Does Monday.com need to improve transparency, responsiveness, and development priorities?

Feature requests
1

I’d like to offer some newcomer observations for the Monday.com team, and invite advanced Monday users to chime in here as well. First - a caveat for the Monday team - this is intended as constructive feedback, so please take it that way. Coming from someone who’s about to purchase an initial subscription and commit our team to the system.

I help lead a 25-person organization. Over the past 3 months I’ve done a DEEP dive into Monday testing / exploration, including reading a lot of the content in this community forum. There is a lot to like about Monday - enough for us to take the plunge. However, I have significant concerns about missing / incomplete core functionality, lack of support team responsiveness / action on critical feature requests, and poor visibility into future Monday development priorities and direction.

In sum, I sense that Monday.com is 80-90% of the way toward being the amazing, fully-functional WorkOS that we all want it to be (and that my organization really needs). Yet that missing 10-20% of core functionality is a major roadblock that you only realize after digging into the system, only to discover that, “No, actually, I can’t do this critical thing my team needs because of x / y / z missing capabilities.” I have read this sentiment in many community threads.

The gist of my concerns are summed up nicely in this post by Paul @TheOtherPM: Releasing our first monday apps! - #21 by TheOtherPM and in other threads that discuss missing / incomplete core functionality. I think (hope!) the Monday team knows what these missing pieces are. So I’m going to move right to a starting list of high-level suggestions. Again I invite veteran users to add to / modify these suggestions and agree / disagree with me.

  1. Establish a development advisory group of advanced users. There are dedicated / advanced users (including me) who I think would be eager to help Monday identify / prioritize / scope its development needs - from the users’ perspective. It’s one thing to have a broad community forum, and that’s very helpful for all users; it’s another to solicit and utilize the knowledge and insights of a smaller core group of advanced users in a collaborative, structured, and proactive way. I think Monday (and all users) would benefit greatly by better tapping the deep well of advanced users who really WANT to help improve the system. This would be different from the “Monday Club” (as I understand it) - which appears focused on promoting the product; the development advisory group I suggest would be inward-facing - helping the functionality of Monday.com actually live up to its billing.

  2. Follow the 80/20 principle. As Paul @TheOtherPM suggests in his post linked above: “Focus 80% of your time on the 20% of features that people use the most.” And as he notes - especially focusing on incomplete / problematic core functionality, like mirrored columns, user communications, and - I’ll add - the My Week / ‘easily see all my tasks in one place the way I want to see them’ missing capability. There’s a long list of other examples that could be effectively consolidated, vetted, and refined via item 1. above.

  3. Re-post the live development road map. For so many reasons, users need to know the future plans and development status of system features and functionality. This road map should be comprehensive and honest / explicit about priorities and time frames. Just one example from our team to illustrate: I’m about to begin onboarding 25 people and need to develop system structures and user guidance, including for sub-items. Whether we incorporate sub-items from the start has major implications. I would really like to use them, but they are currently missing too much functionality and will cause too many problems. If I could see the road map, I would be able to plan how best to deal with this. Without the road map, I’m lacking the info needed to make informed design decisions that could result in sub-optimal implementation, unhappy users, and a lot of wasted time.

I’ll stop there with those initial suggestions. Please add your thoughts.

Below I’m tagging some of the advanced users / frequent posters I’ve seen in the forums. Feel free to tag others to broaden this discussion - and please keep it constructive and respectful! Once there’s some discussion and posting of other suggestions, we can tag some Monday support folks if they haven’t already responded.

Thanks for considering my $.02 and offering your own.

@TheOtherPM @JohnW @basdebruin @Danny @Eltjo @nikolamujdzic @caseyparnis @PedroM @Aksalano @Sven.H

2

I double the money and add my 2 cents :slight_smile:

Thank you for the initiative @hdurey, Hunt. I had a very similar discussion with @dipro the other day. Basically I wrote an email stating my concerns you mention here too. There is a lot of buzz around apps, emoticons, twitter feeds and other things power user as you describe them are not requesting. At the same time we suffer from some missing core features. The ones I like to add:

  • Make sure the API supports new features as soon as they are released, but before doing that make sure the API support simple things like setting status values and adding / deleting guests to a board
  • Enhance the API documentation, from the tons of questions here one can see the quality of the documentation
  • Recognize that not every “solution to a challenge” fits in one board only. Therefore create something to combine boards (I like to call this containers)
  • Make all references (list to item, dependencies, dashboard widgets etc) relative to that container in a way we can easily duplicate a container
  • Make it possible to set board permissions in templates (really don’t see why that is not possible)

To repeat Hunt, please do not regard this a negative. We all want the same thing and that is the perfect WorkOS.

