Inside monday.com’s transformation: radical transparency, impact over output, and their path to $1B ARR | Daniel Lereya (Chief Product and Technology Officer)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/7cd4183f657a6182

A great pen 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. We've been at this for eight years.
You said there's two hundred fifty thousand 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 receive the gift from our competitors.
They showed us.
But 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 Larrea.
Daniel's 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.
And 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 sharents when it felt like everything was gonna crumble.
Why it's important to know that the skills that got you to where you are today aren't the skills that are gonna take you to the next level.
Why it's so important to orєant all your teams around impact.
And so much more.
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With that, I bring you
Daniel Arrea.
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Daniel, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
Thank you so much for having me.
We're gonna get into the story of Monday. We're gonna talk about your journey over the last eight years, building and scaling this company, all the things you've learned along the way.
But I wanna 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 in that lesson and and what you took away from that?
Yeah, well
You you take me a while back, you know, uh
I think it was when we were relatively a small team, I think we were something around like uh thirty
And uh, 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 uh you know, uh weekly update where we would share everything that we did with the company.
And it was all
Always, you know, super long and super like with so many different things.
Yeah.
And we really felt good about ourselves at that point.
Uh, to be honest.
About the the execution.
And then I remember
One day.
Yeah, you know, coming to the office and just looking on
One of our competitors.
And we at Monday we have uh like one of the main things that we have in the product is our boards. It's like
the h the heart and soul of the product.
And it's you can think about it 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.
Yeah, to be honest.
And
Each and every one of these.
Like took us like four months.
to develop, you know, together with defining the product and everything.
And
And this morning we actually saw
It won't be a
Our main competitors back then.
It's actually launched.
Thirty new columns.
Thirty.
Yeah.
And
You know
We said
Okay.
At first we d we didn't really know what to do and
No, 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 Royan Iran, which are the founders
And also uh together with me and Tal, which is uh
Uh w 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
I can understand 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.
Yeah.
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 Dancer was
You know, there's so many things, but it wasn't something
specific.
And
After like uh you know, acknowledging that and
You know, it's a very hard thing personally, especially when you walk so hard and you put
You entire heart in in what you do.
Yeah, we said okay.
No?
We need to treat it differently.
Receive the gift.
For more competitors.
They showed us.
But it's possible.
Now we f we need to think how.
In order to do that we need

We said okay.
If we're going to add twenty five more, multiply it by four months.
We're a small team.
We we lost.
Okay, we can't make it. So
We said, Okay, we need to take upon ourselves an ambitious goal.
Like
twenty five 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 gave 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 thirty columns.
And 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 deal exactly.
We have
Yeah.
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, specially at these phases.
How would you 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 thing
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 walks for us, time after time and
Last thing 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 uh I have so many threads I want to follow on.
One is just

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 uh
I love that you saw it as a gift. A lot of people, a lot of companies do this, so they're in this place and they're like, No way. It's like when the iPhone launched, like, no, no one no one needs that. That's not there's no keyboard.
And a lot of people like are uh like deny that it's
A a thing they should be paying attention to?
I love that you saw it as like, Okay, we need to
We need to move the then things have changed. We're not doing things.
Uh
We're not gonna 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 walking 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 he said.
And see it as a gift is one of the most important things.
Use your competition, know it.
Is it to your advantage?
And
You know, take it.
And set ambitious goals and believe in yourself and
And you can do amazing things.
Another right, I think uh
piece a lot of people are probably resonating with here is uh
Starting a company that's small, grow 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 it 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 to four weeks to ship one type of cut and new column?
And
So is there anything by the way, what was the scale of the company at this point?
Well, it's a good question. Uh
If I'm not mistaken, it was around uh twenty eighteen.
Uh back then how
It's safe to assume like one hundred and fifty, two hundred people in the company, but we we were relatively small.
I recently had Brian Singer on the podcast who created the shape up method from Basecamp and

uh piece of advice too is around like fifty to a hundred 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, this these columns you're describing, just to make it clear, this is like a new type of like 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 so actually like the
Exactly.
It 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 captes, 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 will
Like
W when we set the goal of adding so many different columns
We actually stopped for the first time and say
What is the column like? And we also like organized all the product architecture around it.
And you know, these kind of things like sounds really trivial in retrospect.
But you know
We really define okay.
Each column need to have like specific capabilities. It should be able to export it to Excel. It's 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
Walk of adding a new column just
thinking about the specific wallet 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're going to have
An aceton.
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 in it.
Back then I remember people said
How can it be? But then

Told you about uh build
and infrastructure he send it to me. I did a column at night, you know, just to to see the
How the how it walks.
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 wanna 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 crazyly big.
A lot of people think that when you ask your team
We need to build twenty five columns in a month or whatever it was.
people would be like I uh burnt out or feeling super depressed. But really people get excited.
There's all this opportunity to think really differently.
It reminds me of our B, Brian.
Chesky was very famous for you give him a goal. Here's our goal for the year.
And he's like
What it would 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'cause your first reaction's like
What no, no.

Leave leave us alone.
Uh but then you realize if you really think big, it changes everything about how you approach the problem as you describe, where it's like instead of
Like in a date. What what would it take to build this in a date?
Yeah, and I and I think by the way, this is
Something which is really important about setting ambitious goals.
if you'll set a like 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 to
you to work longer hours and this is not the message here.
It's about walking 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 speeding
Like organizations and
Speedy.
Of execution
Many times it's about doing things like it's about understanding
Yeah.
What is going to move the needle?

You tend to invent.
When you trying to solve a problem.
And B.
Is
Like you know
About like
Thinking.
As you said, like uh
Thinking differently. And I think that for the goals this is why we really wanted the goal that
You really understand from
The first minute?
But if you walk the same way you cannot achieve it, even if you'll sleep in the office.
So
You need to
Change dramatically.
Yeah, how you think.
And you know, the advanced phase of it is that today
We're doing it on things that we didn't see others.
Brilliant.
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 has shifted the way you all operate is focusing on impact.
There's 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 the main thing that we also measure like our teams.
And this is how I see a great PM, so
A great pen basically for me is someone
That is relentless.
Until he gets this
impact and it 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.
Okay.
It's not about uh 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 move the nailed.
And without these two things.
You can build so many different things and you know, it's like uh songs for the door.
Like I built so
You know, such huge part of what I build.
was never used by uh users led the way I thought it was going to use so
I think that
For me.
having the this understanding of what we want
Yeah. To change.
for customers and also how we know we did it is a huge, huge part of the PM all and for us, you know
Yeah, 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
I will see.
And we'll know for sure that we move the needle in many ways, you know
It changes the the conversation. So PMs, you know, and the teams
Many times like a
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 it
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.
Unreal life.
So they make
M 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
It's very special it's 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

