Daniel Lereya: How a 30-column rival reset monday's ambition

When a competitor launched 30 column types while monday.com had six, they treated it as proof of what was possible, set a seemingly impossible goal (25 columns in a month), rethought their architecture, and hit 30 columns in ~6 weeks—then reused this pattern for dashboards, automations, and more.

PMs at monday.com must first define the problem, target audience, and how they’ll know they’ve moved the needle (metrics, behaviors); only then do they explore solutions, which might be better onboarding, distribution, or packaging instead of new features.

monday.com historically exposed real-time dashboards of signups, churn, ARR, and more to everyone (even interview candidates), turning every employee into a watcher of key metrics and a contributor to identifying issues—sustained even post-IPO via internal apps and 10b5 plans.

Instead of letting scope expand, teams commit to shipping by a fixed date (e.g., “by next earnings call”) and cut scope to the core value; they prefer early feedback like “this is premature” to overbuilt v1s that took too long and still missed the mark.

Daniel constantly asks, “How will the product be meaningfully different for customers in 3–12 months?” If the answer is just tweaks and enhancements, it’s a signal of lack of focus and ambition, prompting bigger, more pivotal bets.