[TrevorAustin]

As an engineering manager, what I want most from a project management app is something that does a good job helping engineers on my teams collaborate effectively with non-technical departments. We use Asana for this right now and it works well, and at a previous employer we used Jira which also worked well. Done well, it means the team always has shared state about what the latest designs are, how far along various pieces of work are, and what to-dos we need to keep track of. The goal is to offload onto the tool a bunch of status communication that otherwise happens in meetings.

If someone was starting from no system today I’d recommend Asana. Jira gives you way too much rope to make a custom workflow to enforce business rules, but as long as you have a light touch and use it mostly stock it’s fine. I have trouble organizing medium to large projects with many small sub-tasks in Trello. When I’ve used a more engineering-focused tool like GitHub Issues or Phabricator, I have too much trouble getting non-technical stakeholders to follow along there. I despised PivotalTracker trying to put me in a process straightjacket, and found BugZilla unusably ugly.

[jaryd]

Second Asana. I've been using it for years and it has really improved tremendously over that time. There are definitely still many things missing (most notably for me is the lack of advanced markup in comments/conversations)... but it works very well for cross-functional collaboration and longer-term project management.

[Benjamin_Dobell]

I've just started using Asana in the last month, the very first thing I noticed was how incredibly slow the interface is to respond. Dragging things around on a board is particularly painful compared to Trello or Github Projects.

I also find it incredibly annoying that when you add a card to a column, it adds it to the top of the column, rather than the bottom.

However, aside from those two annoyances, it does seems to offer a lot of useful functionality.

[vanzorn]

Thirding Asana. Just set up a major series of teams and projects and hooked in Zapier for some automation with a ticket system (Teamwork Desk). While Asana isn't a CRM by any means, we're creating a workflow with Kanban and automation to capture the vital interactions with clients.

Asana has the added benefit of allowing the user to interweave non-project-specific tasks to achieve something of a GTD workflow. It really helps me to get every actionable item out of my head space and assign some kind of priority / responsibility / due date to it.

Asana Premium is a must for the flexibility with custom fields (https://asana.com/guide/help/premium/custom-fields)