Yeah. On it.
And it's hard because like people tend to build things. Like we all love to build things.
I then
When you start to build things you get excited and suddenly
You lose track of
Why?
Why you're doing it and
What do you need to change and
I think that in that sense this is the most important part about like uh
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're successful, it doesn't mean that we are doing a walk right.
Okay.
Yeah.
And
It's not only for the PMs.
It's for the entire team. So the entire team.
succeeds or fail 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 like how
Like what am I doing wrong? What am I missing maybe?
Uh
What's a sign that you're not oriented around impact?
I think the the most obvious sign for me
Is that
You are building something.
Without
The aim
Or without the initial aim of
what it sh change for all users and how you are going to to measure it. So in my eyes it's many times the fact that
You don't have a goal.
Oh the goal he's is like
Many times, you know, for me a smell for that is that I hear people
Here's the word.
We're going to enhance, we're going to
augment we are going to extend
Value and this and this and it No, it's not enough.
What is it going to change?
for users and how you're 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 en big enough target audience, for instance, in order to to get you all uh
You know.
Uh to your girls. You need to make sure that
what you build actually going to touch all of these people. And and I can share just the recent example, you know, and and you know
These things sound trivial and maybe an example would
You know, like uh
help resonate with that because I know many people are thinking like that.
And
You know, we we have a very like uh
uh interesting offering that we just introduced with AI. It's called uh AI blocks.
Okay.
And basically me it means that with no code
You can integrate
Blocks.
Which contain
A AI actions within your existing workflows. And you know, seventy percent 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, you know.
uh 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 uh
Think about it like uh a message.
That the team is building.
with all the numbers that care 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 the AI actions.
How many accounts like uh are we using uh these AI actions and so on and so on.
And
You know
We got amazing responses from our customers.
We see good
Great success of them getting value from their actions.
But you know, one day like
It is like uh it's a we we use a Slack channel in which
Uh one of our internal systems, Big Way, is sending us these messages every day.
And then we have conversations about it.
Okay.
And
You know, one day we saw
We notice 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 two hundred and fifty thousand paying companies.
That you is Monday.
And we saw only like a few thousands there.
And
You know, until this point, everyone will like in a very good feeling that we're making an amazing product, we get v really good feedback, we're building great value, we're adding value.
But
We sit down and say, Okay, whites only like
This and this.
Yeah.
Yeah, you know.
A sense AI is new.
We need to do change of uh the terms of service for for 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
Said what?
No, we need to do it now.
You know, we need to now open it.

Because
This is actually what would be
the most impactful thing to do.
And then
Like you know, the team
Went and set with legal and sent with everyone and with two weeks time.
It was open to d ninety eight percent 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 good.
But the impact
Wouldn't be
the impact that we we're we were aiming for. And
This is a very important point. And you know we
I think in that sense
Staying really connected.
Two teams.
Yeah, to a number story, 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.
Yeah, you know, for me it's like so exciting to see a conversation that says
Oh wow, it
Today
There were a lot of 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
Uh it's amazing. And also you know for in this case
Seeing the AI actions go.
It's like
You want to drive 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 walk really fast, you can deliver a lot of features.
But the problem lies in other place in order to get the impact that you want.
Yeah. There's so much joy in watching watching her number go up.
Mm-hmm.
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
uh you're working backwards from a goal that is gonna 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 a sign you're
thinking impact through 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 a
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
Yeah it's 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
If you're just saying
We'll have better security, we'll have better performance, we'll have
Less bugs we'll have
More uh 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?
Yeah, it's a it's a very good sign that you are not impact 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're not very focused and you're definitely not maximizing the impact that you want.
Due to debt in my eyes.
I like that exercise as a kind of a
Like versus waiting for your competitors to do something and then realizing they're be 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 or a summit on your calendar?
Or how do you how do you actually operationalize this?
So it's actually the you know, today we are like uh
under the builders organization, which is the engineering, product management, product design, was seven hundred people.
Yeah, so we have a lot of different like uh ways and methodologies to do it uh 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 early kickoff each and uh each and every year we do a
Early kick off for our company.
One of the most
You know, exciting sessions obviously is what we're going to
do with a product as a product company.
And
I really too like to have a slide.
In which I like write.
And I just share it.
When I'm going to stand hill.
In a evil form 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 deal.
I want to, you know, each year to start
Uh my my presentation with the slide from Lestil and C
Well we are.
And you know, in in this level it can be something like
Our CLM 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 a an additional product of
C R marketing, I would just say.
But uh
On a team level, what we did, and maybe I'll take an example from the early days.
You know
We really did uh we really love to do and each
E each and every two weeks.
I told you we would write like a 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 for
Like well to
Is the highlights.
And then
We would share it.
with the 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 write uh to to read these updates and say
Then
We had a good two weeks, or we had the bad two weeks, we did a lot of impact, or we did uh
not not enough impact. So I really encourage to create these points in time where w 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 the slide idea. It's basically there's all this
power and just working backwards from something in the future.
uh however you come up with it. So it's just like in a year we're gonna have there's just like working backwards from a goal, working backwards from a big vision.
Those I think those are such good exercises, you know. Obviously Amazon's famous for working backwards. There's a whole book called Working Backwards.
From their PR approach. Uh
Okay.
I wanna go in a slightly different direction.
I wanna zoom out a little bit.
So you've been at this for eight years building Monday.
You said there's two hundred fifty thousand customers at this point. What's like the revenue scale? Give people a couple of stats to give them a sense of just how large this company's gotten.
We recently announced that we cross the
The one uh billion dollar in the AR?
And we're serving, as I said, two hundred and fifty thousand customers across the globe.
From
Virtually
any industry that you can think about, like more than two hundred different business verticals, it could be
Both tech and non tech sevy customers.
Yeah, the vast majority of our customers are non tech.
And
You know
From like a customer that is building
Airplanes and cruise ships all the way to real estate, construction.
Finance.
tech and everything you can basically
Thing of
And if I like just
for reference and single golf base so
When they join Monday.
Eight and a half years ago.
Yeah, we'll we
And back then we were called the pulse uh
We had around four million in AR and we you know, we're
scale from the from there to
One billion.
Yeah, and from like around thirty, forty people to the company to twenty five hundred.
Right now.
Awesome.
When you talk about the product you're building, to a lot of people it's like oh it's like project management software, all this like
Call him Like what's the big deal? But I had Drew Houston on the podcast.
And he made this really interesting point.
When he talks to people working at SpaceX who are like launching rockets to Mars.
And he talked about people building ships. Like if you really boil down what are they doing day to day?
They're sitting in tools like Monday.
putting together tasks and doing to do's and sharing documents.
Like this is kind of what
The world runs on.
So it's important to have that perspective.
With that, putting that aside for a second.
I think very few people have seen what you've seen.
Having a seeing a company uh skill.
this way. Also the transformation you just shared of just like
Almost ship shipping.
too much and being slow to like okay, let's rework things to shipping.
twenty five columns in a month and all these things. Like very few people have seen this. So there's a lot to learn from this journey that you've been on.
So I have a bunch of questions and a different a bunch of different ways of approaching some of your biggest lessons from this journey.
The first is let me just ask you this question.
What would you say is the most counterintuitive

