It’s said that doctors make the worst patients. In contrast, it turns out that the company that builds a work management platform is incredibly good at work management — or at least monday.com is proving that to be true.
Moving in lockstep as a global company is no small feat, especially in a year as busy as 2023 has been for monday.com.
WHAT DOES MONDAY.COM DO?
monday.com is a SaaS company that created a platform of the same name. The platform is a work operating system that transforms the way teams work together.
In the last year alone, the company has: released a product that allows engineers to manage life cycles from start to finish; set up a new data infrastructure; and cut the ribbon for its new APAC headquarters in Australia. Continuously scaling and developing new procedures to keep worldwide teams aligned is critical for monday.com.
“While I work closely with our account management team on a day-to-day basis, I have fewer interactions with our account executive team as we’ve scaled,” said Customer Success Team Manager Rebecca Mass Donnenfeld. “That said, it is important for me to stay up to date with the AE team, as they are the first line of communication with our prospects and have a better sense of what is going on in the market.”
Mass Donnenfeld stays updated on the AE team by working with a group of AE managers to understand the challenges and areas of opportunity for the company’s forecasting efforts, then shares her insights with the broader team.
“I also lean into opportunities to participate in larger company initiatives, as I find staying up to date on other areas of the business helps me better support my team,” said Mass Donnenfeld.
Senior Account Manager Claudia Valdez is often part of those large company initiatives that require cross-functional collaboration, which makes it crucial for her to understand the goals, perspectives and responsibilities of her counterparts, including Mass Donnenfeld.
“It’s all with the goal to enhance collaboration and provide exceptional service for our clients,” said Valdez.
Valdez went on to share how, since 2022, monday.com's leadership has been presenting organization-wide objectives and key results that require collaboration from all areas of the business. The OKRs are shared during the internal meetings, and the company kicks off each year with a comprehensive analysis of the successes and failures from the previous year.
“It’s easy to get wrapped up in your own day-to-day work,” said Valdez. “When you take a step back to look at the big picture, you’ll often find that everyone is on a similar mission. So, why not work to support each other’s journeys?”
For Valdez, that means taking in-person time in the office to catch up with colleagues.
“Oftentimes, I find that when I go to another team with a blocker, they are experiencing the same issue,” added Valdez. “We brainstorm and pool our knowledge together so we can then go back and help our own teams with what we’ve found. We never fail alone.”
When I go to another team with a blocker, we brainstorm and pool our knowledge together, then go back and help our own teams with what we’ve found. We never fail alone.”
Working together and supporting one another is a huge part of the company culture at monday.com. It is the undertone in the company values, according to Revenue Enablement Program Manager Michelle Lam, who told Built In, “If I could distill our culture down into one word, it would be ‘collaboration.’ There’s this adage that goes ‘one band, one sound’ and I think that describes us perfectly.”
A Collaboration Tool in Action
A big portion of monday.com’s collaboration comes from time spent together as a united company, with frequent events and global meetings.
“There are plenty of opportunities to build relationships with colleagues from all departments,” said Valdez. “We are true power users of monday.com, which helps us remain connected and enables full transparency to our company goals, product roadmaps and more.”
Using the monday.com platform to its fullest extent enables cross-functional collaboration and helps every department share its progress easily.
“From the beginning, monday.com has fostered a culture of communication and transparency,” said Valdez.
monday.com’s research has revealed how rare it is to have the tools needed to support maximum productivity at work. monday.com and independent research company RepData surveyed 4,000 workers from diverse industries to find that only 26 percent of employees believe they have the necessary tools to streamline their processes or maximize their productivity — all despite using an average of 10.5 tech tools every month.
“Part of the benefit of working for a company like monday.com is that we have an amazing platform that helps facilitate collaboration and alignment in an acute way,” said Professional Services Team Lead Emily Williams. “The monday platform allows us to easily understand and interact with cross-functional processes, survey our teams on different alignment-related areas and collaborate in a transparent and easily accessible way.”
Mass Donnenfeld noted that, for a global company, monday.com has done a great job at addressing some of the challenges that come with staying collaborative while scaling on a large level. She highlighted that the customer success team relies heavily on the monday.com platform to manage multiple key processes including risk mitigation, renewal management and day-to-day portfolio management.
“It’s always great to see folks in different parts of the world commenting and jumping in to help,” said Mass Donnenfeld. “Outside of the customer success team, managers meet with cross-functional partners on a weekly basis to discuss anything that could impact how our teams work together –– from upcoming product releases to internal process changes.”
Under One Banner
In the last year, monday.com has shifted the team structure to create one unit that brings together customer success, sales, consulting, customer experience, marketing and partners.
“We established the Chief Revenue Officer organization, which means all customer-facing teams are part of the same business unit,” said Mass Donnenfeld. “Our sales and customer success teams now work towards similar goals and report to the same internal decision-makers and stakeholders.”
She shared the example of the customer success team using “adoption” as a KPI. Now, adoption is part of the KPIs for the entire CRO team to determine if the current strategy is successful or if the team needs to adjust accordingly.
Within the CRO, there is also now a project management office that assesses whether the teams are aligned. “It identifies redundancies or bottlenecks so we can stay on track,” added Mass Donnenfeld. She noted that there are also now quarterly regional reviews, where all stakeholders from the CRO group come together. In between those meetings, the teams can make use of the escalations channel where customer success managers can reach out to the customer experience team to receive additional support.
“Understanding the perspectives of other teams is absolutely essential to having a positive working relationship,” said Williams. “If both teams can align on the ultimate goal, whatever that may be, it can be easy to work toward a shared perspective or at least an understanding.”
Williams added that, of course, it’s natural to prioritize your immediate team. “However, to foster effective collaboration, I’ve learned it’s important to expand my perspective and consider the broader context of the company’s strategy,” concluded Williams. “By understanding how each team’s work contributes to the overall goals, I can then better align or redirect my team’s efforts and minimize potential conflicts.”
