Daniel Lereya

Radical Transparency in Management

Daniel Lereya: … 8:00 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.

Introducing the Guest

Lenny Rachitsky: 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?

Competitor’s Stunning Blow

Daniel Lereya: 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.

The Gift from a Competitor

Lenny Rachitsky: You basically realized that 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.

Daniel Lereya: 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.

Scaling Challenges and Growth Bottlenecks

Lenny Rachitsky: Today, my guest is Daniel Lereya. 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’s 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’re today aren’t the skills that are going to take you to the next level. Why it’s so important to orient all your teams around impact and so much more.

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Daniel, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Daniel Lereya: Thank you so much for having me.

Hackathons: From Four Months to One Day

Lenny Rachitsky: We’re going to get into the story of Monday. We’re going to talk about your journey over the last eight years, building and scaling this company, and all the things you’ve learned along the way. But I want to start with a very specific 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, and that lesson, and what you took away from that?

Daniel Lereya: Yeah. Well, you take me a while back. I think it was when we were relatively a small team. I think we were something around 30 people. And, 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 a weekly update. We would share everything that we did with the company and it was always super long and super… We had 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, coming to the office and just looking on one of our competitors, and at Monday we have one of the main things that we have in the product is our boards. It’s the heart and soul of the product. And, 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, 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 took us four months to develop together with defining the product and everything. And, this morning, we actually saw that one of our main competitors back then has actually launched 30 new columns.

Focusing on Impact

Lenny Rachitsky: 30?

Daniel Lereya: Yeah. And, we said, “Okay…” At first, we didn’t really know what to do. And, we thought about it and I remember that we said, “Okay, we’re going to take even some time out of the office. So back then, Roy and Eran, which are the founders, and also together with me and Tal, which was one of the main tech leads in Monday for a long time, and few others, we went outside the office and we said, “Listen, we need to do things differently. Something doesn’t make sense.” And, I remember back then that for me this realization of, understanding that we’re doing so much, but suddenly, some of our competitors did something that we can only imagine, and actually transform the product, because it’s a different platform, if you think about it. It was really hard. Personally, first of all, admitting that although you worked like crazy, you didn’t do something that really transformed the product.

Because, I remember back then, when we did a conversation, we said, “Okay. We’re doing so much. What is the most meaningful thing that we did over the last three months?” And suddenly, the answer was, “There’s so many things.” But it wasn’t something specific. And after acknowledging that, it’s a very hard thing personally, especially when you walk so hard and you put your entire heart in what you do, we said, “Okay. Now, we need to treat it differently. We received a gift from our competitors, they showed us that it’s possible. Now, we need to think how. And in order to do that, we need to think differently.” Because we said, “Okay. If we’re going to add 25 more, multiply it by four months, we’re a small team, we are lost. Okay, we can’t make it.” So we said, “Okay, we need to take upon ourselves an ambitious goal, like 25 columns in one month.” And this is the goal that we took upon ourselves.

And, I think that the fact that our competitors did it, it didn’t give us the excuse of saying, “It’s not possible.” So in a way, it was the biggest favor that we can ask for. And, long story short, month and a half afterwards, we had 30 columns in Monday. And, we did it by thinking totally different. And by the way, afterwards, we did it over and over again. So if you think about Monday, it’s basically a platform for work and you have different building blocks, columns is one of them, but we did the same deal exactly with dashboards and widgets, and then with automations, and so on. So I think this was so transformative, because, A, we understood that you need to constantly think, especially at these phases, how would you transform completely the product in the next three months?

And if you can’t answer that and you say, “Listen, I’m doing so much.” But you can’t point this exact thing, you have a focus problem in my eyes. And second is that 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. And, let’s think about it. The team that was there suddenly became invincible, because it’s such an amazing, amazing experience that you have a goal that you don’t know how you’re going to do it and you succeed, and then it makes you feel that everything is possible.

Signs of Lacking Impact Focus

Lenny Rachitsky: There’s so much here. And, I have so many threads I want to follow on. One is just, there’s this metaphor of the four-minute mile, where no one thought it was possible, and then someone did it, and then everyone started beating that record. So I like that this is highlighting, there’s just so much power in seeing somebody else accomplish something you thought was impossible, and that unlocks the way you think. And, I love that you saw it as a gift. A lot of companies do this, they’re in this place and they’re like, “No way.” It’s like when the iPhone launch like, “No one needs that. There’s no keyboard.” And a lot of people deny that it’s a thing they should be paying attention to. I love that you saw it as like, “Okay, we need to move. Things have changed. We’re not doing things. We’re not going to be competitive long-term.”

Daniel Lereya: I think it’s also very much about focus. And I think that it’s very hard to get to very good execution, but it doesn’t guarantee that you are working in the right way. And many times, in my eyes, simple questions can provide the most and the deepest insights about your work. And I think that, for us, the fact that we managed to leverage it, as you said, and see it as a gift is one of the most important things. Use your competition, know it, use it to your advantage, and take it, and set ambitious goals, and believe in yourself, and you can do amazing things.

The Core Mindset of Impact-Driven Work

Lenny Rachitsky: Another, I think, piece a lot of people are probably resonating with here is starting a company that’s small, growing, things are going great, and then all of a sudden, things start to slow down. And, in some cases, you don’t realize that they’ve slowed down. And, that’s what happened in your case. Sounds like in a lot of cases, the founder’s like, “What the hell’s going on? Why is it taking three or four weeks to ship one of…” Whatever you call them. And so, is there anything… By the way, what was the scale of the company at this point?

Working Backwards from Your Vision

Daniel Lereya: It’s a good question. If I’m not mistaken, it was around 2018 back then, it’s safe to assume 150, 200 people in the company. But, we were relatively small.

Lenny Rachitsky: I recently had Ryan Singer on the podcast who created the Shape Up method from Basecamp, and that’s his piece of advice too is around 50 to 100 people things start to really change, and slow down, and that’s where a lot of companies start to go sideways. So that resonates. That’s really interesting. And by the way, these columns you’re describing, just to make it clear, this is a new data, new format of column, it’s a new data format that you’re building. It’s not like, just add another column to some database.

Scaling from $4M to$1B ARR

Daniel Lereya: Yeah. So actually, exactly. It’s a new column, but it’s a whole product around it. If you think about it, for instance, you have a column that dates, so it’s pretty straightforward, but you can also have formula column, which is more complicated and has more complex product around it. I think, one of the best benefits for us as platform is that suddenly when we set the goal of adding so many different columns, we actually stopped for the first time and say, “What is the column like?” And we also organized all the product architecture around it. And, these things sounds really trivial in retrospect, but we really define, “Okay, each column need to have specific capabilities. It should be able to export it to Excel. It should be able to be filtered and sorted.” And so many different other things. But basically, we defined what is it, and then create an infrastructure for all these shared things, making the work of adding a new column just thinking about the specific product that you want to provide with each one of these columns.