About building product and leading teams.
Through this journey of
Building Monday.
Maybe first of all is about like something that we really care about, which is transparency.
Mm.
I I I'm like uh let me tell you a story. Like I I uh
sat down for dinner at my family and
Many, many different members of my family are like entrepreneurs or like uh working as an executive in uh tech companies and so on.
And
You know, back in the days with Monday
Before we went public.
Uh we actually should
Every bit of information
With our employees.
You would get into our office.
And
You would see a dashboard.
With how many bank accounts do you have?
How many people have channed today? How many signups do we have? And
So many different things. Even if you
Came for an interview, you'd see these numbers. And I remember sitting at this dinner and
Everyone would tell me, Listen.
You're making
A mistake. How can you do it when things go south
You know
you'll demoralize the team and people like uh
You know?
We'll get upset about it.
And I think this is um
You know.
Formi, one of the most important things.
Yeah.
And you have such a talented team.
You want to share them?
We want to share with them everything.
And the reason for that is that
Then
You're working on every challenge.
Together.
And instead of demoralizing people, I think that for the right people and the people that like, you know
Uh walking at Monday.
This is something that gives them so
Like
You know
Сенсо в діп партнерші.
And
As a leader, you know there were many situations in my professional life that
I knew some bit of information.
And I felt, you know, all the way
on my shoulders and I love to call it the dark side of the moon, you're there alone, right? Like
You're coming to the office, there's nothing
you know, like more demoralising as or like
The first thing is uh as a little
That you feel
Awful because something that you know.
And you're coming to the office and everything is great and everyone uh like happy.
And I think on Monday we
We really wanted to do it differently and we
Any
have an approach of like very radical transparency.
About everything.
And this actually makes everyone part
of what we are doing. And in a way we like to say
We really want everyone's brains in the challenge.
And not just one centralized brain and a lot of walking hands.
And I can share examples, you know, when for instance
Suddenly
People would come up to the office, we have dashboards of course.
Everyone in the office, like each team
has its own dashboards, we have our combined dashboards with some metrics and so on.
And I remember cases in which someone said, Listen
What happened to the conversion?
And you know, think how powerful it is.
When you have everyone.
At a company.
Looking at these things.
And many of the things that we
discovered many of the things that we saw as challenges and problems is things that people saw
due to this transparency.
Yeah, so I think that's
maybe the, you know, counterintuitive part is that
Yeah.
Don't be afraid.
To share the information. It's exactly the other way around.
And I can probably share share that, you know, even today as a public company.
Yeah, we're really short.
Everything that we can do.
You know?
And also like if you are a product manager that Monday.
You are signing like a ten V five program for selling your stocks.
Meaning that
We found a way to make everyone
still see the data because we think this is the most important part and
I think this is one
thing that I really believe in and really changed how we walk and also how people are feeling about
being partners.
In building Monday.
And not just walking at a company.
Is that thing they sign that's just like auto sell stock, so they're not selling based on information, based on announcements that's coming. Okay, got it. So every PM basically has to s automatically.
I can't like decide I'm gonna sell my stock tomorrow because of the numbers tanking. Yeah, so so you know, like uh we want to give people a choice, but like usually we really feel that in most cases you really need to know these information in order to do your work.
That's so interesting.
And hey.
I I think people even prefer just like dollar cost average sell, you know, it's like it makes life easier not having to try to time all these things.
I definitely think so, yeah. That's really interesting.
Uh, and that's and that's just product managers, or how far does that all go?
No, so basically
W when we became public, you know, uh I remember still like one of the conversations that we had with uh
Like uh
the bankers and the lawyers about like uh
Listen, guys.
Things would need to change. You cannot have a dashboard with only financials at the entrance of the the building.
Uh it doesn't make sense as a public company.
And we understood it, but we didn't want to let go of what we cared about because we really believe this is one of the main drivers to the business, having these transparency and having these
Nick.
Shared Blaine's
Uh you know uh mode.
So
We tried to think about ways.
In order to do it. So
Mm.
Now if I'll
Like fast forward, you know, we're almost four years public.
Uh and we have uh an internal app called Monday Morning.
And in Monday morning you have two parts, part A and part B. Part A
It's for the every
Yeah.
Company employee.
Contains a lot about engagement and a lot of data.
It can
Be shared with everyone.
And part B is confidential and it's buy wall.
Okay, so it's the company management, but I think the important point is that
We see product management as
Something that
got to have these numbers, so we thought about it really hard and you know it's uh it's a lot of logistics to do
Like so many plants.
Yeah, ten be five plants, but I think it will fit.
Yeah.
This is so interesting. Like a lot of companies talk about transparency and you guys are
Uh, I think radical transparency is a good way to describe this,'cause I've never heard of a company
Doing this.

They didn't feel about it as well, apparently. And yeah, it was it it took time to, you know.
To get to the solutions.
That's so funny. So for people that are listening to this are like, hey, maybe we should explore this, what's like one thing you'd suggest they
that they could do to start moving down this road.
And the benefit again is you
I guess maybe again remind people of the benefits of doing this,'cause it sounds like a lot of work and and risk.
So I think that as a young startup
It's actually
Not such a hard walk.
Yeah, when we were very small, you know, back in the days, we had the like like the daily numbers concept that we now have for the teams, we had the daily numbers for the company.
How much bank accounts, how many upgraded, downgraded, and so on daily.
And you saw people reacting to it like on a daily basis. So this is something that you can do in virtually one hour.
And
It like changes
How people
See.
You know?
the role within the company, it focuses everyone to the company's KPIs because everyone understands what you care about and so on.
So this is one thing that you can do extremely fast.
And I don't see any disadvantage.

Aside from the fact that people are afraid.
Many time you are afraid and I can share like
It's so much like it's even
like a a big relief that you don't need to think. Can I share it? Can I don't share it? Like can I like
You just let it go.
And everything would be okay.
And I can show from my experience that we shared everything.
And the second thing which is really practical, you know
It's the office dashboards.
We really believe in it.
So you know
You buy a TV?
You put it on the walk.
You
Start a conversation.
You do it.
What do we want to show on this TV?
And you know, when we was
Like
uh a smaller startup and we set all in one office space
We had our company goals.
Yeah, dashboard.
And it also had like uh we we programmed it to have sounds on meaningful events. So
When you had the like for instance new paying account, you had the almost Simpson saying uh like the the saying with the one million dollar I'll become a millionaire or something like that.
Yeah, for all you know.
And you sign up, you add a tick, and so on. So
suddenly everyone are leaving it, you know, it becomes part of the cadence of the company.
So these are just two ideas to make it super easy.
And the change happens immediately.
I love how that connects back to the whole point about impact people all lining around here is what we're trying to drive.
Like if the Simpson sound is going off.
Oh.
That's a sign that this matters and that's something we should be driving up.
And it creates such a partnership, you know, I remember like
Listening to the first time where we had one uh million dollar collection in one month.
Breaking the record of like new paying accounts for one day.
Everyone are living.
But in many companies, you know, only the management or the founders are like feeling and I think that in that sense
You already feel that you have a great power because everyone
Around these
The same things and it makes
Conversations different because everyone understands what matters to you at this point.
This is awesome. Uh really cool counterintuitive lesson. I feel like a whole podcast could be a done on like how to do this effectively.
I wanna move on, but if I guess if people wanna start implementing this at the company, let's just say they should come talk to you and you could probably give them a bunch of advice. I would love to
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Thanks for that, Christina.
Thank you.
Any other big counterintuitive lessons from the journey that you think would be fun to share?
One thing I really love about what we do in Monday is that
Really love
To take
Risks.
Not for the sake of it, but we are not afraid.
To do bold moves.
And many times when you want to do bold moves, you have a lot of concerns, especially when you start to be successful, because you you're afraid that you are going to break everything that you built.
Till now.
And for me, you know
One of the
most pivotal moments in the company life is
When we decided that, you know
Back in the days, as you said, we we were a platform, but we had a go to market of a project management tool.
We said listen.
People are doing so many different things on top of my data.
building a CLM of Monday and they are building
a software for managing the dev cycles and they are building so many different things.
And we took a decision, strategic decision decision to become like a
A multi product company.
Which is built on top of this platform.
And
We actually did something which is really counterintuitive, you know, the the first thought that comes to mind, at least for me
Is
Why maybe not just launch a new product, do it
Relatively on the side.
gradually understand if it's successful. And if it would be successful
Double click on it.
But we actually did it
In a very different way.
We actually announced five different new products.
Yeah.
Simultaneously.
On the same time.
And you know, we had so many like
I can't stress enough how
You know
How hot it is?

