Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Subtasks are one of the most useful parts of Asana. They let you break a big task into smaller steps, assign pieces of work to different people, and track progress without losing sight of the bigger picture. But working with subtasks used to take a few extra steps. You'd leave your project view, open a task pane, and work from there. If you wanted to turn an existing task into a subtask, you had to open a menu, search for the parent task by name, and click through a few more steps to confirm.

Stephanie Bui, content marketing strategy lead at Asana, used to think about her role in straightforward terms: managing content calendars, overseeing assets, and running a team. That framing worked when each idea lived in one or two places, like a gated asset or a blog post. The work started with one strong idea and ended when it shipped. AI changed all of that. A single idea ending at one asset was no longer enough. "AI raised expectations," says Steph.

Every project manager I've worked with has hit the same wall. You're juggling three client projects, a fourth lands on your desk, and suddenly the whole team is underwater. Nobody said yes to the overload. It just crept in. And by the time you notice, someone's already missed a deadline or quietly started working evenings. That's what task overload does to professional services teams. It doesn't announce itself.

Every hour of overservicing is margin you'll never get back. The question isn't whether it's happening at your agency; it's whether you can see it before the invoice goes out. Most agencies track revenue, headcount, and hours logged. Those numbers feel productive. They fill dashboards and look great in Monday standups. But none of them tell you whether a project actually made money. In my experience, the agencies that grow profitably are the ones that obsess over a different set of numbers entirely.

Every agency owner or operations leader I've talked to has the same complaint. They know AI could help their business, but they can't connect the hype to their P&L. The conversation is always about "efficiency" and "productivity" in abstract terms, never about the number that actually matters: profit per project. This guide bridges that gap.

The May 2026 release of OneDesk is now live! Here’s what this release introduces.

Most agency owners and services leaders frame the retainer-vs.-project debate as an either/or choice. In my experience, that framing misses the point entirely. The question isn't which model is more profitable. It's whether you have the visibility to make either model profitable. I've watched the same pattern with our customers at Teamwork.com: firms chasing retainer revenue for stability, then discovering they were over-servicing clients because nobody tracked the hours against the fee.