And the story about it is actually even more interesting. The way we actually achieved it is that we said, “Okay. In two weeks, we’re going to have a hackathon, in which, each one of our developers is going to take one column and implement it in one day.” And, if you think about it, from four months to one day, it’s mind-blowing. And, back then, I remember, people said, “How can it be?” But then, I told you about build an infrastructure, he sent it to me. I did a column at night, just to see how it works. And, on the day that we did the columns, everyone knew what they’re going to do, what they’re trying to solve, and we just did it. And, two weeks afterwards it was in production, which was amazing.

Lenny Rachitsky: What we want to do here is help people avoid these moments where they’re almost too late and realizing that things have slowed down. So I think really another important lesson here is the power of ambition and thinking crazily big. A lot of people think that when you ask your team when need to build 25 columns in a month or whatever it was, people would be burned out or feeling super depressed. But really, people get excited. There’s all this opportunity to think really differently. It reminds me at our Airbnb, Brian Chesky was very famous for you give him a goal, “Here’s our goal for the year.” And he’s like, “What it would take to 10X this goal?” Just like, “What would it take to do that?” And he’s always pushing you to think a lot bigger, because your first reaction’s like, “No, no, no. Leave us alone?” But then, you realize, if you really think big, it changes everything about how you approach the problem as you described, where instead of… Like in a day. What would it take to build this in a day?

A Culture of Radical Transparency

Daniel Lereya: Yeah. And I think, by the way, this is something which is really important about setting ambitious goals. If you set a different goal, “I want to reduce it from four months to three months.” So many times, this translates in people’s heads to, “I want you to work harder. I want you to work longer hours.” And, this is not a message here. It’s about working smarter. And I think that many times when we talk about speed of execution, there’s fake speed, which means, trying to do the same work by skipping stages or not doing the high quality that you want, but there’s the real speed, and speed of organizations, and speed of execution. Many times, it’s about doing things right. It’s about understanding, A, what is going to move the needle? And work only on that. Not working in a lot of things that you tend to invent when you’re trying to solve a problem.

And B, is about, as you said, thinking differently. And I think that for the goals, this is why we really wanted the goal that you really understand from the first minute that if you work the same way, you cannot achieve it, even if you sleep in the office. So you need to change dramatically how you think. And, the advanced phase of it is that today we’re doing it on things that we didn’t see others doing. And, we have the confidence, because we have the experience of trusting ourselves that this is an exercise for us that will make us actually think about different solutions.

Building Cohesion Through Shared Data

Lenny Rachitsky: I know another element of this that is really important to you that you have shifted the way you all operate is focusing on impact. There was a lot of focus on just building a lot of stuff and you realize there’s a lot of power in thinking from perspective of how do we have the most impact? Talk about that.

Bold Shift to a Multi-Product Company

Daniel Lereya: This is the core and the main thing that we also measure our teams, and this is how I see a great PM. So a great PM basically for me is someone that is relentless until he gets this impact, and until he validates that this impact is in place. And, for us, it really changed how we think about things. It really changed how we set goals for our teams. So in many ways PM in Monday, first and foremost, is responsible for creating the shared understanding on what would be impactful for our customers. Okay? It’s not about the solution and what we are going to build. It’s about, what’s the problem, what’s the opportunity. And second, how we will know that we moved the needle. And without these two things, you can build so many different things, and it’s songs for the door. Such huge part of what I build was never used by users the way I fought it was going to use.

So I think that, for me, having this understanding of what we want to change for our customers and also how we know we did it is a huge, huge part of the PM. And, for us, it means that we pay a lot of time in setting goals, in making sure that we really understand both, again, the opportunity, but not only that, but how we’ll see and we’ll know for sure that we move the needle. In many ways, it changes the conversation. So 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. And, once you do that and you have these goals, suddenly, it reduces also a lot of the discussions that you have about the different solutions, because everyone knows that everything is going to be tested in real life. So they make everyone treat it differently.

And also, in that way, it makes you think much more holistically, which I also think is something that is very special at Monday, is that, we give our teams real life goals as much as we can. And then, in some cases, doing the biggest impact is not developing another feature. It’s about making the current value more accessible. It’s about connecting better the go-to market motion that you have. It’s about understanding how your customers are going to learn what you built and use it. And, this realization is something that we try very hard to stay on it. And, it’s hard, because people tend to build things. We all love to build things. And, when you start to build things, you get excited, and suddenly, you lose track of why you are doing it, and why do you need to change.

And, I think that in that sense, this is the most important part about this point of impact. And, this is also how we measure ourselves, so we can work extremely hard. It doesn’t mean that we’re successful, it doesn’t mean that we’re doing our work right. And, it’s not only for the PMs, it’s for the entire team. So the entire team succeeds or fail together, based on the value that we bring to our customers. And we have a lot of different ways in order to make sure that we stay honest to this principle.

Lenny Rachitsky: 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 am I doing wrong? What am I missing?” Maybe. What’s a sign that you’re not oriented around impact?

Shifts in the Competitive Landscape

Daniel Lereya: I think, the most obvious sign for me is that you are building something without the aim or without the initial aim of what it changed for your users and how you are going to measure it. So in my eyes, it’s many times the fact that you don’t have a goal or the goal is like… Many times, 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 this.” No, it’s not enough. What is it going to change for users and how you are 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 big enough target audience, for instance, in order to get to your goals. You need to make sure that what you build actually going to touch all of these people.

And I can share just a recent example. And, these things sound trivial and maybe an example would help resonate with that, because I know many people are thinking like that. And, we have a very interesting offering that we just introduced with AI, it’s called AI Blocks. Okay? And basically, it means that with no-code, you can integrate blocks which contain AI actions within your existing workflows. And, 70% of Monday’s customers are non-tech. And for them, this makes AI accessible for them and has a huge, huge value. And we started building these blocks and we listed to customers and we measured discoverability, and adoption, and retention, and so on. And, something that we do in order to stay connected to the numbers. So each team at Monday has, what we call, the daily numbers update. So think about it like a message that the team is building with all the numbers-

How to Use Customer Feedback Correctly

Daniel Lereya: … a message that the team is building with all the numbers that they care about, because we really want people to live these numbers. So, for AI, for instance, for the AI blocks, it was the AI actions. So we had the AI actions, how many accounts are we using these AI actions, and so on, and so on. And we got amazing responses from our customers. We see great success of them getting value from the AI actions. We use a Slack channel in which one of our internal systems, [inaudible 00:24:36], is sending us this messages every day, and then we have conversations about it, okay? And one day, we saw, we noticed that the amount of accounts that are using AI is super, super low comparing to the entire population that we have. And we have 250,000 paying companies that use Monday, and we saw only few thousands there. And until this point, everyone in a very good feeling that we are making an amazing product, we get really good feedback, we are building great value, we’re adding value, but we sat down and say, “Okay, why it’s only this and this?” Then someone say, “Yeah, since AI is new, we need to do change of the terms of service for customers before we are opening it to them,” and this is planned in the next quarter, or something like that. And said, “What? No, we need to do it now. We need to now open it for everyone because this is actually what would be the most impactful thing to do.”