9 Likes
3

My initial thoughts…

1). If an advisory group was to be assembled that would be awesome and I think it would be critical to break down the group by industry / category as best as possible for equal / best representation. I think we are advanced users of the platform but what we do primarily applies to manufacturing and the complex order process for the products we manufacture which is very different than say software development or marketing.

2). I agree, one of my fears is that Monday.com tries to be everything to everyone to quickly and that eventually makes the platform less useful.

An example from our perspective is sub items…such a powerful feature but has so far to go before it is ready for primetime. I also fear that a rapid pace for development begins to create too many glitches or downtime. We have only been on the platform for about a year but we are dead in the water if the system goes down.

Another example would be the automation recipe builder…cannot wait for more powerful options to custom build your own automations, but again even though in Beta has a lot of dev. to acheive its full potential for advanced users.

3). You can read about the sub items road map here maybe it is not as detailed as you desire?.. I agree, we have already implemented and we can only hope that the development of sub items goes smooth!

Just sharing…but we actually joined just after forms were introduced which kinda sealed the deal for us, after subscribing and learning more I believe that a lot of functionality has been added in the last 2 years, not sure if we would have subscribed if it was 1 year earlier.

So far we are very please but yes, there are times when we desire to do more and there is no option within the platform, possibly via integration but that just adds a layer of maintenance / construction…etc.

5 Likes
4

This is a great post, Hunt. Thank you for sharing it. It’s clear that you (and all of us!) want Monday to succeed and be a truly comprehensive hub for work tracking and project management. Monday is a pretty significant investment in both time and money, so I hope the team will take your suggestion for a user advisory board into consideration because there are plenty of us who are willing to lend our time to improve this product.

I agree with each item Hunt listed, particularly the point about an accessible development road map. I do not have a ton of time to dedicate to nailing down the most effective Monday workflows for us and it has been frustrating having to guess when functionalities will become available or if they will ever appear at all. As a non-profit we are on the Standard plan and noticed a few functionalities (such as time tracking) move to Pro without warning (which I admit I may have missed), which was also frustrating.

2 Likes
5

Hello im adding myself to the list… I dont want Monday.com to become a huge Beta version with unfinished features in all their functions and capabilites.

Here in my previous post i mention a lot of core functionalities that needs to be done.

4 Likes
6

I agree @hlopezvc @hdurey.

The biggest challenge is the speed/responsiveness to enable consistency in the use of boards and dashboards. The workload widget appears to be a great feature, however without consideration of the bigger picture and how it will be used demonstrates a glitz facade. Fix the speed so when the AMERicas regions come online monday.com that the lights don’'t go out.

Plus if resource capacity management i.e. workload widget is a feature have the option to choose real-time or refresh, so that every linked board that is being changed real-time doesn’t halt the widget. I have linked 2 boards so far, imagine if you linked the maximum number of boards which I believe is 40. The widget would be a merry go round at hyper-speed with all the board charges never presenting a result.

2 Likes
7

I’m glad to see this thread pop up because I feel that it’s important. The loss of the Roadmap was very disheartening and this new WorkOS thing has been, despite the best marketing efforts of the Monday team, confusing to the user base.

Monday is a good TEAM task management system, but it is still a poor PERSONAL task management system. I believe this is the biggest problem that MY team has using Monday - likely the same with others.

As others have said, there are a lot of unfinished features hanging out there. I know there are a LOT of voices in the user base and everyone has their own must-have feature lists, but I would love to see these capabilities more functional for everybody. It feels like there’s a lot of work being done so that prospective users can check a box when comparing to other project management tools.

6 Likes
8

This thread is an excellent summary of a lot of post comments littered across these forums. Thanks @hdurey.

