What Makes Monday.com So Great?

Context / Background
Monday.com’s impressive growth is undeniable. After being launched just a few years ago, the company is now valued at almost $2 Billion. Monday.com is a best-in-class workflow management software that, unlike other similar products, aims to manage people rather than projects.

Although there are key drivers that have catalyzed Monday’s success, including being horizontal SaaS serving SMB & enterprises (which expands their TAM significantly), having a short sales cycle (self-service + quick onboarding process), and being 100% in the cloud, in this article I will focus on why the product itself is so great. More specifically, I will highlight the impact it played during my past two years as the leader of a company, why I am so obsessed with it, and areas for further improvement.

Product Description
Monday.com’s mission is to become the only tool needed to organize a team’s entire operations by “creating a workplace environment of transparency, ownership, and accountability, to empower managers and their teams.”

At a high-level, Monday.com’s product is a modernized version of the Gantt Chart and is composed of three key elements — Boards, Groups, and Pulses. For context, multiple pulses make a group, and multiple groups make a board. A typical Monday.com ecosystem structure would have a couple of board.

• Boards: these would be the high-level buckets, such as “Tech”, “Marketing”, “Sales”
• Groups: within the “Tech” boards there would be groups such as “App”, “Website”, “Backend”
• Pulses: within the “App” group, there would be tasks such as “Fix bug XYZ”, “Change picture XYZ”, “Add item XYZ”

Finally, Monday.com allows people to be assigned to tasks individually, add comments, break down each pulse based on priority, engineering effort, deadlines, timeline, etc. All the above features lead to an easy-to-use, intuitive, and engaging software that orchestrates the workflow relationship between a (growing) team.
Please see the image below for a more visual overview of the product.

So, what do I love about Monday.com?
While working as the co-founder of Suna Breakfast, a 22-employee tech/logistics business, there are three key components that make Monday.com stand out among other software:

First, it is extremely intuitive. Given our lack of time and resources, I needed a tool with little to no onboarding period so that every team member would easily learn and engage proactively. Due to Monday.com’s superior user interface, appealing ecosystem, and fast onboarding process, within a couple of days, engineers, designers, operations & salespeople were all using the platform at full-speed, leading to minimal resource allocation to use the tool.

Second, the pulses focus on people and not on the task. They are extremely flexible and adaptable to our needs, which allows the team to understand who is responsible for what and what the deadlines/expectations are. Features such as automated emails to update on approaching deadlines and/or changes in the project, internal communication capabilities, integrations with other software tools, and more, allow our team to have a one-stop-shop that updates in real-time. Since we are a team of students with many obligations, it is crucial for me to have an organized and clear way to delegate tasks. Two key impacts that the pulses had on our team were:

• First, there was a decrease of 50% in slack messages. No more back and forth about asking who is responsible for a certain task, or whether something was finished on time; now we could visually see who was responsible for a task and its deadline.
• Second, prioritization became unambiguous. I have always been the one leading the efforts in prioritizing the tasks based on multiple factors, but on certain occasions, there would be confusion and misalignments even after I defined the priority. After Monday.com, the pulses objectively stated the level of priority, a glaring red “HIGH PRIORITY”, made the priority status evident.

Finally, and most importantly, Monday.com provides a coherent and transparent platform that allows everyone to access the entirety of the team’s agenda and tasks. I’ve learned that one of the most important aspects of leading a team is transparency. As Avishai Abrahami (Wix’s CEO) said, “When you hide information from your team, you limit their intelligence to that of your own, crippling the smart people you hired.” Because we were using Monday.com, this scenario wouldn’t happen. Everyone has access to all the moving pieces of the projects and the business — its intuitive interface and collaboration tools made it possible for people outside of a specific project to contribute with their insights and perspectives.

The impact of this increased level of transparency was a more engaged, motivated team that could provide additional insight. For example, people who weren’t directly involved in the “Tech” board could now clearly see we were building a pick-up feature in real-time, which allowed the marketing team to proactively start creating content to reflect that, instead of me having to bridge this gap. Consequently, my job became much easier, which allowed me to focus on other priorities. Additionally, with Monday.com, every member of the team could understand the reasoning behind a certain feature coming first, and how that would affect the big picture, which established an increased level of collaboration that resulted in a more productive and effective team.

