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

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

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

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

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

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

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