I’m disappointed that after a few weeks nobody from Monday.com has chimed in : (

Here are my thoughts:

Re #1 the advisory group suggestion

Have a read of @Julia-monday.com’s response to @hlopezvc’s “About delayed requests” thread…

There are a few sources that we use that help us track, monitor and relay our user feedback internally so that we get a well-rounded understanding of what all of our users voice to us. Those sources include: data from feedback in the platform, support tickets, our product consultant and CSM team feedback for larger accounts, user interviews, as well as the community.

So I can understand why they may not want yet another source to add into their decision-making mix.

Re #2, Following the 80/20 principle

Yeah, to my mind, this is the key point. Monday.com has already identified that “…most teams are not benefitting from the platform’s advanced capabilities” - that’s a quote from Monday.com 2.0 vision webinar earlier this year.

Monday.com webinar
Monday.com webinar2674×1490 521 KB

Surely, then, the focus should be on ensuring that users are using the advanced capabilities that already exist or strengthening the capabilities that users are actually using…

Instead, with the Apps framework, you’re putting a lot of effort into building an entire other level of advanced capabilities. It seems like you are more excited by this than most current users. Maybe we don’t understand your vision for Apps? I dunno.

Re #3 - report the roadmap

I would love to hear from somebody in Monday.com why this has disappeared and when it will be coming back. @Julia-monday.com could you help with that? It’s really helpful knowing what features might be coming and when.

Also, I would appreciate much better connections between this community forum, the high-level roadmap, the “What’s new” updates within the app and the new “Captain’s Log” blog posts. It’s hard to know where to look to stay up to date.

11 Likes
9

Well said @TheOtherPM.

2 Likes
10

+1 to having at least a high level roadmap that is user facing.

I also think the Monday team should consider moving feature requests and voting out of the discourse forum and into a more organized place with fewer duplicates, "I must have this or else I’ll hold my breath until I turn purple!" threads, and more organized voting. If you’re going to take user input to inform your roadmap, you have to follow the numbers, or else you end up with many of the hyper specific and seemingly odd additions to the product that some in this thread are complaining of.

I agree with others that have mentioned stabilizing the primary features and API should be first priority over gimmicks. Fortunately, from this thread, we know the Monday team is actively working on ways to improve the API.

We’re all guilty of demanding features that would benefit us personally and complaining about our personal unsupported use cases. It helps to keep in mind that monday is in a hyper growth stage right now and things will get better over time, like all evolving software. Personally, I appreciate the level of engagement I have had with the Monday team via support tickets and the forums, since switching back to the platform recently from Asana. By comparison, Asana is a company that virtually never responds directly or honestly to user criticism and has feature requests + bugs with hundreds or even thousands of votes on their forums stuck in the “planned” stage for years at a time.

5 Likes
11

Hey everyone!

Dipro from monday.com here. Thank you for the really detailed and thorough comments on this thread. We know that it takes time and effort to give thoughtful feedback, and it’s awesome to see this level of detailed engagement!

(Apologies that we didn’t respond earlier, but a nice side-effect of this is that this thread has even more feedback than before!)

What I’ll be covering

I want to use this post to share what we’ve been up to as a company, to address some of the points you’ve raised here. I’m going to try and summarize our company’s approach to product improvements, describe challenges we’ve had in the past, and point out what we’re doing to become better.

To reiterate what has already been said: our goal as a company is to build an amazing Work OS that you love and, more importantly, helps your teams get work done. We strive to make transparency and inclusion a key part of everything we do, so we appreciate the spirited dialogue happening here.

80/20 rule, or “How we choose what to build next”

The most important metrics for us are weekly user engagements with our product. Whether it’s on the company level or the feature level, we know that if we’re building something useful, our clients will be using it a lot. When building any feature, we also build feedback loops to ensure we know how users are engaging with our product: which features they’re using, how much they’re using it, etc.

We don’t only keep track of engagements, we heavily optimize for them. We only build something if it’s helpful enough for lots of people to use – and to use repeatedly. This approach helps us build features that are as useful as possible with the minimum effort. In other words, we first do the 20% of work that will give us 80% of the value (Pareto principle).

To see this in action, check out the apps built by monday.com (Pivot Table, Whiteboard, etc). We built these in the course of 2 days in order to show how easy it is to create apps on top of monday.com. I think it’s the perfect example of our team’s efficiency – it might feel like we put a lot of effort into building the apps, but it was just 2 days of our teams’ time for a ton of new features.