Like I remember when we talked about and doing it
People say, What, but we are going to confuse our quant users and it's going to help conversion. And how are we going to do the marketing now?
When we have so many different go to markets.
And the cells, they don't know how to navigate people to different and what about pricing?
So many different concerns.
And
But we decided to do it.
Because we really want to create

And
I think that in that sense, you know, fast forward to to this day day like
Part of these products were really successful.
Yeah, for instance Monday Celsi LM is like
Like
going faster than Monday back in the days, like you know, and it's amazing to see it.
And
Some of them we understood that they don't need to be separate products and we uh collapsed them back to the main product.
But the point is is that we managed to learn
Interchange
Both internally at the company, how the perception of everyone around what we are building, but also externally.
Like this move.
Change
dramatically the competitive landscape that we live in.
And
You know, I think
There was a lot of friction. Many people at the company were uh
Like having a lot of friction with it, it was really, really hard.
But
Looking back
It's such
I'm so happy with this move and the fact that we did it like that because
Just imagine what would happen if we would choose one of them.
And it wasn't the successful product.
And our conclusion can be that multi product won't work for us.
We really managed to transform the company in a very short amount of time and also to create new reality.
Yeah, you know.
And I think that
People need to remember that and I'm constantly reminding it to myself and I think this is something that we're constantly working, you know.
Yeah.
with each other in order to make sure that we we
Remember it that
Not taking bold risks.
Not m making
Ball moves.
It's a risk for itself.
Okay, and many times like you know, people want the inertia, people want just the incremental value.
But if you want to do lips
Many times you need to let go of things that were successful for you in the past and
This is very counterintuitive and we did a lot of, you know
A lot of mental models to help us
Cope with it. So I remember that when we were small
And we had for instance like twenty
Thousand paying customers.
So I said
Listen.
Most of Monday's customers are not customers of Monday yet.
So we need to think about them as well.
You know, and this is something that really helps you.
Because many times you need to do
Things that affect
Like the cool and success that you have.
Yeah.
But I think it's this is another very very important thing that I'm constantly reminding to myself.
There's a kind of this other recurring theme that I'm noticing of just like
Thinking big.
And taking leaps. And I love this point you made of
Not doing that is actually a big risk. Not taking risk is a big risk. That's a really powerful point.
And it's innately scary to do something risky.
And so I love the push here of just like
Take more risks.
Because
It's so easy and it this comes back again to the beginning of the conversation where you
We're just like building things the way they've always been built.
And looking back and like what have we even done?
What have we done over this year of hard work and tons of features?
Think a lot of companies get in that place where they're just like, What are we like at our B and B I had this exact Brian is constantly like, What are we even shipping? All these billions of experiments that are moving the numbers, like what are we even doing?
Like I don't know anything that we ship that's really exciting.
And so I think this is a really good reminder and push to just like
Think bigger and take
And you need to take big
Leaps.
Um
So
Love that.
Is there
Uh
Any other big counterintuitive lessons before we move in a different direction?
I really believe that many time like uh
Spending more time on working on something.
will not yi to better results or to better products.
And
You know, I think that many times
Like um
We
Is
People that are building products for others.
Uh get to a point where
The feedback that we we want to get
In the bottom of our heart, you know, is like
Wow, what an amazing product you have built.
And I think this is a very bad
feedback to get.

