How do you evaluate and choose the right tools for your team?

This is an easy one for me 🙂

I’m very lucky to be at a company where we can actually dogfood our product 24/7. As an operations lead, Asana is my tool of choice (de facto or not). I love the flexibility of the data model, the power of automations, and the ease of use. At Asana, dogfooding is a way of life- from culinary to sales to product operations, we are all in Asana every day.

But I’m not answering this question just to boast 😉. I’ve been in situations at previous jobs where we had to make tooling decisions. The primary questions I ask are:

• How easy is it to adopt?

  • Watch out for complex usage patterns, a lack of help docs, or a general lack of intuitiveness in product flows

  • If you need to peer over someone’s shoulder to make sure they’re using the tool correctly, then adoption is going to be an uphill battle

• How will it scale? 

  • Can the tool solve your problems today AND a year out?

  • Can it support your team size now AND when it’s grown two-fold?

• Is the cost:benefit ratio fair?

  • What’s the seat cost and how much time will it save or how much clarity will it provide?

  • Tools should not make solely ops’ lives easier- they should make everyone’s lives easier