And then the team went and sat with legal, and sent with everyone. And with two weeks time, it was open to 98% of Monday customers. And I think, in that sense, this is a very good example because we could have continued building value, and it’s great, but the impact wouldn’t be the impact that we were aiming for, and this is a very important point. I think, in that sense, staying really connected to your teams… to your numbers. Sorry, this is something that I really feel strongly about. I feel that you need to get your numbers and push. You need to live by them. For me, it’s so exciting to see a conversation that says, “Oh, wow, today, there were a lot of new accounts that are using what I’m building. Let’s see why it happens.” And this kind of things that I see the conversation about, it’s amazing.

And also, in this case, seeing the AI actions go, it’s like you want to dive it and push it forward. And in many ways, they feel that this is a very good example on where you can actually build a lot of value. You can walk really fast, you can deliver a lot of features, but the problem lays in other place in order to get the impact that you want.

Replacing Endless Polishing With Timeboxing

Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah. There’s so much joy in watching your number go up. So, just to close the loop here, to help people see if they’re impact-driven, working from a perspective of how do we drive the most impact, one simple way of thinking about it is you’re working backwards from a goal that is going to drive business growth and revenue, basically, in the end. If you’re working backwards from a number, and a metric, and a goal, and then thinking through what are the levers that will most move this metric, that’s a sign you’re thinking by impact, versus, “Let’s just keep shipping features that the sales team wants.”

Advice to My Future Self

Daniel Lereya: Yeah. And I think another thing for me, it’s an exercise that I really encourage everyone to do. For me, it was after the columns hackathon and everything that we talked about, I said, “Okay, each quarter…” and this is when we were much smaller, but it can be each month, it can be each two weeks, but 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.

But if you are just saying, “We’ll have better security. We’ll have better performance. We’ll have less bugs. We’ll have more enhancements to,” I don’t know, “this and this feature,” it’s not enough. You need to constantly build value, which is pivotal to your customers. And if you don’t do it and if it’s hard for you to answer about this question, it’s a very good sign that you are not impact-driven. And I love to do it also with teams and individuals like, “What are the things that you are most proud of that you did in the last three months?” And if it takes you a lot of time to think, you are not very focused and you are definitely not maximizing the impact that you want due to that, in my eyes.

From Pitching to Being Pitched

Lenny Rachitsky: I like that exercise as a, versus waiting for your competitors to do something and then realizing we’re way behind, it’s forcing yourself every quarter to think about this. So do you do this as you have a meeting or something on your calendar, or how do you actually operationalize this?

Daniel Lereya: Today, we are under the builders organization, which is the engineering, product management, product design. We are 700 people. So, we have a lot of different ways and methodologies to do it in different levels, but I’ll give you an example from the company level and from the team level maybe, because these are the most interesting ones. So, we just recently had our yearly kickoff. Each and every year, we do a yearly kickoff for our company, and one of the most exciting sessions, obviously, is what we are going to do with our product as a product company. And I really like to have a slide in which I write and I just share it, ” When I’m going to stand here in a year from now, what is going to be different for our customers?” And this is on the company level.

And I have one slide, and it talks about our offering and it talks about the value that they are getting in a way that, next year, I want to… each year to start my presentation with the slide from last year and see where we are. And in this level, it can be something like, “Our CRM continues with a very strong momentum and becomes a product suite when we give much more robust value to our customers.” This can be an example with an additional product of CRM marketing, I would just say.

But on a team level, what we did, and maybe I’ll take an example from the early days, we really love to do, each and every two weeks, I told you we would write an update for the entire company about what we did, and the way we did it is that each and every one of our team members actually write out his highlights and then we would share it with the company. And this exercise really made us sit every two weeks and think on individual level, but also on a team level. And every one of our team members used to read these updates and say, “Dan, we had a good two weeks,” or, “We had a bad two weeks,” “We did a lot of impact,” or, “We did not enough impact.” So I really encourage to create these points in time where you sit down and you force yourself to understand whether what you did is what you thought you are going to achieve or not.

Greater Vulnerability, Greater Authenticity

Lenny Rachitsky: That’s great. I really like the slide idea. It’s basically there’s all this power and just working backwards from something in the future, however you come up with it. So, it’s just like, in a year, we’re going to have… There’s just working backwards from a goal, working backwards from a big vision. I think those are such good exercises. Obviously, Amazon’s famous Working Backwards. There’s a whole book called Working Backwards from their PR approach. Okay, I want to go in a slightly different direction. I want to zoom out a little bit. So you’ve been at this for eight years, building Monday. You said there is 250,000 customers at this point. What’s the revenue scale? Give people a couple stats to give them a sense of just how large this company has gotten.

Daniel Lereya: We recently announced that we cost the 1 billion in ARR, and we are serving, as I said, 250,000 customers across the globe from virtually any industry that you can think about, more than 200 different business verticals. It could be both tech and non-tech-savvy customers. The vast majority of our customers are non-tech, from a customer that is building airplanes and cruise ships, all the way to real estate, construction, finance, tech, and everything you can basically think of. Just for reference, in a single [inaudible 00:33:06], when I joined Monday eight and a half years ago, back then, we were called the Pulse. We had around 4 million in ARR, and we scaled from there to 1 billion. And from around 30, 40 people in the company to 2,500 right now.

Turning Crises into Opportunities

Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. When you talk about the product you’re building, to a lot of people, it’s like, “Oh, it’s like project management software, all this column. What’s the big deal?” But I had Drew Houston on the podcast, and he made this really interesting point when he talks to people working at SpaceX, who are launching rockets to Mars, and he talked about people building ships. If you really boil down what are they doing day-to-day, they’re sitting in tools like Monday, putting together tasks, and doing to-dos, and sharing documents. This is what the world runs on. So it’s important to have that perspective. With that, putting that aside for a second, I think very few people have seen what you’ve seen, seeing a company scale this way. Also, the transformation you just shared of just almost shipping too much and being slow to like, “Okay, let’s rework things to shipping 25 columns in a month,” and all these things. Very few people have seen this, so there’s a lot to learn from this journey that you’ve been on. So I have a bunch of questions in a bunch of different ways of approaching some of your biggest lessons from this journey. The first is, let me just ask you this question, what would you say is the most counterintuitive thing you’ve learned about building product and leading teams through this journey of building Monday?

Thinking at a 100X Scale

Daniel Lereya: Maybe, first of all, it’s about something that we really care about, which is transparency. Let me tell you a story. I sat down for dinner at my family, and many different members of my family are entrepreneurs, so working as an executive in tech companies and so on. And back in the days, we as Monday, before we went public, we actually shared every bit of information with our employees. You would get into our office and you would see a dashboard with how many paying accounts do you have, how many people have churned today, how many signups do we have, and so many different things. Even if you came for an interview, you would see these numbers.

And I remember sitting in this dinner and everyone would tell me, “Listen, you are making a mistake. How can you do it when things go south? You’ll demoralize the team and people will get upset about it.” And I think this is, for me, one of the most important things. When you hire and you have such a talented team, we want to share with them everything, and the reason for that is that, “Dan, you are working on every challenge together.” And instead of demoralizing people, I think that, for the right people and the people that are working at Monday, this is something that gives them a sense of deep partnership. And as a leader, there were many situations in my professional life that I knew some bit of information and I felt all the way on my shoulders, and I love to call it the dark side of the moon. You’re there alone, right? You are coming to the office. There’s nothing more demoralizing or depressing as a leader that you feel awful because something that you know and you’re coming to the office and everything is great and everyone are happy.