Ownership, or how we stop features from being “left behind”

By optimizing for engagement, we sometimes build features that are useful for most users, but have limitations that power users need to work around. This isn’t a new challenge, but one that we will continue to face as our company keeps doubling in size every year.

To combat this, we restructured our entire R&D organization at the beginning of 2020. Now each of our R&D teams are organized around a specific domain in the platform, to ensure all of our features are well rounded and work for basic and power users alike. We currently have around 100 people in our R&D organization across 5 product domains.

This reorganization let us focus on core features that had not been improved in quite a while. For example, let us focus on giving the timeline a redesign, and improving the chart widget (shoutout to the Boards Core and Insights domains, led by @oron and @Oron-monday.com).

We know that our users’ needs change over time, so we will keep adding new domains to ensure no part of our platform gets left behind. For example, we recognize that our API has a lot of areas for improvement, and we’re heavily investing in it so that developers building on monday.com have the best experience. In fact, we’re hiring a new R&D team to focus on this part of our platform (@VladMonday joined at the start of May to lead this effort, and we currently have 3 developers working on the apps/API domain).

Adding transparency around product roadmap

As I mentioned before, one of our key company values is transparency. And as part of that, we do want to give you a running roadmap of everything we’re working on. However, we don’t want to give a roadmap that we can’t commit to, for the sake of saying we have one.

In the previous iteration of our roadmap, every quarter we’d list out what we wanted to accomplish, and publish it for our users. As a growing startup, however, we do sometimes need to pivot our roadmap in response to business opportunities – and as we grow, we find ourselves needing to be more agile in this way.

To strike the balance between predictability and flexibility, we decided to remove our platform-wide roadmap and instead share product-area specific roadmaps where applicable. This is why you see roadmaps for specific features (such as subitems) but not an overall roadmap.

We hope we can offer these feature-specific (as well as overall) roadmap more often, so it’s something that we’re working on!

Channels for feature feedback

Internally, we are obsessed with feedback. Our R&D teams create tight feedback loops for qualitative and quantitative insights, our Customer Success and Experience teams log all feedback from tickets in a variety of places so that this information isn’t lost, and we have multiple internal channels to ensure we build the right features for the right reasons.

When we think of customer feedback though, we try to consider feedback from all our users – not just our most vocal users. While we do have channels for high-touch accounts and power users to give feedback, we do try to mix this with feedback from “low-touch” accounts, or the folks who use monday.com a lot but may not be posting in the community, etc. Optimizing for engagement and creating feedback loops that don’t require a user to put their hand up and say “I have a problem with this” is a big part of this.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of feedback channels, to give you an idea of what we’re working with:

  • Feedback forms embedded in our product, so any user can give their thoughts immediately
  • Suggestions from email tickets (of course)
  • Feedback from the monday club, from our most-engaged users
  • Feedback from Customer Success managers, working with larger teams
  • User interviews
  • Reporting on engagement in our platform, for “no-touch” feedback
  • Our community (shoutout to the folks in the Developers section holding us accountable with all their API suggestions!)

Feature-specific feedback

There are quite a few great feature suggestions in the thread above. I’m not going to go through every point but I wanted to highlight a couple of features that are on our radar in the next weeks/months/quarters:

  • Communication (updates, notification, etc): We’re researching how to improve communicating in our platform and plan to roll out changes in the upcoming months. We don’t have specifics yet in terms of timeline or what this will look like, but wanted to highlight that it’s on our radar!

  • My Week: we’re looking at this feature now to see how to better give our users a snapshot of what they need to know from their monday.com account. If anyone has feedback on this particular feature, would love to hear it (a separate thread probably makes the most sense)

  • API improvements: we want to build a world-class developer program, which means a world-class set of APIs. Specifically, we know that there’s a lot of gaps between our old REST API and current GraphQL API and are working on it.

  • Automations and Custom Recipes: custom recipes are the first step; we want to add more “no-code” solutions that let you customize your Work OS and send data from one workflow to another.

I know that was a lot of information to handle, I hope I covered everything! I’m also going to CC some folks internally so we all can learn from this thread: @Julia-monday.com @oron @Talh-monday.com @Abigail-monday.com @VladMonday

11 Likes
12

Hi @dipro. As the originator of this thread, for now I’d just like to say that I really appreciate your thoughtful and detailed post in response to the comments and discussion so far. I’m going to take some time to digest and consider your comments. I hope that other users – especially the “power users” with more Monday.com experience and history than I – will respond with their continued constructive input, questions, and suggestions.

