Inside monday.com’s transformation: Radical transparency, impact over output, & the path to $1B ARR

A great PM basically for me is someone that is relentless until he gets this impact, until he validates that this impact is in place. In some cases, doing the biggest impact is not developing another feature. It's about making the current value more accessible.

You've been at this for eight years. You said there's 250,000 customers at this point. What would you say is the most counterintuitive thing you've learned through this journey of building Monday?

We really have an approach of very radical transparency about everything. Before we went public, we actually shared every bit of information with our employees. Instead of demoralizing people, I think that this is something that gives them a sense of deep partnership. We really want everyone's brains in the challenge and not just one centralized brain and a lot of walking hands.

You basically realized that your competitors were shipping a lot faster than you were. That made you shift the way you think about product and the way you operate.

Some of our competitors did something that we can only imagine. We said, okay, we need to treat it differently. We received a gift from our competitors. They showed us that it's possible. Use your competition, know it, and take it and set ambitious goals and believe in yourself and you can do amazing things.

Today, my guest is Daniel Laraea. Daniel is currently Chief Product and Technology Officer at Monday.com He joined when they were just around 40 employees. And a few years in, Daniel and the exec team realized that their competitors were able to move a lot faster than they were and ship a lot more often than they were. And that spurred a transformation in how they build and operate their teams. Very few companies are able to transform like this, and even fewer recognize that something is wrong. In our conversation, Daniel shares a bunch of very specific insights and suggestions into how to go about making change or even recognizing that something is wrong. Daniel shares moments when it felt like everything was going to crumble, why it's important to know that the skills that got you to where you are today aren't the skills that are going to take you to the next level, why it's so important to orient all your teams around impact, and so much more. If you enjoyed this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of paid accounts at Superhuman, Linear, Notion, Granola, and Perplexity Pro. Check it out at lenny's newsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Daniel Laraea. This episode is brought to you by Interpret. Interpret unifies all your customer interactions from Gong calls to Zendesk tickets to Twitter threads to App Store reviews and makes it available for analysis. It's trusted by leading product orgs like Canva, Notion, Loom, Linear, Monday.com, and Strava to bring the voice of the customer into the product development process, helping you build best-in-class products faster. What makes Interpret special is its ability to build and update customer-specific AI models that provide the most granular and accurate insights into your business, connect customer insights to revenue and operational data in your CRM or data warehouse to map the business impact of each customer need and prioritize confidently, and empower your entire team to easily take action on use cases like win/loss analysis, critical bug detection, and identifying drivers of churn. with Interprets AI Assistant Wisdom. Looking to automate your feedback loops and prioritize your roadmap with confidence like Notion, Canva, and Linear. Visit e-n-t-e-r-p-r-e-t.com/lenny to connect with the team and get two free months when you sign up for an annual plan. This is a limited time offer. That's interpret.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Airtable Product Central, the unified system that brings your entire product org together in one place. No more scattered tools. No more misaligned teams. If you're like most product leaders, you're tired of constant context switching between tools. That's why Airtable built Product Central after decades of working with world-class product companies. Think of it as mission control for your entire product organization. Unlike rigid point solutions, Product Central powers everything from resourcing to voice of customer to roadmapping to launch execution. And because it's built on Airtable's no-code platform, you can customize every workflow to match exactly how your team works. No limitations, no compromises. Ready to see it in action? Head to airtable.com/lenny to book a demo. That's airtable.com/lenny. Daniel, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.

We're going to get into the story of Monday. We're going to talk about your journey over the last eight years building and scaling this company and all things you've learned along the way. But I want to start with a very specific moment that you shared with me where you basically realized that your competitors were shipping a lot faster than you were able to get stuff out a lot more quickly and more often than you guys. And that made you shift the way you think about product and the way you operate. Can you talk about that moment in that lesson and what you took away from that?