And I think, in Monday, we really wanted to do it differently and we really have an approach of very radical transparency about everything, and this actually makes everyone part of what we are doing. And in a way, we like to say, “We really want everyone’s brains in the challenge and not just one centralized brain and a lot of working hands.” And I can share examples when, for instance, suddenly, people would come up to the office. We have dashboards, of course, everywhere in the office. Each team has its own dashboards. We have our company dashboards for metrics and so on. And I remember cases in which someone said, “Listen, what happened to the conversion?” And think how powerful it is when you have everyone at the company looking at these things. And many of the things that we discovered, many of the things that we saw as challenges and problems is things that people saw due to this transparency.

So I think that maybe the counterintuitive part is that don’t be afraid to share the information. It’s exactly the other way around. And I can probably share that, even today as a public company, we really share everything that we can. And also, if you are a product manager at Monday, you are signing a 10b5 program for selling your stocks, meaning that we found a way to make everyone still see the data because we think this is the most important part. And I think this is one thing that I really believe in and really changed how we work, and also how people are feeling about being partners in building Monday and not just working at the company.

Turning Crises into Strategic Advantages

Lenny Rachitsky: Is that thing they sign that’s just like auto sell stocks? So they’re not-

Daniel Lereya: Exactly, yeah.

Lightning Round Q&A

Lenny Rachitsky: … selling based on information, based on announcements that’s coming. Okay, got it. So every PM basically has to automatically, “Can’t decide, I’m going to sell my stock tomorrow because this number is tanking.”

Daniel Lereya: Yeah. So we want to give people a choice. But usually, we really feel that, in most cases, you really need to know this information in order to do your work.

Lenny Rachitsky: That’s so interesting. And I think people even prefer just dollar cost average sell. It’s like makes life easier, not having to try to time all these things.

Daniel Lereya: I definitely think so, yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: That’s really interesting. And that’s just product managers, or how far does that all go?

Daniel Lereya: No. So, basically, when we became public, I remember still one of the conversations that we had with the bankers and the lawyers about, “Listen, guys, things would need to change. You cannot have a dashboard. We follow your financials at the entrance of the building. 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 shared brains mode. So, we tried to think about ways in order to do it.

So, now, if I’ll fast-forward, 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 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, okay? 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 it’s a lot of logistics to do so many plans, 10b5 plans, but I think it’s worth it, yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: This is so interesting. A lot of companies talk about transparency, and you guys are… I think radical transparency is a good way to describe this because I’ve never heard of a company doing this where you have to sign this-

Daniel Lereya: They didn’t hear about it as well, apparently. And yeah, it took time to get to these solutions.

Lenny Rachitsky: That’s so funny. So, for people that are listening to this, they’re like, “Hey, maybe we should explore this.” What’s one thing you’d suggest that they could do to start moving down this road? And the benefit, again, is you… I guess maybe, again, remind people of the benefits of doing this, because it sounds like a lot of work and risk.

Daniel Lereya: So I think that, as a young startup, it’s actually not such a hard work. When we were very small back in the days, we had the daily numbers concept that we now have for the teams, we had the daily numbers for the company, how much paying accounts, how many upgraded, downgrade, and so on daily, and you saw people reacting to it on a daily basis. So this is something that you can do in virtually one hour, and it changes how people see their role within the company, focus everyone to the company’s KPIs because everyone understand what you care about, and so on. So this is one thing that you can do extremely fast, and I don’t see any disadvantage, aside from the fact that people are afraid. Many time, you are afraid. And I can share, it’s so much… It’s even a bigger lift that you don’t need to think, “Can I share it? Can I don’t share it?” You just let it go and everything would be okay. And I can share from my experience that we shared everything.

And the second thing which is really practical, it’s the office dashboards. We really believe in it. So, you buy a TV, you put it on the wall, you start a conversation due to it, “What do we want to show on this TV?” And when we were a smaller startup and we sat all in one office space, we had our company goals dashboard, and it also had… We programmed it to have sounds on meaningful events. So, when you had, for instance, new paying account, you had the almost Simpson saying the same with the, “$1 million, I’ll become a millionaire,” or something like that. For new signup, you add the tick, and so on. So, suddenly, everyone are living it. It becomes part of the cadence of the company. So these are just two ideas to make it super easy, and the change happens immediately.

Lenny Rachitsky: I love how that connects back to the whole point about impact. People all lining around here is what we’re trying to drive. If the Simpson sound is going off, that’s a sign that this matters, and it’s something we should be driving up.

Daniel Lereya: And it creates such a partnership. I remember reaching to the first time where we had $1 million collection in one month, breaking the record of new paying accounts for one day, everyone are living. But in many companies, only the management or the founders are feeling. And I think that, in that sense, you already feel that you have a great power because everyone around is the same things, and it makes conversations different because everyone understands what matters to you at that point.

Lenny Rachitsky: This is awesome, really cool counterintuitive lesson. I feel like a whole podcast could be done on how to do this effectively. I want to move on, but I guess if people want to start implementing this at the company, let’s just say they should go talk to you, and you could give them a bunch of advice.

Daniel Lereya: I would love to.

Lenny Rachitsky:

Christina Cacioppo: Great to be here. Big fan of the podcast and the newsletter.

Lenny Rachitsky: Vanta is a longtime sponsor of the show. But for some of our newer listeners, what does Vanta do and who is it for?

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Lenny Rachitsky: That is awesome. I know from experience that these things take a lot of time and a lot of resources, and nobody wants to spend time doing this.

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Christina Cacioppo: Thank you.

Lenny Rachitsky: Any other big counterintuitive lessons from the journey that you think would be fun to share?

Daniel Lereya: One thing I really love about what we do in Monday is that we really love to take risks, not for the sake of it, but we are not afraid to do bold moves. And many times, when you want to do bold moves, you have a lot of concerns, especially when you start to be successful, because you are afraid that you are going to break everything that you built until now. And for me, one of the most pivotal moments in the company life is when we decided that, back in the days, as you said, we were a platform, but we had a go-to market of project management tool and we said, “Listen, people are doing so many different things on top of Monday. They are building a CRM of Monday and they are building a software for managing their dev cycles, and they are building so many different things,” and we took a strategic decision to become a multi-product company which is built on top of this platform. And we actually did something which is really counterintuitive.

The first thought that comes to mind, at least for me, is, “Why maybe not just launch a new product, do it relatively on the side, gradually understand if it’s successful? And if it would be successful, double click on it.” But we actually did it in a very different way. We actually announced five different new products simultaneously on the same time, and we had so many… I can’t stress enough how hard it is to think about it. Because I remember when we talked about and doing it, people say, “What? But we are going to confuse our current users and it’s going to have conversion. And how are we going to do the marketing now when we have so many different go-to markets? And the sales, they don’t know how to navigate people to different… And what about pricing?” So many different concerns, but we decided to do it because we really want to create a pivotal leap.