for initial things that you are doing.
Yeah, because it means that
You know, I I feel that in many ways
The the point in which
You make
Real people use your product is really scary.
Because you
You suddenly
You know.
Put your walk out there.
And
Then
In order to to like actually and you you are fair that do we say, listen, it's a lousy product, it's not a good product, but
Actually
Really encourage people.
To get
Minifest.
production to put traps for themselves that is scoped by time.
And not by effort.
And
You know
Many times I saw that more time.
Crates.
More questions.
It creates more complications.
It creates more assumptions.
That we put for ourselves.
In thinking what our users need.
And we invent things.
You know.
And
We we do it all from good reasons. We want people to like what we build, we want them to get value.
But for me like this is a very important point that
Many time.
Many times using
Like
The
Setting traps mechanism.
Of saying listen.
We have
Three weeks.
Let's think about it.
And scope it by time.
It makes you extremely focused.
And
You know
This is very important because
You know, uh
We really want to do it.
to get feedback from customers that say, Yeah, listen, this is on the direction, I'm still missing this and this and this and also we really love the fact of
This is not a good product.
And I can give you a recent example, you know, even when now we you know, we work with big customers and of course like
There are different ways to implement what I said.
Yeah, then you're a small startup, but
We are building like a new offering of enterprise work management. Think about it like
a way of managing projects at a huge, huge scale, you know, thousands of projects, like tens of thousands of employees and so on.
So
I really love using the deadline trap.
and it makes you focused, it makes you sharper and thinking. And we just had a recent example with the offering I was telling you about of like enterprise work management, managing projects at scale.
And you know, this is an enterprise product.
So you have all the reasons in the world to say
No, I can't release it yet.
I need more time. I need to do more things. They won't use it. They need
This and this and this.
And I think that
Actually at least
the first like alpha version to them.
And we got a feedback of
Listen guys, this is premature. We need more like
More comprehensive value.
But we got exactly the feedback of what?
And this is price lesson. And my response to the dims is
Well done.
Like I think you did an amazing
Job.
Because
You know
Many times.
being so afraid of releasing it and like uh thinking
If I just have one, two, three
More weeks.
Yeah, it will be the body product. I think it's not it's not.
This is such good advice. It resonates so much with recent other conversations I've had.
So just to clarify what you're saying, basically you
have a time box. When you say traps, it's basically a a set amount of time. We're gonna spend three weeks on this feature.
And
If it doesn't if it we don't hit the three weeks, we just cut scope, essentially. Is that the idea?
I think yeah it's it's like this is the basic version of it.
But now for us we really want and we really love
doing doing it as an exercise for ourselves. For instance, let's say now as a public company, we say, Listen, we're working on something
We want to announce it on the next earning.
And put it there for ourselves. Why? Because again, it makes you
Shop. It makes you
super focused about things.
And
You know
I think that in many ways.
This results in a much better product because you're not building things that you invented.
you're staying really true to what your n users
Needs
The real you know core of the value.
And it's really funny to see the dynamics of teams, you know.
When they're planning, you know, from the bottom up, so
It starts like, you know, with something that uh like let's say you done everything great, okay, you have the opportunity, you understand, you have the KPIs, everything is in place, but now
Starting to plan it.
And suddenly people are raising
You know.
Concentration.
And issue is
And it becomes
uh spot to say what can go wrong.
And like being fear driven and then
you tend to, you know, protect yourself and adding more content. And more content.
And then when you see what happens, it's
Actually like it's going to be shipped in two years.
Let me say.
Okay. We have earnings in two months.
What can we ship to
This earnings and let's put it a tab. And then you suddenly see the conversation
Changes.
First of all, it makes everyone really focused on what's the core of the value.
And it removes all the theoretical discussions that people have and things like that.
And
You know, the results
Are amazing. And you need to remember when you do it, you need to continue afterwards, if you like according to feedbacks and and not let it go.
Just but what you did in the first version
But
In many ways I really love the fact that
You know, the first version get a feedback which is not
Everything is perfect because if this is the the feedback
It means that we build
Too much.
And probably it's not
Focus product enough.
And when you build a lot of features.
This can be like
You know, the a death by thousand cuts because in each
corner of the product you add more than you need. Like
Yeah, there's so much here that that connects the other conversation we just had. We had uh Garov Mistra from the C of Captions.
And he made this point that if people aren't complaining about your pro like
You you want to see people complaining'cause that means they care. Like there's something there that they care about. If they're if you're not hearing any complaints, they could care less about what you're building and that's not w that's a bad sign.
I really loved it.
Yeah.
Their company actually goes to the extreme of what you're describing. Every engineer ships a feature, uh a marketable feature every week.
That's their pace.
I I really connected to it and by the way, about user feedback, I think you know uh
It's really it's really nice because
Like uh
many times, you know, people sociate like uh
They they only
measure themselves by
Use the feedback?
Yeah, the specific point and I think this is also maybe uh
You know?
Something that is a
Counterintuitive.
Not every customer feedback is the feedback that will drive you to the
You know
To the end result of the best product out there.
Yeah, there are many aspects to it. I I can share, you know, just one example about us.
We as a you know.
In the beginning of the company?
We for instance
Yeah.
didn't want to have a free trial and part of it

to hear feedback about a product.
Only from people.
That
The product.
means something to them.
the the best proxy for that is that they are paying.
Because it means they get real value and
You know, in that sense it helps us it helped us at the beginning to be
To stay
Super focused about like, you know, separating the wheat from the shaft in the
with the the customers' feedback. So I think uh
It's a super important point.
And we need to take
Customer feedback in context.
The other really interesting point here that you're making is this idea of
We had uh I think I mentioned this already, Ryan Singer, he's the creator of this method shape up.
Which is very centered around appetites over deadlines.
There's so much like so many everyone listening to this has probably gone through an exercise where like let's redo our landing page.
And so it's like, yeah, it'll probably have some impact. Let's spend some time on this.
It ends up taking like six months.
And everyone's like, Why did we spend six months redoing this freaking landing page? Like
I would have given it three weeks and then moved on.
And
The way to do that is you just commit up front. We will spend three weeks on this. We'll to get as much done.
As we can in three weeks and then we'll move on.
People talk about this very hard to actually do. So I love that's how you actually approach some of these bigger features you work on.
Do you guys
Practice shape up by any chance, or is this just like a thing you do?
Uh no, actually I wasn't that familiar with it, but uh definitely going to check it out. Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, it's uh it's a whole method.
Uh, and we'll have I think the episode right before this is actually that episode. Okay.
Let me go in a different direction and kind of keep extracting lessons from this journey'cause that was a really fruitful
Place to go.
So let me ask you this question.
What's one thing that you wish you'd known before
Stepping into the role you're in today.
This is an interesting question, I think uh you know the many aspects to it. Um
Maybe if I'll take the
The personal aspect so you know, I've been in charge of like the the ballot and technology from from like since I joined the company.
But
With that, my role has changed, I think like
Dozens of times. Like if
I feel
I'm very fortunate to walk
In one company, but
actually work in dozens of different companies. Think about the scale that we talked about, like each point is a different uh
It's actually a different company and a different role and different challenge.
And
I think that you know, something that's maybe is counter counterintuitive personally for me was that
In many of the phases.
That we undergoed with.
I felt that
what got me to this phase isn't is not necessarily what's going to make me successful in the next phase and if a
Want to be even more blunt, you know?
They will
Like
Personally times when suddenly I saw
How my biggest, you know, splend
Uh, for instance like
Mastering all the details and having everything in my head, knowing exactly what's happening on
Every corner of what we do.
This is
was probably something that gave a lot of
Value when we were small.
But
As we got bigger, I think like it suddenly created, you know
Even the damage.
You know, continue to do the same thing.
And
In many ways it takes time to do this realization.
And I think that
A good advice that
I would
love to have is that
Don't be afraid again to to let go of things that
You
Uh finger superpowers many times your superpowers that brought you to this point and made you successful. Many times you think that if you let it go, you won't be successful.
And it's frightening, but
Really feel that
You need to constantly evaluate what you call and tall
Yeah, is actually
is actually what what is the whole like and what is needed in order to be successful in it.
and not continue with the inertion and uh this is uh something that
I wish someone had told me, yeah.
It took me time in many cases, you know.
Many cases I did it too late.
Is there anything that helped you realize this or get good at this? Is it like coaching? Is it just doing it and surviving and failing and be like, Oh, I see.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think all of the above.
I think that uh
One sign for that.
For me it was
That in many cases
I felt
Um
I'm doing a very good
Job.
But then people
Like uh it can be like uh I I'll give you an example, okay? Like uh
For instance, doing a company like leadership QBLs, okay quarterly business reviews.
So
when we just started it with it very early, you know, I would
Actually
Tell about
Everything.
And you know, I remember one meeting that
I went out of the meeting and I say wow I really managed to, you know, convey
Everything and explain everything in very like in a very articulated way.
And
Like one of uh my colleagues in the the co leadership team said
Yeah.
Well, I didn't understand anything.
W what is the bottom line of all of this?
And
You know, it was like uh
You suddenly realize that what you fought
Is is good.
Necessarily what's
That a
People needs from you at this point.
And you know
Like uh after understanding that, I I wanted to ask like what would be beneficial for you. You said listen, I want to keep in my head like the three most meaningful things that you are currently facing with
I don't want to kn heal everything.
And
You know.
Yeah.
But uh
But this was the point for me that I realized that I need to change and I need to change something and
the the like the requirements are different and
Like
At the beginning, you know
I tried to say, but listen, it's very it's important that you know like you you're sticking to it, right? But uh
We need to let it go sometimes.
And think from like from the beginning.
There's this phrase that someone shared on this podcast once where in as you rise in your career.
You often go from the person that
Is pitching leaders on something to the person being pitched.
And that's a really weird place to move from
You know, having to learn how to be give great feedback, delegate.
Let go of things.
And I love that this this is a good example of that.
Yeah. Since we're getting a little vulnerable and open about stuff.
I wanna try this question.
You haven't you've done a lot of podcasts, done a lot of interviews, you've been all over the place. Is there anything you haven't shared anywhere else?
that might be helpful to share here, but
the the journey you've been on.
Yeah, so maybe continuing with the same point, you know, like uh it's a crazy journey.
And it's crazy personal journey. If you think about it like uh
I remember the way he once said
If someone would have interviewed me to a public company of uh, you know
Uh, like uh I would say ten uh billion uh dollars in market cap and managing twenty five hundred employees.
I'm not sure that I would interviewed myself and get myself to the job.
Yeah.
And I can you know, for me there were a lot of moments and it's constantly happening.
Mm.
You know, when Fhinks
you know, uh going sideways and things doesn't work and you see so many things are breaking down and
You know.
You can be on the same day
Super happy and
Suddenly
On the lowest point there is.
And I can show you now, many times I have I vest myself like
Yeah.
Whether I'm the right person to lead it, whether we need like someone that is coming with all the experience to this phase.
And I remember like uh talk that I had uh with Alan, he told me he told me something, listen.
First of all, as the one who built it.
No one would be able to do it like you.
And I think it's an important, you know, thing to remember when times are tough.
I really believe that, you know
If you have the passion.
And if you have the will.
Yeah.
And if you
are willing to do the hard work in order to constantly adjust and evolve and
You know, to be vulnerable and also
you know, to say about yourself like I didn't understand something, now I need to learn it.
And I need to deal with things differently.
Yeah.
You know, it's a very important point if you want to do this kind of uh
Of a journey.
And it's hard.
And
Something I can share, you know.
I can reassure everyone that are listening to us, you know.
If you're feeling it.
You're not the only one.
Everyone are feeling it for once in a while.
Be confident about yourself.
Be vulnerable in order to learn and to evolve.
And I really love to do like a a mental you know mental exercise of like saying
Like we we said about the product.
So
Let's say um
Uh I'm uh Daniel of like
Next six months.
How do I want to look back?
On these six months. And what do I want to say about myself that I learned that I evolved and
This helped you get
out from the state of like
Everything is okay. I'm good and
It it makes you like want to learn and want to evolve.
Mm.
And also
Nick.
Stay in doing mode.
Like
I don't believe in uh
Like I think the one one thing that really characterized me is that I can be like very, you know
It can be very difficult and very challenging time.
But on the next day.
I'm already
Bouncing back with energy.
And you know the like to come and do things and win it.
And
You know, there are a lot of things that we as leaders need to do in order to to help ourselves.
to keep like this mental uh you know state. So
I like to run, I like to do things that are unrelated to work in order to get back to my
Centre.
But
Then
Quickly bounce back.
And