Yeah, wow. You take me a while back, you know, I think it was when we were relatively a small team. I think we were something around like 30 people and, you know, including engineers and product and everyone. It's actually that back in the days we did so many things and actually we had an amazing, amazing execution. We had a weekly update where we would share everything that we did with the company. And it was always super long and super like with so many different things. And we really felt good about ourselves at that point, to be honest, about the execution. And then I remember one day, you know, coming to the office and just looking on one of our competitors. And we at Monday, we have like one of the main things that we have in the product is our boards. It's like the heart and soul of the product. And it's, you can think about it as a table. And it has different column types, data types that you can capture within the board and work with. And, you know, back then we had five of these and I was actually coding the sixth one, to be honest. And each and every one of these took us four months to develop together with defining the product and everything. And this morning we actually saw that one of our main competitors back then has actually launched 30 new columns.

30?

Yeah. And we said, okay, at first we didn't really know what to do. you know, we thought about it and I remember that even we said, okay, we're going to take even some time out of the office. So back then Roy and Elan, which are the founders, and also together with me and Tal, which is, was one of the main tech leads in Monday for a long time, and few others, we went outside the office and we said, listen, we need to do things differently. Something doesn't make sense. And, you know, I remember back then that for me, this realization of like understanding that we are doing so much, but suddenly some of our competitors did something that we can only imagine and actually transform the product because it's a different type of platform, if you think about it. It was really hard. Personally, first of all, admitting that although you walked like crazy, you didn't do something that really transformed the product. Because I remember back then when we did a conversation, we said, okay, we're doing so much. What is the most meaningful thing that we did over the last three months? And, you know, suddenly the answer was, you know, there's so many things, but it wasn't something specific. And after acknowledging that, it's a very hard thing personally, especially when you work so hard and you put your entire heart in what you do. We said, okay, now we need to treat it differently. We received a gift from our competitors. They showed us that it's possible. Now we need to think how. and in order to do that, we need to think differently because remember, like we said, okay, if we're going to add 25 more multiplied by four months, we're a small team, we lost, okay, we can't make it. So we said, okay, we need to take upon ourselves an ambitious goal, like 25 columns in one month. And this is the goal that we took upon ourselves. And, you know, I think that the fact that our competitors did it give us like, didn't give us the excuse of saying it's not possible. So in a way it was the biggest favor that we can ask for. And, you know, long story short, month and a half afterwards, we had 30 columns in Monday. And we did it, you know, by thinking totally different. And by the way, afterwards, you know, we did it over and over again. So if you think about Monday, it's basically a platform for work and you have different building blocks. Columns is one of them, but we did the same drill exactly with dashboards and widgets and then with automations and so on. So I think this was so transformative because A, we understood that you need to constantly think, especially at these phases, how would you transform completely the product in the next three months? And if you can't answer that and you say, listen, I'm doing so much thing, but you can't point this exact you have a focus problem in my eyes. And second that is that, you know, put ambitious goals, it will make you think differently. And, you know, we really love now to do it even with when we don't know it's possible. And it actually like works for us time after time. And let's think about it, you know, the team that was there suddenly became invincible. Because, you know, it's such an amazing, amazing experience that you have a goal that you don't know how you're going to do it and you succeed. And then it makes you feel that everything is possible.

There's so much here and I have so many threads I want to follow on. One is just, there's kind of, there's this metaphor of the four minute mile where no one thought it was possible and then someone did it and then everyone started beating that record. So, I like that this is highlighting there's just so much power in seeing somebody else accomplish something you thought was impossible and that unlocks the way you think. And I love that you saw it as a gift. A lot of people, a lot of companies do this. They're in this place and they're like, no way. It's like when the iPhone launched, like, no, no one needs that. That's not, there's no keyboard. And a lot of people deny that it's a thing they should be paying attention to. I love that you saw it as like, okay, we need to We need to move. Things have changed. We're not doing things. We're not going to be competitive long term.

I think it's also very much about focus. And I think that, you know, it's very hard to get to very good execution, but it doesn't guarantee that you are working in the right way. And many times in my eyes, you know, simple questions can provide the most and the deepest insights about your work. And I think that for us, the fact that we managed to leverage it, as you said, and see it as a gift is one of the most important things. User competition, know it, use it to your advantage, and take it and set ambitious goals and believe in yourself and you can do amazing things.

Another, I think, piece a lot of people are probably resonating with here is starting a company that's small, growing, things are going great, and then all of a sudden things start to slow down. and in some cases you don't realize that they've slowed down. And that's what it happened in your case sounds like. In a lot of cases, the founder's like, what the hell's going on? Why is it taking three or four weeks to ship one type of new column? And so is there anything, by the way, what was the scale of the company at this point?

