Access control at 300,000-seat scale

Enterprise prospects were walking. Sales kept losing deals to Monday.com and ClickUp over one line item: access control. Customers who stayed avoided putting anything sensitive — budgets, salaries, strategic metrics — into Asana at all, because once a task was shared, everything on it was visible to whoever could see the task.

I led the effort end to end: 20+ customer interviews, usage analysis across every enterprise account, and a permission model that had to hold up everywhere in Asana — custom fields, rules, AI teammates — for teams from ten people to 300,000.

Custom fields carry the business-critical data, but Asana's whole model is built on sharing tasks across projects. Without finer-grained permissions, a field couldn't be both private and collaborative — it had to pick one.

The fix had to survive four things at once: scale (thousands of fields, company-wide), flexibility (rules, templates, AI teammates), zero regressions (millions of tasks already using these fields), and trust — no permission quietly changing on someone without warning.

The existing settings modal had one lever — invite people, one at a time. I explored three directions: a click-to-reveal toggle that kept the friction low, a full-screen surface with more room to explain the tradeoffs, and a split-view modal that showed every field at once.

Twenty rounds of testing with enterprise customers and internal teams landed on three things: plain language beat technical terms every time, an eye icon read better than a padlock, and people wanted to manage visibility from the field library — not buried inside every task.

I ran the finalists past the VP of Product against the same four constraints — scale, flexibility, regressions, trust — and recommended the option that traded a little feature completeness for a lot of clarity.

99% adoption within three months — on a foundation that now underwrites Asana's AI teammates and automation rules too.