Daniel Lereya
Daniel Lereya, the Chief Product and Technology Officer at monday.com, shares how he and his team realized they were being outpaced by competitors and how that realization completely transformed how they operate and allowed them to build a global powerhouse, doing over $1 billion in ARR, with 245,000 customers worldwide.
Engineering Skills
Scaling feature velocity requires abstracting common capabilities into a shared infrastructure so developers only focus on unique logic.
"We actually stopped for the first time and say, 'What is the column like?' And we also organized all the product architecture around it... we defined what is it, and then create an infrastructure for..."
Critical infrastructure projects (like MondayDB) require dedicated teams focused on 100X scale rather than incremental feature work.
"We need few of our most talented people that are now not going to contribute features anymore. We are putting them on a separate place, and let's think and solve this problem while thinking about 100X..."
Growth Skills
Requiring payment early can act as a filter to ensure you are only listening to feedback from users who derive real value.
"We, for instance, didn't want to have a free trial. And part of it is that we really wanted to hear feedback about our product only from people that the product means something to them. The best proxy..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Radical transparency creates a sense of ownership and allows the entire organization to help solve high-level business challenges.
"We really have an approach of very radical transparency about everything... Instead of demoralizing people, I think that this is something that gives them a sense of deep partnership. We really want e..."
Leadership Skills
Scaling as a leader requires abandoning the very skills (like attention to every detail) that made you successful at smaller scales.
"Don't be afraid again to let go of things that you think are superpowers... Many times your superpowers that brought you to this point and made you successful, many times you think that if you let it..."
Product Management Skills
Ambitious goals force teams to abandon incremental thinking and invent entirely new workflows or architectures.
"Put ambitious goals, it'll make you think differently. And, we really love now to do it even when we don't know it's possible and it actually works for us time after time."
Goal setting should focus on the intended impact and the specific metric that proves the needle has moved, rather than the solution itself.
"PM in Monday, first and foremost, is responsible for creating the shared understanding on what would be impactful for our customers... and second, how we will know that we moved the needle."
View competitor progress as a 'gift' that proves what is possible, using it to benchmark and set more ambitious internal goals.
"Use your competition, know it, and take it, and set ambitious goals, and believe in yourself, and you can do amazing things."
Deeply understanding the problem space reduces friction in solution discussions because the criteria for success are already aligned.
"PMs and the teams, many times, spending a lot of time at the problem area, before they think about the solution. The solution is not the case anymore. There are so many different solutions."
Setting hard time-boxes (traps) forces teams to prioritize the core value and prevents 'death by a thousand cuts' from over-engineering.
"I really love using the deadline trap and it makes you focused... It removes all the theoretical discussions that people have and things like that."
Effective planning starts with a clear vision of the future state and reverse-engineers the steps to get there.
"How do I imagine the company and the product is going to be different and better for our customers in a quarter from now? And from that, walk it backwards."