And I think that, in that sense, fast-forward to this day, part of these products were really successful. For instance, Monday sale CRM is going faster than Monday back in the days, when it’s amazing to see it, and-

In the days when it’s amazing to see it. And some of them we understood that they don’t need to be separate products and we collapse them back to the main product. But the point is, is that we managed to learn and to change both internally at the company, how the perception of everyone around what we are building, but also externally.

This move changed dramatically the competitive landscape that we live in. And, I think there was a lot of friction. Many people at the company were having a lot of friction with it. It was really, really hard.

But looking back it’s such, I’m so happy with this move and the fact that we did it like that because just imagine what would happen if we would choose one of them and it wasn’t the successful products. And our conclusion can be that multi product won’t work for us.

We really managed to transform the company in a very short amount of time and also to create new reality. And I think that people need to remember that and I’m constantly reminding it to myself. And I think this is something that we are constantly working with each other in order to make sure that we remember that not taking bold risks, not making bold moves, it’s a risk for itself. Okay?

And many times people want the inertia, people want just the incremental value. But if you want to do leaps many times you need to let go of things that were successful for you in the past. And this is very counterintuitive and we did a lot of mental models to help us cope with it.

So I remember that when we were small and we had for instance 20,000 paying customers, so we said, “Listen, but most of Monday’s customers are not customers of Monday, yet. So we need to think about them, as well.”

And this is something that really helps you because many times you need to do things that affect the current success that you have. But I think this is another very, very important thing that I am constantly reminding to myself.

Lenny Rachitsky: There’s kind of this other recurring theme that I’m noticing of just thinking big and taking leaps. And I love this point you made of not doing that is actually a big risk. Not taking a risk is a big risk. That’s a really powerful point.

And it’s innately scary to do something risky. And so, I love the push here of just take more risks because it’s so easy. And this comes back again to the beginning of the conversation where we’re just building things the way they’ve always been built. And looking back and what have we even done? What have we done over this year of hard work and tons of features?

I think a lot of companies get in that place where they’re just like, “What are we?” Like in our B and B, I had this exact, Brian is constant like, “What are we even shipping all these billions of experiments that are moving the numbers? What are we even doing? I don’t know anything that we ship that’s really exciting.”

And so, I think this is a really good reminder and push to just think bigger and you need to take big leaps. So, love that. Is there any other big counterintuitive lessons before we move in a different direction?

Daniel Lereya: I really believe that many time, like spending more time on working on something will not yield to better results or to better products. And I think that many times we, as people, that are building products for others get to a point where the feedback that we want to get in the bottom of our heart is like, ” Wow, what an amazing product you have built.”

And I think this is a very bad feedback to get for initial things that you are doing. Because it means that, I feel that in many ways, the point in which you make real people use your product is really scary. Because you suddenly put your work out there and then in order to actually, and you are afraid that they will say, “Listen, it’s a lousy product, it’s not a good product.” But actually we really encourage people to get really fast production, to put traps for themselves that is called by time and not by effort.

And, many times I saw that more time creates more questions. It creates more complications. It creates more assumptions that we put for ourselves in thinking what our users need. And we invent things.

And we do it all from good reasons. We want people to like what we build, we want them to get value. But, for me, this is a very important point that many times using, like the setting traps mechanism of saying, “Listen, we have three weeks, let’s think about it.”

And [inaudible 00:52:51] by time, it makes you extremely focused. And this is very important because we really want to get feedback from customers that say, “Yeah, listen, this is on the direction. I’m still missing this and this and this. And also we really love the fact of this is not a good product.”

And I can give you a recent example. Even when now we work with big customers and, of course, there are different ways to implement what I said than you are a small startup. But we are building a new offering of enterprise work management. Think about it like a way of managing projects. It’s a huge, huge scale. Thousands of projects like tens of thousands of employees and so on.

So, I really love using the deadline trap and it makes you focused, it makes you sharper in thinking. And, we just had a recent example with the offering I was telling you about of enterprise work management, managing project at scale. And this is an enterprise product.

So you have all the reasons in the world to say, “No, I can’t release it, yet. I need more time. I need to do more things. They won’t use it. They need this and this and this.”

And I think that we actually released the first alpha version to them. And we got a feedback of, “Listen guys, this is premature. We need more comprehensive value.” But we got exactly the feedback of what, and this is priceless.

And my response to the teams is, “Well done. I think you did an amazing job in releasing it and making sure.” Because many times, being so afraid of releasing it and thinking, “If I just have 1, 2, 3 more weeks, I will build a better product.” I think it’s not true.

Lenny Rachitsky: 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 we don’t hit the three weeks, we just cut scope, essentially. Is that the idea?

Daniel Lereya: I think, yeah, it’s like this is the basic version of it.

Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah.

Daniel Lereya: But now, for us, we really want and we really love doing it as an exercise for ourself. 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 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 core of the value.

And, it’s really funny to see the dynamics of teams when they are planning from the bottom up. So, it starts 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 concerns and issues. And it becomes a sport to say what can go wrong and like being fear- driven. And then you tend to protect yourself and adding more content and more content. And then when you see what happens, it’s actually, it’s going to be shipped in two years.

And then we say, “Okay, no. Okay, we have earnings in two months. What can we ship to this earnings? And let’s put a tab.” And then you suddenly see the conversation changes. First of all, it makes everyone really focused on what’s the core of the value. And it removes all the theoretical discussions that people have and things like that.

And, the results are amazing. And you need to remember when you do it, you need to continue afterwards like according to feedbacks and not let it go just but what you did in the first version. But, in many ways, I really love the fact that the first version get the feedback, which is not everything is perfect because if this is the feedback, it means that we built too much and probably it’s not focused product enough.

And when you build a lot of features, this can be like a death by a thousand cuts because in each corner of the product you add more than you need.

Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, there’s so much here that connects the other conversation we just had. We had Gaurav Misra, he’s the CEO of Captions and he made this point that if people aren’t complaining about your product, you want to see people complaining because that means they care. There’s something there that they care about. If you’re not hearing any complaints, they could care less about what you’re building and that’s a bad sign.

Daniel Lereya: I really loved it. Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: Their company actually goes to the extreme of what you’re describing. Every engineer ships a marketable feature every week. That’s their pace.

Daniel Lereya: I really connected to it. And by the way, about user feedback, I think it’s really nice because many times people associate, like they only measure themselves by user feedback and a specific point. And I think this is also maybe something that is counterintuitive. Not every customer feedback is the feedback that will drive you to the end result of the best product out there.

There are many aspects to it. I can share just one example about us. We, as a, in the beginning of the company, 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 for that is that they are paying because it means they get real value. And you know, in that sense it helped us at the beginning to stay super focused about separating the wheat from the shaft with the customer’s feedback. So I think it’s a super important point and we need to take customer feedback in context.

Lenny Rachitsky: The other really interesting point here that you’re making is this idea of, we had, I think I mentioned this already, Ryan Singer, he’s the creator of this method, Shape Up, which is very centered around appetites over deadlines.

