Lenny Distilled

Daniel Lereya

Chief Product and Technology Officer, Monday.com

8 quotes across 1 episode

Daniel Lereya

I felt that what got me to this phase is not necessarily what's going to make me successful in the next phase. 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.

Each quarter... 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.

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.

Not taking bold risks, not making bold moves, it's a risk for itself. 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.

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.

I really believe that many time, like spending more time on working on something will not yield to better results or to better products. Many times using, like the setting traps mechanism of saying, 'Listen, we have three weeks, let's think about it.' And [setting goals] by time, it makes you extremely focused.

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.

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 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.