In conclusion, I became obsessed with Monday.com after I experienced its benefit first-hand. The combination of a well-designed, easy-to-use product that provides an increased level of transparency, became a mission-critical tool for our business’ productivity and efficiency.

What should Monday.com build next?
First, in order to decide what to build next, it is crucial to define what is success for Monday.com and how it can be measured. I consider success to be an increase in engagement (active users/week), an increase in revenue, and/or a decrease in CAC (customer acquisition cost). In defining what to prioritize for a potential feature, I will focus on innovations that drive engagement, specifically for users that aren’t yet obsessed with Monday.com (a.k.a. unhealthy users). This is because the company has proven its ability to acquire new customers (given growth and customers in different verticals) — thus, maximizing engagement will lead to a decrease in churn, and overall higher ARR.

Second, it is vital to understand who Monday.com’s users are. For each of Monday.com’s customers (i.e. WeWork), there are three different users:

• Managers/Leaders (i.e CEOs, VPs, PMs)
• Assignees (i.e. engineers, designers, salespeople)
• Passive users (i.e. consultants, individual contributors)

All the users above have different needs, wants, and pain points that Monday.com tries to address. Given my experience as the leader of a company for two years, I have realized that the most critical user for Monday.com’s success is the leader, followed by the assignees. After all, without the former, the latter won’t succeed within Monday.com’s ecosystem. Thus, I will take a deep dive into the first type of user. After using this software for years, I can identify a couple of pain points/opportunities:

• The users take time to create the habit to update/access Monday.com recurrently
• The PMs and the assignees have a less-than-optimal onboarding/educating process since the current process is the same for users that use Monday.com differently
• Users under-utilize the wide array of resources and features that Monday.com offers

I am confident that the issue with the highest opportunity to improve is the third point. This is because there is a significant engineering effort that is already devoted to building these new features, but the ROI for Monday.com will only be realized if these new features drive customer engagement.

Thinking about Monday.com’s customer journey, a PM, for example, goes through the onboarding process, learns the simple and crucial features about Monday.com through a 30-second tutorial, and starts using the software. This means that this PM would know how to create a board, groups, pulses, and invite people, but that’s it. The problem is that this user won’t know what new tools should be learned next as there is no clear path towards learning more advanced features. This is such a problem because customers who become more acquainted with the platform are inherently stickier, and the hardest part in making this work was already done — after all the features are built.

The solution? A personalized progress bar.

The goal of the personalized progress bar is two-fold. First, it would intuitively explain to the user what is the next logical feature to learn given what he/she is already familiar with. For example, if someone already knows how to create a board and a group, the next thing to learn is how to make a pulse. As a result, whenever the user clicks on this bar, it will show “how to create a pulse” tutorial. Second, this feature will go beyond a standard onboarding progress bar (like LinkedIn’s, which is the same for every user). Monday.com’s already existing internal artificial intelligence tool, “Big Brain”, which tracks and analyzes all the users’ interactions with the product, will allow the progress bar to be personalized for everyone.

Consequently, instead of having the same standard ten steps to learn new features about Monday.com, once the user reaches a certain level of competency (“completed the critical lessons”, i.e. five steps), this person will receive personalized lessons. For the PMs, for example, if this user uses Slack, he/she will be prompted to integrate Monday.com with Slack. Conversely, if this person uses Google Drive, integrating with that could be the next lesson.

As a result, a personalized progress bar will be an intuitive, helpful resource that leaders will be able to rely on whenever they are ready to learn more about Monday.com. The impact is that now users will not only become more engaged and experienced with Monday.com, but they will also become more productive, rely less on Monday’s customer support (which is already overwhelmed), and learn only the things that matter to them, versus taking long webinars and learning about things they might never use.

A key tailwind to highlight in building this feature is that it will leverage existing resources such as the Big Brain and already existing features and tutorials — meaning that the grunt work of building the more sophisticated features and designing an internal intelligent tool is already done.

That being said, this personalized progress bar will require significant engineering & design power. Additionally, there could be potential issues regarding users not completing the progress bar or feeling overwhelmed by it. Lastly, there should be a different bar for the different users, (since leaders, assignees and passive users have different priority lessons), which will require even further resources to be allocated. The next steps would be to value the trade-off of the above considerations and the expected return of this feature prior to creating it.

Please feel free to reach out to me if you would want to learn more about my experience with Monday.com!