There’s so many, everyone listening to this has probably gone through an exercise where like, “Let’s redo our landing page.” And it’s like, “Yeah, it’ll probably have some impact. Let’s spend some time on this.”

It ends up taking six months. And everyone’s like, “Why did we spend six months redoing this freaking landing page? I would’ve given it three weeks and then moved on.”

And the way to do that is you just commit upfront, “We will spend three weeks on this. We’ll get as much done as we can in three weeks and then we’ll move on.”

People talk about this very hard to actually do so I love that’s how you actually approach some of these bigger features you work on. Do you guys practice Shape Up by any chance or this is just a thing you do?

Daniel Lereya: No, actually, I wasn’t that familiar with it, but I definitely going to check it out. Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, cool. Yeah, it’s a whole method. And I think the episode right before this is actually that episode. Okay. Let me go in a different direction and kind of keep extracting lessons from this journey because that was a really fruitful place to go.

So let me ask you this question. What’s one thing that you wish you’d known before stepping into the role that you’re in today?

Daniel Lereya: This is an interesting question. I think there are many aspects to it and maybe if I’ll take the personal aspects. So I’ve been in charge of the product and technology from since I joined the company. But with that, my role has changed, I think, dozens of times.

I feel I’m very fortunate to work in one company but actually work in dozens of different companies. Think about the scale that we talked about. Each point is a different, it’s actually a different company and a different role and a different challenge.

And I think that something that maybe is counterintuitive personally, for me, was that in many of the phases that we undergrowed with, I felt that what got me to this phase is not necessarily what’s going to make me successful in the next phase.

And if I want to be even more blunt, there will personally times when suddenly I saw how my biggest strength, for instance like, mastering all the details and having everything in my head knowing exactly what’s happening on every corner of what we do. This was probably something that gave a lot of value when we were small.

But, as we got bigger, I think it suddenly created even the damage continuing to do the same thing. And in many ways, it takes time to do this realization. And I think that a good advice that I would love to have is that 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 go you won’t be successful and it’s frightening. But, I really feel that you need to constantly evaluate what your current role is actually, is actually what is the role? And what is needed in order to be successful in it and not continue with the inertia?

And this is something that I wish someone has told me. Yeah. It took me time in many cases, you know? Many cases I did it too late.

Lenny Rachitsky: Is there anything that helped you realize this or get good at this? Is it like coaching? Is it just doing it and surviving and failing and be like, “Oh, I see.”

Daniel Lereya: I think all of the above. I think that one sign for that, for me, was that in many cases I felt I’m doing a very good job. But then people, it can be like, I’ll give you an example. Okay?

For instance, doing a company like Leadership QBRs. Okay, quarterly business reviews. So, when we just started it with it very early, I would actually tell about everything.

And I remember one meeting that I went out of the meeting and I say, “Wow, I really managed to convey everything and explain everything in a very articulated way.”

And one of my colleagues in the core leadership team said, “Well, I didn’t understand anything. What is the bottom line of all of this?” And it was like you suddenly realize that what you thought is good is not necessarily what the other people needs from you at this point.

And after understanding that, I went and ask, “What would be beneficial for you?” He said, “Listen, I want to keep in my head the three most meaningful things that you are currently facing with. I don’t want to hear everything.”

And it’s hard. But, this was the point for me that I realized that I need to change. And I need to change something and the requirements are different.

At the beginning I tried to say, “But, listen, it’s important that you know you are sticking to it.” Right? But we need to let it go sometimes and think from the beginning.

Lenny Rachitsky: There’s this phrase that someone shared on this podcast once where, as you rise in your career, you often go from the person that is pitching leaders on something to the person being pitched. And that’s a really weird place to move from, having to learn how to give great feedback, delegate, let go of things. And I love that this is a good example of that.

Since we’re getting a little vulnerable and open about stuff, I want to try this question. You’ve done a lot of podcasts, you’ve done a lot of interviews, you’ve been all over the place. Is there anything you haven’t shared anywhere else that might be helpful to share here about the journey you’ve been on?

Daniel Lereya: Yeah, so, maybe continuing with the same point. It’s a crazy journey and it’s a crazy personal journey. If you think about it, I remember Roy once said, “If someone would’ve interviewed me to a public company of, like I would say $10 billion in market cap and managing 2,500 employees, I’m not sure that I would interview myself and get myself to the job.”

And, for me, there were a lot of moments and it’s constantly happening. You know, when things are going sideways and things doesn’t work, and you see so many things are breaking down. You can be on the same day super happy and suddenly on the lowest point there is.

And I can show you, no. Many times I’ve asked myself whether I’m the right person to lead it, whether we need someone that is coming with all the experience to this phase. And I remember talked to that day with Ron. He tell me, he told me something, “Listen, first of all, as the one who built it, no one would be able to do it like you.”

And I think it’s an important thing to remember when times are tough. I really believe that if you have the passion, and if you have the will, and if you are willing to do the hard work in order to constantly adjust and evolve and to be vulnerable and also to say about yourself, “I didn’t understand something. Now, I need to learn it and I need to deal things differently.”

It’s a very important point if you want to do this kind of a journey. And it’s hard. And something I can share, I can reassure everyone that are listening to us, if you are feeling it, you are not the only one. Everyone are feeling it from once in a while. Be confident about yourself. Be vulnerable in order to learn and to evolve.

And I really love to do a mental exercise of saying, like we said about the product. So, let’s say I’m Daniel of next six months. How do I want to look back on these six months? And what do I want to say about myself that I learned that I evolved? And this helped you get out from the state of everything is okay, I am good. And it makes you want to learn and want to evolve.

And also staying doing mode. I don’t believe in, I think one thing that really characterized me is that it can be very difficult and very challenging time. But on the next day, I’m already bouncing back with energy. And in order to come and do things and win it.

And there are a lot of things that we, as leaders, needs to do in order to help ourselves to keep this mental state. So, I like to run. I like to do things that are unrelated to work in order to get back to my center.

But then quickly bounce back and to really believe in myself, in the team around me. So this, yeah, this is something maybe very personal, but I am pretty sure I’m not the only one feeling it.

Lenny Rachitsky: I appreciate you sharing that. There’s a post that I did a long time ago with a coach and it was about imposter syndrome. And she made this really powerful point that you are actually an imposter in the role you’re in. You’ve never done this before.

Most people are imposters in their role. They’ve never been a chief product officer. In a lot of cases they’ve never led teams this large. And first of all just realize that you actually are.

And second of all, that’s okay and most people are like you said. And then third of all, this advice you shared about how to work through that is really powerful. Just like know many people feel this way.

Work hard, I think, is a really important part of this. Just like know there’s another day and that you can bounce back.

Daniel Lereya: Remember that everyone are people. No one is born to be in the world that he’s currently at. And another thing that in Monday we’re scaling so fast. So even people that are coming with experience and I had the chance to see it over and over again, because we’re going so fast, each one of us will get to a point, which is the first time he’s doing it sooner or later.

So, experience matters and we have a lot of people that are coming and bringing experience from the outside. But also remember that and remember that everyone are people and no one was born in a position.

Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah. And in companies like yours, people have described it as every six months you have a new job.