It's a good question. If I'm not mistaken, it was around 2018 back then how It's safe to assume like 150, 200 people in the company, but we were relatively small. I recently had Ryan Singer on the.

Podcast who created the Shape Up method from Basecamp. And that's kind of his piece of advice too, is around like 50 to 100 people, things start to really change and slow down. And that's where a lot of companies start to go sideways. So that resonates. That's really interesting. And by the way, these columns you're describing, just to make it clear, this is like a new type of data. like new format of column, like it's a new data format that you're building. It's not like just add another column to some database.

Yeah. So actually, like exactly, it's a new type of column, but it's a whole product around it. Like if you think about it, for instance, you have a column that captures dates, so it's pretty straightforward, but you can also have like formula column, which is like more complicated and has like more complex product around it. I think one of the best benefits for us as platform is that suddenly when we set the goal of adding so many different columns, we actually stopped for the first time and say, what is a column like? And we also organized all the product architecture around it. And these kind of things sounds really trivial in retrospect, but we really defined, okay, each column needs to have specific capabilities. It should be able to export it to Excel. It should be able to be filtered and sorted and so many different other things. But basically we defined what is it and then create an infrastructure for all these shared things, making the work of adding a new column just thinking about the specific product that you want to provide with each one of these columns. And the story about it is actually even more interesting. We the way we actually achieved it is that we said, okay, in two weeks we are going to have an hackathon in which each one of our developers is going to take one column and implement it in one day. And, you know, if you think about it from four months to one day, it's like mind blowing. And back then, I remember people said, how can it be? But then that I told you about build an infrastructure, he sent it to me. I did a column at night, you know, just to see how it works. And on the day that we did the columns, like everyone knew what they are going to do, what they are trying to solve, and we just did it. And two weeks afterwards, it was in production, which was amazing.

What we want to do here is help people avoid these. MomenTs where they're almost like too late and realizing that things have slowed down. So I think a really, another important lesson here is the power of ambition and thinking crazily big. A lot of people think that when you ask your team, we need to build 25 columns in a month or whatever it was, people would be like, I burned out or feeling super depressed, but really people get excited. There's all this opportunity to think really differently. It reminds me at our BNB, Brian Chesky was very famous for, you give them a goal. Here's our goal for the year. and he's like, what would it take to 10x this goal? Just like, what would it take to do that? And he's always pushing you to think a lot bigger when you're like, because your first reaction is like, what? No, no. Why would you leave us alone? But then you realize if you really think big, it changes everything about how you approach the problem, as you described, where it's like, instead of like in a day, what would it take to build this in a day? Yeah.

And I think, by the way, this is something which is really important about setting ambitious goals. If you'll set a different goal, I want to reduce it from four months to three months. So many times this translates in people's heads to, I want you to work harder. I want you to work longer hours. And this is not a message here. It's about working smarter. And I think that many times when we talk about speed of execution, you know, there's fake speed, which means trying to do the same work by skipping stages or not doing the high quality that you want. But there's the real speed and speed like organizations and speed of execution. Many times it's about doing things right. It's about understanding A, what is going to move the needle and work only on that, not working in a lot of things that you tend to invent when you're trying to solve a problem. And B, is like, you know, about like thinking, as you said, like thinking differently. And I think that for the girls, this is why we really wanted the goal that you really understand from the first minute that if you work the same way, you cannot achieve it, even if you sleep in the office. So you need to change dramatically how you think. And, you know, the advanced phase of it is that today. We are doing it on things that we didn't see others doing. And, you know, we have the confidence because we have the experience of like trusting ourselves that this is an exercise for us that will make us actually think about different solutions.

I know another element of this that is really important to you that you have shifted the way you all operate is focusing on impact. There was a lot of focus on just building a lot of stuff and you realize there's a lot of power in thinking from perspective of how do we have the most impact? Talk about that.

