The Exchanges

Q 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?

A 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 should change for your 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 or the goal is, 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 that. 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're committed to, suddenly you think about the target audience, because you need enough Like, like, bigger, big enough target audience, for instance, in order to, to get your, uh, you know, uh, to your goals. 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 AI blocks. Okay. And basically it means that with no code, you can…

AI assessment note: “most obvious sign for me is that you are building something Without the aim”

Q Next question. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful and work here in life?

A Stay positive. Like I think, uh, being positive, seeing, uh, seeing like the good things is a huge, huge power and it's a huge driver. And it allows you to, to give energy to the people around you and it's 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, uh, you know, uh, 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 learned with the way that, uh, it's really more fun and actually brings better results this way.

AI assessment note: “Stay positive. Like I think, uh, being positive, seeing, uh, seeing like the good things”

Q 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 what you took away from that?

A Yeah. Wow. 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, 30 people 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, a weekly update where we would share everything that we did with the company. And it was always, always, you know, 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 with 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, like, took us, like, four months to develop, you know, together with defining the product and everything, and At this morning, we actually saw that one of our main competitors back then has actually launched 30 new columns.

AI assessment note: “one of our main competitors back then has actually launched 30 new columns.”

Q 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 set amount of time. We're going to spend three weeks on this feature. And if it doesn't, if we don't hit the three weeks, we just cut scope essentially. Is that the idea?

A I think it's, it's like, this is the basic version of it, but now for us, we really want, and we really love 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 a trap for ourselves. Why? Because again, it makes you sharp. 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 are not building things that you invented. You are staying really true to what your 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 are planning, you know, from the bottom up, so it starts, like, you know, with something that, like, let's say you've done everything great, okay, you have the opportunity, you understand, you have the KPIs, everything is in place, but now you're starting to plan it, and suddenly people are raising, you know, concerns and issues, and it becomes a sport 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, no. Okay, we have earnings in two months. What can we ship to these earnings? And let'…

AI assessment note: “this is the basic version of it, but now for us”

Q That's really interesting. Uh, and that's, and that's just product managers or how far does that all go?

A No. So basically 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 all your financials at the entrance of the building, and 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 this transparency and having this, like, shared brains, uh, you know, uh, mode. So we tried to think about ways in order to do it. So, uh, Now, if I, like, fast forward, you know, we're almost four years public, and we have an internal app called Monday Morning, and in Monday Morning, you have two parts, part A and part B. Part A is for the every company employee, contains a lot about engagement and a lot of data that can be shared with everyone, and part B is confidential and it's by role, ok? 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 a, it's a lot of logistics to do like so many plans, uh, 10 by five plans, but I think it's worth it. Yeah.

AI assessment note: “Part A is for the every company employee... and part B is confidential and it's by role”

Q 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 maybe a moment of crisis along the journey where you thought like, okay, things are going to fall apart. This is over. See everyone.

A Yeah. To be honest, we have so many, uh, like, uh, but again, this is the problems, uh, that you are lucky to have. Uh, but, uh, yeah, 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 in the board. And, you know, again, like our boards is this table of like, think about it, like of data. And on each time where 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 kinds of tables usually had like, let's say five columns and 100 rows. And if you look about it today, it's like hundreds of columns, you know, tens of thousands of flows, and, like, so performance was always a challenge and struggle, like, and making sure that everything works, uh, smoothly, and this is also a value to us. We really believe that performance is the number one feature, uh, that makes people use your system. So, you know, he came to me, and I remember that, like, suddenly seeing the spike in the tickets, You know, it's super hard, right? Like you say, wow, it's something super hard. You don't necessarily have a magic wand of like fixing it immediately. And what we did, we actually, again, connected everyone to it. The first thing I did was like taking this graph t…

AI assessment note: “Someone from our customer success team has approached me and say, listen, Daniel, we have a spike in performance”