Daniel Lereya: Exactly. Exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky: Cheryl Sandberg once did a talk that I was at where people are complaining. It was just like, “So much is changing, we’re growing. The culture is not as strong as it was, and there’s just like things not working. Our processes are no, hiring is hard.”

And she’s just like, “This is the problems you want because you’re growing very fast and that’s very good. Versus, if you were not growing, it’d be much more painful and hard. So, be thankful this is the problems you’re facing.”

Daniel Lereya: I couldn’t agree more.

Lenny Rachitsky: You talked about things breaking along the way and things you had to deal with. Is there an example of something? I love these stories of just maybe a moment of crisis along the journey where you thought like, “Okay, things are going to fall apart. This is over. See you, everyone.”

Daniel Lereya: Yeah. To be honest, we have so many. But, again, this is the problems that you are lucky to have. But, yeah, maybe I’ll give you an example.

I remember this day that someone from our customer success team has approached me and say, “Listen, Daniel, we have a spike in performance issues in the board.” And again, our boards is this table of think about it like of data.

And on each time 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 this kind 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, tens of thousands of rows.

And so, performance is always a challenge and struggle in making sure that everything works smoothly. And this is also a value to us. We really believe that performance is the number one feature that makes people use your system. So, we came to me-

System. He came to me, and I remember that suddenly seeing the spike in the tickets, it’s super hard, right? You say, wow, it’s something super hard. You don’t necessarily have a magic wand of fixing it immediately. And what we did, we actually, again, connected everyone to it. The first thing they did was taking disc golf to everyone in the team and showing and thinking together what we can do. And we did a lot of things and we worked really hard and we managed to make this situation better. And then time passed by and you are continuing, and then it happened again. And I can share that on the third time I said, “Okay, we had enough. We need to think totally different in a different way.” And back in the days, this is where I think many of our core long-term projects have born. The signature one would be MondayDB. It’s a name we use for an underlying data infrastructure that we’ve been building in the last three years or so.

Think about a very small team and a very small startup. I remember the day that we said, listen, 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. And it really, in many ways, so different from what we talked about in so many other of the examples, right? And I think now we said, listen, instead of being fixing an issue, we want this to be our competitive edge. We have a very unique product architecture where everyone can build their own schemas of the table. And it’s a crazy thing in terms of technology behind it. We want to do something that will not only solve the problem, but also will serve us as a competitive edge. And we took a huge risk because we took a lot of people and put them aside for that, or not a lot of people, but the very talented people.

And I think in retrospect, by the way we released MondayDB, I think one and a half years ago, the first version, it did a huge, huge change for customers. And in many ways, this is what actually makes us today a platform which is enterprise-grade. My lesson from that is that if you feel about something, it is strategic. You need to not only solve problems, but be super proactive. And also, again, this contradicts the fact of, what are the goals, what are we going to achieve because you need to lean on something which is strategic. With everything that we said at the beginning of the conversation, there is also things that you need to do because this is the company you want to build, this is the product that you want to build. And you don’t necessarily get the [inaudible 01:15:23] of getting conviction from things that happened in the past or from data. You need to just go with your intuition and take this risk. And I’m super happy that we did it, but this is an example where things really broke and what we did with it.

Lenny Rachitsky: There’s a couple other stories of crisis I’m thinking back to, and they all seem to be a database started reaching capacity and we are about to fall apart ‘cause their growth was too fast. That’s an interesting lesson for people to hear, just try to anticipate this a little more. And sounds like that’s what you realized is let’s think a 100X from now, not just a couple years from now. It reminds me of, so Brian Johnson, he’s this dude that’s trying to live forever or as long as he can and he makes this really interesting point that I promise connects to what you’re talking about, which is he’s like, okay, what is your goal? He asked everyone, what’s your life goal? And so they’re like, oh, I want to do this and this and that. To accomplish that, the base goal you’re not even thinking about is you need to not die. And that’s actually the number one goal everyone should have, don’t die. And I feel like that’s infrastructure in companies is you have all these metrics and goals, but really the goal underneath that is your infrastructure needs to scale. It makes sense why this is outside of, okay, we have all these metrics and goals, this is-

Daniel Lereya: Yeah. Not necessarily treating it as a tax or as a risk, but rather for our offering as a platform, this is actually now one of our core advantages. It’s super important as well, that value to customers comes in different ways, shapes and forms. And you need to think about the experience and not only about… And many times the general experience start with things that are reliable, performant, that you can count on them and suddenly you even use them differently because they’re fast. I think this is another important aspect to it.

Lenny Rachitsky: That’s such a good point. When you have a problem, something that’s slowing you down or might crumble the company, just not flipping it from how do we just put the bandaid here? How do we turn this into a strategic advantage if we really invest the time? I like that a lot. Okay. To start to close out our conversation, I’m going to take us to AI Corner, which is a recurring segment I try to get to more and more with this podcast. And the question is, what’s an example of you using AI tools in your day-to-day work to do better work, to do faster work that you think might be helpful to other folks?

Daniel Lereya: Maybe I start with a personal one. It’s not about work, but I think it really shows that for me, it was a moment of really saying this has so much potential in it. I actually prepared myself for a marathon and unfortunately I got injured in my knee. Yeah/ I went to do an MRI scan and I finished the scan and they gave me this disc with the results and then they said, “Listen, you need to schedule a doctor appointment five days from now.” Okay. I said, I took it, put it in ChatGPT and ask for the results, an explanation of line by line, what does it mean. And then I of course went to the doctor and said, these are the results. But I think for me, this is something that I was really happy about using it and it also opens my mind a lot because I think that if you think about it from the product perspective, and this is how we think about AI in Monday, the technology is amazing, you can do so much with it, but there’s still the part of productizing it because every person that I talked with him about this example, with enthusiasm he said, “How did you think about putting your MRI there?”

And I said, “I don’t know, I just did.” But this is all creating products that actually allow people to leverage this technology. And more on the work side, I use it a lot. I think for me, one recent example I would say is we really worked hard towards determining the pricing for AI offering that I was mentioning earlier. And just in two hours I managed to get the full perspective on what everyone else are doing. And we have analysts and we have product managers, but the fact that I was independent and managed to get the initial thoughts and all the information in just a bit, it was mind-blowing. I use it a lot in order to understand things that are very extensive, what the competitors are doing, what is the history of this and that. And I think it helped me a lot in that sense.

Lenny Rachitsky: These are awesome examples. And is this all ChatGPT?Is that the tool of choice?

Daniel Lereya: It’s hard. I have my own periods right now, it’s changing from one week to another. These two actually were with ChatGPT. Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: Very cool. The first example, my wife does all the time, my mother-in was in the hospital and we’re waiting for the doctor to show up and she just put the chart in ChatGPT and is like, what’s the problem? And it’s exactly what he told us. And it feels like we’re in a world now where an engineer without, say Cursor or one of these tools, that’s not possible anymore. And it feels now with going to doctors, it’s like if you don’t do this and see what it says, you’re missing out on a big gap. There’s this New York Times story, I don’t know if you’ve seen where they actually compared a doctor’s analysis versus a doctor plus ChatGPT plus just ChatGPT. And guess what was the best, most accurate diagnosis?