This is the core and the main thing that we also measure like our teams. And this is how I see a great PM. So a great PM basically for me is someone that is relentless until he gets this impact and until it validates that this impact is in place. And you know, for us, it really changed how we think about things. It really changed how we set goals for our teams. So in many ways, PM in Monday, first and foremost, is responsible for creating the shared understanding on what would be impactful for our customers. It's not about the solution and what we are going to build. It's about what's the problem, what's the opportunity, and second, how we will know that we moved the needle. And without these two things, you can build so many different things, and it's like songs for the door. like I built so, you know, such huge part of what I built was never used by our users the way I thought it was going to use. So I think that for me, having this understanding of what we want to change for our customers and also how we know we did it is a huge, huge part of the PM role. And for us, you know, it means that we pay a lot of time in setting goals, in making sure that we really understand both again the opportunity, but not only that, but how we'll see and we'll know for sure that we move the needle. In many ways, you know, it changes the conversation. So PMs, you know, and the teams, many times like spending a lot of time at the problem area before they think about the solution. The solution is not the case anymore. It's not like there are so many different solutions. and once you do that and you have these goals, suddenly it reduces also a lot of the discussions that you have about the different solutions because everyone knows that everything is going to be tested on real life. So they make it everyone treated differently. And also in that way, you know, it makes you think much more holistically, which I also think is something that is very special at Monday is that we give our teams like real life goals as much as we can. And then, you know, in some cases, doing the biggest impact is not developing another feature. It's about making the current value more accessible. It's about connecting better to the go-to-market motion that you have. It's about understanding how your customers are going to learn what you built and use it. And, you know, this realization is something that we try very hard to stay on it. And it's hard because, like, people tend to build things. Like, we all love to build things, right? And when you start to build things, you get excited, and suddenly you lose track of why you're doing it and why do you need to change? And I think that in that sense, this is the most important part about, like, this point of impact. And you know, this is also how we measure ourselves. So we can work extremely hard. It doesn't mean that we are successful, it doesn't mean that we are doing our work right. Okay? And it's not only for the PMs, it's for the entire team. So the entire team succeeds or fails together based on the value that we bring to our customers. And we have a lot of like different ways in order to make sure that we stay honest to this principle.

There's a lot of people listening to this that work at, say, modern tech companies, very high growth tech companies that are just like, duh, this is how you should work. A lot of people hearing this are like, I don't really understand what am I doing wrong? What am I missing? Maybe. What's a sign that you're not oriented around impact?

I think the most obvious sign for me is that you are building something without the aim or without the initial aim of what it should change for your users and how you are going to measure it. So in my eyes, it's many times the fact that you don't have a goal or the goal is like many times, you know, for me, a smell for that is that I hear people use the word we're going to enhance, we're going to augment, we're going to extend. value and this and this and this. No, it's not enough. What is it going to change for users and how you are going to see it that it actually happened? And then you start asking yourself all the questions, right? Because once you have a goal that you are committed to, suddenly you think about the target audience because you need enough, like big enough target audience, for instance, in order to get to your goals. You need to make sure that what you build actually going to touch all of these people. And I can share just a recent example, you know, and these things sound trivial and maybe an example would help resonate with that because I know many people are thinking like that. We have a very interesting offering that we just introduced with AI. It's called AI Blocks. And basically it means that with no code, you can integrate blocks which contain AI actions within your existing workflows. And 70% of Monday's customers are non-tech. And for them, this makes AI accessible for them and has a huge, huge value. And we started building these blocks and we released it to customers and we measured discoverability and adoption and retention and so on. And something that we do in order to to stay connected to the numbers. So each team at Monday has like what we call the daily numbers update. So we have a think about it like a message that the team is building with all the numbers that they care about because we really want people to leave these numbers. So for AI, for instance, for the AI blocks, it was the AI actions. So we had AI actions, how many accounts are we using these AI actions and so on and so on. And, you know, we got amazing responses from our customers. We see great success of them getting value from the AI actions. But, you know, one day, like in this, like it's a, we use a Slack channel in which one of our internal systems, BigBrain, is sending us these messages every day. And then we have conversations about it, okay? And, you know, one day we saw, we noticed that the amount of accounts that are using AI is super, super low comparing to the entire population that we have. And, you know, we have 250, 000 paying companies that use Monday, and we saw only like few thousands there. And, you know, until this point, everyone will like in a very good feeling that we are making an amazing product. We get really good feedback. We are building great value, we're adding value, but we sit down and say, okay, why it's only like this and this. Then someone say, yeah, you know, since AI is new, we need to do change of the terms of service for customers before we are opening it to them. And this is planned, you know, for like in the next quarter or something like that. And I said, what? No, we need to do it now. You know, we need to now open it for everyone because this is actually what would be the most impactful thing to do. And then, like, you know, the team went and sat with legal and sat with everyone, and with two weeks time, it was open to 98% of Monday customers, you know? And I think in that sense, you know, this is a very good example because We could have continued building value and it's great, but the impact wouldn't be the impact that we were aiming for. And this is a very important point. And, you know, we, I think in that sense, staying really connected to your teams, to your numbers, sorry, this is something that I really feel strongly about. I feel that you need to get your numbers in push, you need to live by them. You know, for me it's like so exciting to see a conversation that says, oh wow, today there were a lot of new accounts that are using what I'm building. Let's see why it happens. And you know, these kind of things that I see the conversation about, it's amazing. And also, you know, for in this case, seeing the AI actions go, it's like you want to dive it and push it forward. And in many ways they feel that this is a very good example on where you can actually build a lot of value. You can work really fast, you can deliver a lot of features, but the problem lays in other places in order to get the impact that you want.

