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:
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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!
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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)
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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.
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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