Daniel Lereya: Yeah, I want to say ChatGPT.

Lenny Rachitsky: That’s exactly what it was. Not even a doctor with ChatGPT.

Daniel Lereya: I’ll tell you a story about it. In the MRI, I did it because I wanted to go skiing and I didn’t know if I can do it or not. I asked ChatGPT and he said all the recommendations and what I need to do and so on. And then when I was at the doctor, I asked him the same question, can I do ski? He said, “I don’t know, I never ski.” It’s not only about getting the information straight away and getting accuracy, it’s the fact that you can continue and deep dive with it. And this is something that also when I was in the pricing, it’s not only the bit of information, but the fact that you can continue and continue and continue. It’s definitely super impressive

Lenny Rachitsky: And it doesn’t get annoyed, it doesn’t get bored and it’s very supportive. Yeah,

Daniel Lereya: Yeah. It’s always with good intent, or not, but yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: So kind. Amazing. Okay. Well Daniel, we’ve covered a lot of ground. This was extremely fun. Before we get to a very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you wanted to share? Any other nuggets of wisdom you want to leave listeners with?

Daniel Lereya: I think that in many ways, the things that we managed to achieve in Monday is due to the great people and culture that we have. And on early days, we used to take it for granted in a way, not the people but the culture, the fact that everyone understand, the fact that everyone are practicing it. And then you say, okay, culture is something that you can put your fingers on. But now as we scale, I really see how this is what actually drives everything forward. Maybe just to say on a personal note that a huge part of how I see my role is about the people and also about how we work together and what kind of an environment we want to build to ourselves. And we talked a lot about it during the episode, but I really feel that I can’t underestimate on how meaningful it is and how grateful I am that I’m working with such talented people and doing what I love.

Lenny Rachitsky: That’s awesome. I bet we could do a whole other episode on just culture and what you’ve learned. Building a culture, what the culture is like in Monday, but we got to get to our very exciting lightning round. Daniel, are you ready?

Daniel Lereya: I’m ready.

Lenny Rachitsky: All right. I’ve got five questions for you. First question is, what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

Daniel Lereya: The first one I would say is the No Rules Rules book by Netflix. Back in the days we used even the slides, but I think we took a lot of inspiration out of it. And I think that although we have different cultures, many of the things around execution, like excellent people and so on are things that I can really resonate with. And this is something that we really like to give people away after talking about our culture and so on to get inspiration also from other cultures. And another maybe on a different aspect is a book that actually Roy, our co-CEO has given to me, its name is Nonviolent Communication. And it’s about effective ways of communication and understanding the people and their needs and how to communicate in a way that actually promotes an effective communication. And what I liked about this book is mainly we love to talk a lot and after we both read the book, our way of talking changed. It’s very practical. I also like to give it away to our leadership and people within the team because they think it has real value in it.

Lenny Rachitsky: I’m trying to remember the framework of Nonviolent communication is like, I observed you speaking too much in this meeting and that made me feel like I wasn’t listened to something like that, right? I forget the [inaudible 01:25:29].

Daniel Lereya: You shouldn’t be judgmental. You just need to say facts and talk about how you feel and act. Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: And I know I’m joking about it, but it’s actually really powerful. And we had Carol Robin on the podcast who created this program at Stanford called Touchy Feely, which is similar to this whole approach to talking. And by the way, I love the combination of Israeli directness and nonviolent communication. I want to see that in action.

Daniel Lereya: Yeah, definitely.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed?

Daniel Lereya: To be honest, I don’t watch TV so much. I get bored really fast and going back to other things. But when I do watch TV, so many times it’s in order to clear my head. It’s not that exciting things. Maybe a different thing that I’m doing is playing on the PlayStation with my son. FIFA just to vent out. Yeah. And in terms of series, maybe one thing that pops up is the Formula. I really liked it. Formula One, Netflix.

Lenny Rachitsky: Drive to Survive.

Daniel Lereya: Drive to Survive, exactly. Yeah. I really loved seeing the dynamics and everything behind. It looks like something simple of driving cars, but you see that there’s so much into it. It’s also really interesting and opens your mind to watch.

Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah. I haven’t started the new season yet. I wonder if it’s great.

Daniel Lereya: Yeah, likewise. Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite product you’ve recently discovered that you really love?

Daniel Lereya: I don’t want to fall into all the AI trap in terms of products. Maybe I will say something, which is not so recent, but a product that I love. I really like to take pictures. And one product that I really love is Google Photos. I think that they managed to create something which takes the technology edge, but to a place where myself as a human really can connect to it and get a lot of value for it. I’m a really heavy user of that. Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah. That is a magical product that I think people under appreciate.

Daniel Lereya: Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: Next question. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to, find useful and work your own life?

Daniel Lereya: Stay positive. I think being positive, seeing the good things is a huge, huge power and it’s a huge driver and it allows you to give energy to the people around you and it’s contagious. I really love staying positive, making sure that we keep being optimistic. And it doesn’t mean that you need to let go of the problems and don’t 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 it’s really more fun and actually bring better results this way.

Lenny Rachitsky: I’m 1,000% aligned with that. Final question. I know you were in the army at one point in your life. Is there anything that you learned from that experience that helps you build better products?

Daniel Lereya: The funny thing is that I think that like many things that I did in the Army, I was actually commanding of a very big group of people in the Army. And I think it’s not about building products, but more about building teams and building this sense of purpose, sense of shared belonging. And I think that in that way many things are quite similar to, it might be counterintuitive, but many things are quite similar. And from that, many of the things of being together, although it’s a hierarchical environment is something that I take with me and a lot of practical ways to lead a big organization, I would say.

Lenny Rachitsky: Daniel, this was awesome. You’re awesome. So much stuff that we went through. So many golden nuggets. I think that we’re going to help a lot of people with building products, building teams, scaling, surviving, all these scaling challenges that keep coming up in these conversations. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out, maybe talk about being more transparent, and then how can listeners be useful to you?

Daniel Lereya: Online, I think that two main ways is by LinkedIn, I would say. And second is podcasts. I am guessing in a lot of podcasts and I think that this is a cool way to share things, full stories and full practical examples. And in terms of listeners being useful to me, so first of all, in many ways they already are useful to me. I really love your podcast and I’m getting a lot of insights from others and this is something I really love. Many of people that probably listening were also contributing to that. Thank you for that. And I really hope with that, that this episode would also be meaningful to people and that they will take value out of it. And if they are, it would be amazing to hear about it. I remember someone that sent me a picture of his new dashboard in the office and what did he do with that. And add additional ideas of what you can do that we actually took also here on Monday. If you do something, even if it’s small, let me know. It’s super fun to hear and also interesting.

Lenny Rachitsky: All right. There’s the call to action. If you implement some of Daniel’s advice, especially put up new dashboards or monitors in your office, please send photos. Go for LinkedIn, it sounds like, is the best medium. Daniel, thank you so much for being here.

Daniel Lereya: Thank you very much, Lenny. It was a pleasure.

Lenny Rachitsky: Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast. com. See you in the next episode.

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