5 Likes
13

Hi @hdurey, great thread and thanks for tagging me in your original post. I noticed it far too late but I am following now with great interest. There has been said a lot in this thread, and most of I can relate to.

Thanks @dipro for the elaborate explanation and in-depth information. As you guys from Monday know I am always up for feedback sessions and interviews to share my use case in the particular feature you are improving.
You can sing me up for a power user advisory group if there will be created one in the future.

2 Likes
14

Hello @ dipro-monday.com thanks for your answer, I am also available (in my native language which is Spanish) to give many comments and suggestions of new and advanced functions.

I want to ask you something here because it really is unknown to me.

What news do we will have in the short term of main functions that have been incomplete for quite some time: for example, the possibility of having mirror columns that work with different connected boards, also adding the possibility of selecting by pulses, groups or entire boards. For almost a year now, when you link several boards together and then want to use mirror columns, a poster appears saying that this function will soon be available.

Another query that I wanted to ask you is, for example, in cases where the community has expressed itself by voting several times in favor of a specific request for improvement. My example would be improvements to the time tracking column, or for example the need to have a customizable pulse id since the pulse id column is too long.

I know my partners here will have each one their own examples, but resuming my question is:

These little improvements would make our work and our lives with monday.com simpler, don’t they deserve a little time for programmers to finish them?

4 Likes
15

100% agree.

This point has been made repeatedly in this forum. Improvement requests for so many small details in Monday are littered throughout these forums which would greatly enhance the end user experience and productivity.

Perhaps Monday.com could add a team of engineers for “Mission Just-Do-It”: to address the low hanging fruit? Feature requests which have been hanging around for many months and need a final effort to complete and polish them. This would instantly encourage many high-touch power users who are waiting to use them today.

6 Likes
16

So I was asking two different cases:

  1. Most voted improvements: in short, this depends on monday.com to do it or not.

  2. End the beta functions launched: columns, automations, subitems, etc .: this is what worries me the most. Every time Monday.com launches a must-have feature, every company puts them to work, hoping that the beta will go live. It is something that I am seeing now with subitems, there are tons of comments about it,

this is what i mean (this is pending since somewhere in the middle of the last year):
image

2 Likes
17

Hi All! Thanks for continuously sharing your candid feedback - we are aware there are some missing functionalities that need to be addressed and I will be sure to pass all of this feedback with our product managers.

To shed some light, we do “hackathons” multiple times a year to quickly knock out quick wins that users have been asking for. However, I know that multiple-board-linkage that some of you have referenced is something that we’ve been working on but needs some technical infrastructural changes and isn’t a quick win necessarily.

That being said, we understand there are some missing components - I will do my best to see if we can get some additional insight from specific product managers and see what actions can be taken on our end. We do greatly appreciate all of your transparency and feedback.

7 Likes
18

Hi everyone, Oron from engineering here.
I have to say I really appreciate your engagement and detailed explanations about the missing features. You have no idea how helpful that is to us, and how seriously we take this in the teams.

Wanted to shed some light about the linkage features - we’ve been getting a lot of requests about the features you’ve brought up in this thread, specifically:

  • 2-Way mirroring/linkage - Being able to see the linked items and mirrors on both boards
  • Selecting entire groups/boards on the link-to-item column
  • Linking to multiple boards and mirroring their column values

We know these can be really useful to a lot of our users, I could make use of them myself honestly. We do plan to add these features over Q3 however the timeline is not finalized since we are still working out the priorities. We will post here when we have more concrete plans.

BTW - Linking to multiple boards is available through a beta granted feature that you can request via the support email. However, we did keep this as internal beta since Mirror is not yet supported, and it is mostly useless without it.

8 Likes
19

Hi @oron, really great to hear you guys are working on this. Having this feature implemented will change our work processes drastically in a positive way. I’ll be watching this thread closely! Cheers!

3 Likes
20

Hey there @hlopezvc I’m Dana from the customer success team, and also part of the Boards Core domain who’s in charge of all the board features. I’d love to hear about your use case in regards to having a customizable pulse ID, as we do see many requests about this and want to make you guys happy!
I’ll send you a direct message :slight_smile:

2 Likes