In my cells.
In the team around me.
Yeah, so this is yeah, this is something maybe
Very personal, but uh
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one, you know, feeling it.
I appreciate you sharing that.
There's a a post that I did a long time ago with a coach and she it was about imposter syndrome.
And she made this really powerful point.
That
Uh
Like you are actually an imposter.
in the role you're in, you've never done this before.
Like most people are impostors in their role. They've never been a chief product officer in a lot of cases. They've never led teams this large.
And
First of all, I just realized that you actually are.
And second of all.
That's okay. And most people are like you said.
And then third of all, this advice you shared about how to work through that is really powerful.
Just like no many people feel this way.
Uh, work hard, I think is a really important part of this. Just like no, there's another day.
And that you can bounce back.
Remember that everyone
Oh people.
No one is born.
To be like in the world that it's currently at.
And you know, another thing that you know in Monday we are scaling so fast, so even people that are coming with experience and I
You know.
The chance to see it over and over again.
Because we are going so fast.
Each one of us will get to a point which is the first time he is doing it.
Sooner or later.
So
Experience matters and we have like uh
A lot of people that are coming and bringing experience from from the outside, but
Also remember that and remember that everyone are people and like
No one was born in a position.
Mm.
Yeah, and and the company's like
Like yours, it's I've people have described it as like every six months you have a new job.
Exactly.
Exactly.
We had Cheryl Sandberg once did a talk that I was at where people were complaining.
Mm.
We're just like so much is changing, we're growing, every the culture is not as strong as it was, and there's just like things.
Not working, our processes are no hiring is hard.
And she's just like
This is the problems you want because you're growing very fast. And that's
Very good.
versus if you were not growing, it'd be much more painful and hard. So ple be thankful to see the problems you're facing.
I couldn't agree more.
Mm.
You talked about things breaking along the way and things you have to deal with. Is there an example of something? I love these stories of just like uh maybe a moment of crisis along the journey where you thought, like, Okay, things are gonna fall apart. This is over. See everyone.
Yeah.
To be honest, we have so many.
Uh like uh
But again
This is the problem's uh
That you are lucky to have.
Yeah, but uh
Yeah, may maybe I'll give you an example like uh you know, I remember this day that uh
Someone from our customer success team has approached me and say, Listen, Daniel
We have a spike in performance issues.
W in the board.
And
You know, again like our boats is this stable.
Of like think about it like of data.
And
On each time we we add new functionality and we make the platform more mature, people are taking it to the extreme.
So
If you look back eight years ago, so these kind of tables usually had like let's say five columns and one hundred rows.
And if you look about it today, it's like hundreds of columns.
No.
Tens of thousands of flows and
Like
So
Performance was always a challenge and struggle, like in making sure that everything works
Yeah, smoothly, and this is also a value to us. We really believe that performance is the number one feature.
Mm.
It makes people use your system.
So
You know he came to me.
And I remember that
Like suddenly seen the spike in the tickets.
You know, it's super hard, right? Like you say, Well, it's
Something super hard
Yeah, you don't necessarily have a magic wand of like
Fixing it.
Yeah immediately.
And what we did we actually
Again, connected everyone to it.
The first thing they did was like
Taking this cuff.
To everyone in the team.
Enjoying and thinking together what we can do.
And
We did a lot of things and we we worked really hard and we managed to to make this situation better and
Yeah, you know.
And then
Time passed by and you are like continuing and then it happened again.
Mm.
And I can show that on the first time on the third time.
I said, Okay.
We had enough.
Like uh we need to think.
Totally different.
Uh in a different way and um
Back in the days.
This is well I think
Yeah, like many of our core like long term projects have born.
The signature one would be Monday D B.
It's like a
It's an a name we use for like
and underlying data infrastructure that we've been building in the last three years or so.
So
Think about a very small team and a very small startup.
I remember the day that we said listen.
We need
Few of our most
Talented people.
They are now not going to contribute to features anymore.
Well putting them
On
Nick.
Yeah, a separate like uh place.
And let's think and solve this problem.
while thinking about one hundred X. And you know, it really like in many ways so different from what we talked about in so many other of the examples, right?
Yeah, and I think
No, we we said listen.
Instead of being like uh fixing an issue.
We want this to be our competitive edge. We have a very unique
Yeah.
product architecture where everyone can build their own schemas of the table and you know it's like
A crazy thing in terms of technology behind it.
We want to do something.
that will not only solve the problem but also will serve us as a competitive edge edge.
And we took a huge risk because you know, we took a lot of people and put them
Aside
Yeah, for that or like not a lot of people but the
Very talented people.
Um
I think
In retrospect, uh, by the way, we released Monday DB I think uh one and a half years ago, like the the first version, it did a huge, huge change for customers and in many ways this is what like
Actually makes us today
A platform which is enterprise grade.
Yeah.
So my lesson from that is that
If you feel about something
It is strategic.
You need to not only solve problems but be super proactive.
And also again, like um
This contradicts the fact of like what are the goals? What are we going to achieve? Because you need to lean on
Like something which is strategic. So
With the everything that we said at the beginning of the conversation, there is also things that you need to do.
because this is the company you want to build, this is the product that you want to build.
And you don't necessarily get the, you know.
Yeah.
Luxus of getting uh conviction from things that happened in the past or
from data you need to just go with your
uh intuition and take this risk.
And I'm super happy that we did it, yeah, but
This is an example where things really broke, you know, and uh
What we did with it.
There's a couple of other stories of crisis I've been thinking back to, and they're all seem to be d a database
started reaching capacity and we were about to f fall apart'cause their growth was too fast.
So that's an interesting lesson for people to hear just like
Try to anticipate this a little more.
And uh sounds like that's what you realize is like let's think a hundred X from now, not
Not just like a couple of years from now.
There's it reminds me of so Brian Johnson. He's this
Uh dude that's trying to lift
forever or as long as he can and he makes this really interesting point.
That I promise connects to what you're talking about.
Which is he's like.
Okay, what is what is your goal? He asked everyone, what's your life goal?
And so they're like, Oh, I want to do this and this and that. Okay.
To accomplish that, the base goal you're not even thinking about is you need to not die.
Yeah.
And that's actually the number one goal everyone should have. Don't die.
And I feel like that's infrastructure in companies is like you have all these metrics and goals, but really the goal that underneath that is your infrastructure needs to scale.
So it makes sense why this is outside of like okay, we always metrics and goals. Like this is not not necessarily treating it as a as a tax or as a risk, but rather like, you know, for for our offering, like as a platform, this is like actually now one of our core advantages.
Mm. So it's super important as well that value to customers comes in different ways, shapes and forms, and you need to
to think about the experience and not only about like uh you know
And many times the general experience start with
Things that are reliable, performant, that you can count on them.
And suddenly you even use them differently because they're fast.
So
I think this is another important uh like aspect to it.
That's such a good point. When you have a problem, something that's slowing you down or might crumble the company, just not flipping it from how do we just
put the band aid here. It's how do we turn this into a strategic advantage if we really invest the time.
I I I like that a lot.
Okay.

