Asana uses MCPJam to build ChatGPT Apps and Claude Connectors
Asana is a work management platform that helps teams organize work and track progress across organizations. Recently, the Asana team launched their ChatGPT app and Claude connector, bringing the Asana UI experience directly into ChatGPT and Claude for hundreds of millions of users.
The Asana engineering team used MCPJam to build and ship these apps under a tight deadline.
The Challenge: Iteration is slow when building ChatGPT and MCP apps
Building MCP apps and ChatGPT apps comes with a slow and frustrating development loop. To test changes directly in ChatGPT, Asana engineers had to expose their MCP server via ngrok or deploy to a staging environment, then restart ChatGPT. Even small UI changes could take several minutes to validate.
Mobile testing added even more friction. To preview a mobile experience, engineers had to load the app in ChatGPT web and then open the same conversation on ChatGPT mobile, making iterations painfully slow.
Testing directly on ChatGPT or Claude wasn't sustainable if the team wanted to meet their deadline. They needed tooling that offered a much tighter feedback loop.
The Solution: MCPJam closes the feedback loop
The Asana team used MCPJam's App Builder to test and iterate on their MCP apps locally. App Builder provides a local emulator that simulates the exact behavior of ChatGPT and Claude, including:
- Full screen and picture-in-picture views
- Full support for ChatGPT apps SDK and MCP apps, such as tool call, follow message, external links
- Mobile layouts and theme changes
Instead of redeploying or spinning up ngrok, then restarting ChatGPT, engineers could see code changes reflected immediately, reducing every iteration from minutes to seconds.
The Result: Ideation to production in just over a month
By removing deployment overhead and UI testing friction, MCPJam enabled the Asana team to move quickly from ideation to a production-ready app in just over a month.
"MCPJam has helped save a ton of time for UI-related changes. We no longer have to do a two-minute deploy for every UI tweak or wait for an LLM response. MCPJam also removed a lot of the friction around mobile testing."
Michael Chu
Engineering at Asana
Maintaining a production app in the long run
Beyond initial development, MCPJam continues to help Asana engineers test, debug, and maintain their MCP apps in production:
- OAuth Debugger to inspect the Asana authorization flow step by step and catch OAuth issues early
- JSON-RPC Logger to inspect RPC and window.openai messages for every app interaction
- MCP unit tests and evals to catch regressions and maintain high-quality LLM interactions over time
We're proud to partner with Asana on building their ChatGPT app and Claude connector, and excited to see how their product continues to evolve.
Asana's Claude Connector and ChatGPT app are live today.