Yeah, there's so much joy in watching her number go up. So just to close the loop here, to help people see if they're impact driven, working from a perspective of how do we drive the most impact is one simple way of thinking about it is you're working backwards from a goal that is going to drive business growth and revenue basically in the end. If you're working backwards from a number and a metric and a goal, and then thinking through what are the levers that will most move this metric that's assigned your thinking impact by impact versus let's just keep shipping features that the sales team wants.

Yeah, and I think another thing for me, like it's an exercise that I really, you know, I really encourage everyone to do for me. It was like after the columns hackathon and everything that we talked about, I said, okay, each quarter, and this is when we were much smaller, but it can be each month, it can be each two weeks. But how do I imagine the company and the product is going to be different and better for our customers in a quarter from now. And from that, you know, walk it backwards. But if you are just saying, we'll have better security, we'll have better performance, we'll have less bugs, we'll have more like enhancements to the, I don't know, this and this feature, it's not enough. You need to constantly build value, which is pivotal to your customers. And if you don't do it, and if it's hard for you to answer about this question, it's a very good sign that you are not input-driven. And you know, I love to do it. Also with teams and individuals, like what are the things that you are most proud of that he did in the last three months? And if it's like takes you a lot of time to think, you are not very focused and you are definitely not maximizing the impact that you want due to that in my eyes.

I like that exercise as a kind of a like versus waiting for your competitors to do something and then realizing that we're way behind it's forcing yourself every quarter to think about this. So do you do this as like a you have a meeting or some on your calendar or how do you actually operationalize this?

So it's actually that, you know, today we are like under the builders organization, which is the engineering product management product design was 700 people. So we have a lot of different like ways and methodologies to do it in different levels. But I'll give you an example from the company level and from the team level maybe because these are the most interesting ones. So we just recently had a yearly kickoff. Each and every year we do a yearly kickoff for our company. And one of the most, you know, exciting sessions obviously is what we are going to do with our product as a product company. And I really do like to have a slide in which I like write and I just share it when I'm going to stand here in a year from now. what is going to be different for our customers. And, you know, this is on the company level and I have one slide and it talks about like our offering and it talks about the value that they are getting in a way that next still, I want to, you know, each year to start my presentation with the slide from last year and see where we are. And, you know, in this level it can be something like, Our CRM continues with a very strong momentum and becomes a product suite when we give much more robust value to our customers. This can be an example, okay, with an additional product of CRM marketing, I would just say. But on a team level, what we did, and maybe I'll take an example from the early days, you know, we really love to do each and every two weeks. I told you we would write an update for the entire company about what we did. And the way we did it is that each and every one of our team members actually wrote his highlights and then we would share it with the company. And this exercise really made us sit every two weeks and think on an individual level, but also on a team level. And you know, every one of our team members used to read these updates and say, then we had a good two weeks, or we had a bad two weeks, we did a lot of impact or we did not enough impact. So I really encourage to create these points in time where you sit down and you force yourself to understand whether what you did is what you thought you're going to achieve or not.

That's great. I really like the slide idea. It's basically there's all this, power and just working backwards from something in the future, however you come up with it.