close out our conversation. I'm gonna take us to AI Corner.
Which is a a recurring segment I tried to get to is more and more with this podcast.
And the question is
How have you what's an example of you using AI tools in your day to day work?
to do better work, to do faster work.
That you think might be helpful to other folks.
Yeah, maybe I'll start with a personal one, you know, like uh I'm uh it's not it's not about work, but I think it really shows that
For me it was like a moment of like uh
really saying this this has so much potential in it.
Yeah, so I actually prepared myself for a marathon and unfortunately
I got uh injured in my knee.
So yeah.
So I went to do an MRI scan.
And I finished the scan and they gave me this disc.
With the results.
And then they said listen, uh
You need to schedule a doctor appointments.
Five days from now.
Okay, I said I took it.
put it in ch B T and ask for like the results uh an explanation of line by line what
What does it mean?
And then I of course went to the doctor and said these are the results, but I think like for me, you know, this is uh
This is something that I was really happy about.
Are you using it?
And it also opens my mind a lot because I think that if you
think about it from the product perspective and this is how we think about
AI in Monday.
The technology is amazing. You you can do so much with it.
But
You know, there's still the part of like productising it because
Every
There's no detail.

Enthusiasm is it.
How did you think about
Putting your MRI there.
And I said, I don't know, like I just did, but
This is all like creating products that actually allow people to
Leverage technology.
And more on the walk side, you know, I use it a lot, I think like um
For me
Like one recent example, I would say, is like uh we really
Walked how towards like uh determining the
Pricing for AI offering.
And if I was mentioning earlier.
And
Just in like two hours.
It was managed
I managed to get a full perspective on what everyone else are doing.
You know
And
We have analysts and we have
product managers and s but the fact that I was independent and managed to get like, you know, the initial thoughts
And like all the information in just a bit, it was mind blowing. So
I use it a lot in order to understand
Things that are like very extensive, like what
the competitors are doing. What is the history of this and that and
I think it helped me a lot in in that sense.
These are awesome examples.
And is this all chat GPT?
Is that the tool of choice? And
You know, it's hard we I have like uh my own periods right now, it's changing from one week to another.
Yeah, these two uh actually well with Ch PT, yeah.
Very cool. The first example my wife does all the time. I
Mother in law was in the hospital and
We're waiting for the doctor to show up and she just put the chart in Chat GPT and is like what's
With the problem.
And it's exactly what he told us.
Mm-hmm.
And it feels like
Like it feels like we're in a world now where an engineer without, say, cursor or one of these tools is just not
Like that's not that's not a possible anymore.
And it feels like now with going to doctors is like if you don't do this and see what it says
Like you're missing out on a big gap. There's this New York Times story, I don't know if you've seen where they actually compared.
A doctor's analysis versus a doctor plus chat GPT.
Plus.
Just chat GPT.
And
Uh guess w guess what was the the the best, most accurate
Yeah.
Diagnosis.
Yeah, I want to say uh Chi P T, you know, but uh that's exactly what it was. Not even a doctor with Chat G P T.
Yeah.
I I'll tell I'll tell you a story about it. So in the MLI, you know, I I did it because I w I wanted to to go skiing.
And I didn't know if I can do it or not.
So I asked Chad GPT and he said like uh all the recommendations and what I need to do and so on. And then when I was at the doctor, I said
I asked him the same question. Can I do ski?
Said.
I don't know, I never ski.
You know? So it's not only about like getting the information straight away and getting accuracy, it's the fact that you can
Continue deep dive with it.
And this is something that also like
When I was in the Piccans, you know, it's on not only the bit of information, but the fact that you can continue and continue and continue. It's like
It's uh definitely super, super impressive.
And it doesn't get annoyed, it doesn't get bored, it's and it's very surprised. So kind.
Amazing. Okay. Well, Daniel, we've we've covered a lot of ground. This was extremely fun. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you
Wanted to share any other nuggets of wisdom you want to leave listeners with.
I think
That's
In many ways, like the the things that we managed to achieve in Monday
is due to the great people and culture that we have.
And you know on the early days.
We used to take it for granted.
in a way that uh not the people but the culture, the fact that everyone understands the everyone are practicing it, and then you say okay culture is like uh something that you can put your
Fingers on?
But now as we scale like
I really see.
How?
This is what actually drives
Everything forward.
Yeah, so
Maybe
Just to say like on a personal note that
A huge part of how I see my role is about like
The people
And also about how we work together and what kind of
an environment we want to build to ourselves.
And we talked a lot about it during the the episode, but you know, I really feel that
I can't underestimate on
How meaningful it is.
And how like grateful I am that I'm working with such talented people.
And doing what I love.
That's awesome. Uh I bet we could do a whole other episode on just culture and what you've learned.
building a culture with a culture is like it Monday. But uh we gotta we gotta get to our very exciting
Lightning round. Daniel, are you ready?
I'm ready.
All right. So I've got five questions for you. First question is what are two or three books?
that you find yourself recommending most to other people?
The first one I would say is like uh
Is the No Wool Souls airbook by Netflix?
Uh back in the days we we used even the the slides, uh, but I think we took a lot of inspiration out of it. And I think that
Although we have different cultures, many of the things around like
You know execution.
Yeah, like uh excellent people and so on of things that
Like I can really resonate with.
And this is something that we really like, uh
To give people a way.
Yeah, after talking about our culture and so on to get inspiration also from other cultures.
Yeah.
And another maybe an uh on a different uh you know uh aspect.
Is a book that uh
Actually we uh our our co CEO is giving to me.
Yeah, it
Its name is the nonviolent communication.
And it's about
Yeah, effective ways of communication and
Understanding
The people and the needs and
How to communicate in a way
It actually promotes
You know, an effective communication.
And
What I like about this book is uh
You know, mean we we we love to to talk a lot and
Like.
After we both read the book like I will
Talking like
change so it's very practical. So I also like like to give it away to our leadership and people within the team because I think it has like
L value in it.
Uh I'm trying to remember the framework of nonviolent communication is like I observed you
at speaking too much in this meeting and that made me feel
Like I wasn't listened to. Something like that, right? I forget exactly. You shouldn't be judgmental, you just

