level of commitment.

• Priority: The priority level of the task or project. 

• Direct responsible team: Which digital team will be responsible for the project.

• Effort: A numerical estimate from 1–5 that indicates the project’s level of complexity.

Once projects are added and tagged, the digital team assesses their workload and decides how to allocate bandwidth toward different types of projects—like strategic initiatives, technical maintenance, and stakeholder support. With a quick look at the custom fields, digital pillar leads can easily align on each project’s priority, required effort, and potential impact, making it easier to finalize the roadmap.

“Our custom fields allow us to have hard capacity conversations,” says Dani. “We can show stakeholders what’s been requested, what’s committed to, and the level of effort required—and then use that information as a basis for trade-off conversations.”

These custom fields also help Dani’s team see how each project aligns with Asana’s core goals. By tagging tasks with the high-level company goal they ladder up to, the team can feel confident that the work they move forward supports strategic objectives.

“With Asana, everything is linked,” says Dani. “We can clearly see how our priorities map to marketing goals—and ultimately, to core business objectives."

Connecting work across teams

While the digital roadmap is the main source of truth for the digital team’s projects, it’s not the only project in play. Different teams work from multiple, overlapping roadmaps—like marketing, product development, or customer experience. This overlap can easily lead to duplicated efforts and wasted resources.

To prevent this, Dani’s team uses Asana’s multi-homing feature, which allows one task to live in multiple projects. For example, the SEO team’s Q1 pillar page project can be cross-posted to the SEO roadmap, content marketing roadmap, and web development sprint board, keeping everyone aligned and avoiding duplicated tasks.

“The digital roadmap is so massive and spans so many functions, it’s easy for tasks to get lost,” says Dani. “Multi-homing allows our core partners to take a digital project and put it on their roadmap. That way, we can keep everything connected without duplicating work.”

Keeping work on track with real-time reporting

Once the roadmap is locked and work begins, Dani’s team uses Asana’s reporting dashboard to track progress. The dashboard gives a high-level view of project status, helping the team quickly address issues and prevent bottlenecks.

 “We use the dashboard feature to keep a pulse on our progress—where we are in terms of delivering against the company goals,” says Dani. “Everyone can easily see what’s top priority, what’s blocked, and what’s over capacity.”

At the end of each quarter, the digital team revisits their roadmap and adjusts it for any new business priorities. If there are changes that require a shift in focus, they’re discussed during quarterly negotiations, where the team decides which projects to move forward. The updated roadmap is then shared with stakeholders to keep everyone aligned on changes.

Even after a quarter ends, the team’s work continues. They use dashboard metrics to identify successes and challenges, and apply these learnings to future planning.

“By tracking our roadmap start and end dates, we can see how many projects were planned and completed within the set timeframe,” says Dani. “Then, we can use that data to get a clear view of how we’re progressing year over year.” 

Keep your digital roadmap on track

A well-managed digital roadmap doesn’t have to be complicated. With Asana, your team can align on priorities, streamline cross-functional collaboration, and make data-driven decisions that support your organization's strategic goals—setting the stage for meaningful results.