No.
Yeah. Yeah. And I know I'm kind of joking about it, but it's actually really powerful and we
We had uh Carol Robin on the podcast who
created this program at Stanford called Techy Feely, which is similar to
This whole process.
This whole approach to talking and
By the way, I love the combination of Israeli
uh directness.
And nonviolent communication. I want to see that in action.
Yeah, definitely.
Okay. Next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or T V show that you really enjoyed?
So to be honest, I I don't watch TV so much. Like I get bored really fast and uh going back uh to other things, but uh
But uh uh like uh
When I do watch TV so m many times it's like um
in order to clear my head, so it's not that kind of exciting things.
Mm-hmm.
Maybe a different thing that I'm doing is like playing on the Play Station with my son, you know, FIFA, just to
Yeah.
Went out.
Yeah.
Yeah, and in terms of series maybe like uh
One thing that pops up is like the formula. I really liked it.
Yeah, Formula One.
And Netflix.
Drive to survive, exactly, yeah. I I really love seeing the dynamics and everything behind you know, it it looks like something simple of like driving cars, but you see that there's so much into it.
And so it's also something that uh like really interesting and like opens your mind.
To watch.
Yeah, I haven't I haven't started the new season yet. I wonder if it's great. Yeah. Likewise, yeah.
Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love?
So you know, I I don't want to like to to fall into the all the eye trap uh, you know, in terms of product. So maybe I I'll say something which is not so recent, but uh product that I love.
And
I I really like to take pictures.
Uh.
Yeah.
One product that I really love is uh Google Photos. Uh I think that, you know
they managed to create something which takes like the technology edge, but to a place where
myself as a human, like, really can connect to it and
and get a lot of value from it. So I'm like a really
have you use all of that.
Yeah. Yeah, that is a magical product that I think people under underappreciate.
Yeah.
Next question. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to, find useful and work your own life?
Stay positive.
Like I think uh
Being positive, saying uh
Saying like the good things.
Is it you Judge Bower?
And it's a huge driver.
Yeah.
It allows you to to give energy.
To the people around you.
And it contagious.
So
I really love, you know, staying positive, making sure that we keep being optimistic.
And it doesn't mean that you need to
Yeah, you know.
Yeah.
Let go of the problems and don't uh like uh see the problems, but also think about
Always look forward and always think how you can take the current situation and make it better.
And I land with the way that uh
It's really
More fun and actually brings better results this way.
I'm one thousand percent aligned with that.
Final question. I know you were in the army at one point in your life.
Is there anything that you learned from that experience?
That helps you build better products.
The funny thing is is that
I think that's
Like uh
Many things that I did in the army, I was actually commanding uh of
Like a very big group of people in in the army.
And I think uh it's not about building products, but more about building teams.
And bang.
Building like uh
This
Sense of purpose.
sense of shared like belonging.
Yeah and I think that
In that way many things
Are quite similar.
to be it it's it might be like uh counterintuitive, but
Many things are quite similar.
And
And
From that many many of the things of like being together, although it's like a hierarchical uh environment.
It's something that uh I take with me and a lot of like practical ways to
Lead the big organization, I would say.
Daniel, this was awesome. You're awesome.
Uh, so much stuff that we went through, so many golden nuggets. I think they were gonna help a lot of people.
With building products, building teams, scaling, surviving all these
Scaling challenges that keep coming up in these conversations.
Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out? Maybe talk about it being more transparent.
And then how can listeners be useful to you?
Yeah, so online like I think that's
two main ways is like by LinkedIn, uh I would say and
Second is podcasts.
Mm.
Like I'm guessing uh in a lot of podcasts and I think that this is uh like a cool way to share things.
Yeah, for stories and for like
Particle examples.
And
You know, in terms of listeners being useful to me, so
First of all the they in many ways they are already
are useful to me. I I really love your podcast and like uh I'm getting a lot of, you know, insights from others and this is something I
I really love
So
Many of uh people that probably listening will also contributing to that. So thank you for that. And I really hope with that that
This episode would also be meaningful.
to people and that they will take value out of it.
And
If they are
It would be amazing to hear about it, like
I remember, you know, someone did send me
A picture of his new dashboard in the office.
And what did you do with that and
add like uh additional ideas of what what you can do that we we actually took also here on Monday, so
If you do something, even if it's small
Let me know.
Yeah, it's super fun to hear and also interesting.
All right, there's the call to action. If you implement some uh
Daniel's advice, especially put up new dashboards or monitors in your uh office, please send photos.
Oh, for LinkedIn, it sounds like is the best medium.
Daniel, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you very much, Lenny. It was a pleasure.
Bye everyone.
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