Item: monday.com
Rating: 8
Author: Jordan Gottlieb

Overall Satisfaction with monday.com

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

monday.com is primarily used by our IT department, and most heavily leveraged by our software engineering team. We leverage monday.com for high-level resource planning and scheduling, product management and road mapping, agile project management and sprints, KPI
tracking, executive summary reporting, transparency, and cross-functional/inter-departmental collaboration initiatives.

***Update: monday.com is now in use by multiple departments and teams outside of IT as their primary project management, async collaboration, workflow and tracking tool.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Product management
Project management
High-level road mapping and project sequencing
Resource management and allocation
Proactive monitoring via automations and notifications
Stack-incorporation via integrations, especially Slack and GitHub
Flexibility to adapt to most business processes and collaboration workflows

Cons

You have to experiment with some hacky workarounds to effectively run Agile sprints
You almost have to build out your dashboards first, then build out your board schema to fit to minimize re-work when the boards can't quite power your dashboard requirements
As your board schema and needs evolve, there's no easy way to retroactively apply those improvements to all your existing, relevant boards--this problem increases as your number of boards increases
Some quality of life/craftsmanship improvements might be in order for "power users" such as a ctl+f for full screen shortcut, or obviously missing dashboard widgets like "count of items in group"
Severely limited intensely manual reporting capabilities at scale
Severely limited automations and batch actions for mirrored columns, and to some extent, for subitems as well
Customer service feels very corporate post-IPO, and pricing model heavily favors monday.com when scaling now

Return on Investment

Once dialed in, we can kick off a new project in 10 minutes by cloning the right board schema, so huge time-savings when turning up new projects that need tracking
Proactive monitoring--especially automated notifications to check in on delegated or impending due tasks--means I can stay well informed without having to look through boards or dashboards when time is at a premium, yielding more time savings
The team has largely taken over their own project management, organically, which leads to yet more time savings
Transparency is huge; we share our boards up, down, and sideways so everyone always knows exactly where our team is at without having to ask
Makes it easier to predict when resources will become available, yields planning power and efficiency in delegation and tasking
Makes it easier to automatically, proactively detect when a team or individual is blocked or otherwise needs help, the value here is minimizing idle time and frustration, leading to a happier team
Interestingly, 4 years in I've noticed adoption seems to be polar: either all-in or ignore it exists

Usability

monday.com provide you a fully loaded a'la carte tool box and a blank canvas; it is what you make it and it bends to your will quickly and easily. I planned my teams' entire year in advance and got them collaborating within the first two days of onboarding into monday.com. 8 of 10 because it can be very clicky and automations to improve UI deficiencies are often triggered late or require a refresh to see.

Support Rating

Support has been responsive and respectful. We haven't experienced many issues; most of what we've been in touch with support and our CSM for were feature requests, so we can't speak to this much. That said, we reported llama widget lag on a large dashboard once, over a year ago, and monday.com had it patched within a couple of weeks. That's something!

***Update: Since IPO, customer service has shifted to a very corporate-feeling exchange

Reliability & Availability

Uptime has been phenomenal, only a few outages in 4 years and only one that impacted our day to day. Board automations have been very slow at times, enough to cause pain. Per monday.com support, this has been a known issue for years and remains lingering to this day 8/8/2022.

Key Insights

Do you think monday.com delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with monday.com's feature set?

Yes

Did monday.com live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of monday.com go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy monday.com again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Agile sprint tracking support is lacking, but improving with every release. That said, if monday.com is a good fit for how you plan, track and evaluate your standard work, or you don't have your work standardized yet, it would be hard to find something better. Highly recommended for administrative, product, project, and team management, especially for small to mid-size teams that don't want the massive overhead of something like Jira, or yet another tabular-data-centric solution like Smartsheet (which several other departments at our company use, and find very useful). I love the automated proactive monitoring options and having the ability to secure or share tracked initiatives at a very granular or global level. If monday.com filled the gaps that make Agile sprints challenging to track, further aligned their roadmap with community feedback, made mirrored columns usable, and improved reporting at scale, I'd give it a 9.

monday.com Feature Ratings

monday.com & Collaboration

Collaboration

monday.com organically empowered people to become their own project managers, for one. We typically have projects and initiatives tracked at four levels: 30,000-foot view of all projects sequencing, timeline and status; 10,000-foot view of team-specific projects, timeline and status; project-specific sprint boards; and dashboards to track progress and KPIs at all three levels. This provides transparency and summary reporting at varying levels of access tailored to every level of the org chart, enabling everyone to do their job more collaboratively and efficiently.

Project Management Capabilities

monday.com has everything we need; we've had it for years, and apart from full Agile sprint support and some nice-to-have quality of life improvements, such as a full screen shortcut, it has worked phenomenally well for us.

Evaluating monday.com and Competitors

Products Replaced

Yes - Asana. Simply put, Asana can't do what monday.com can, but monday.com can do what Asana can.

Key Differentiators

Product Features
Product Usability
Product Reputation

We needed something with extreme flexibility to fit our standard work, business processes and collaboration workflows and not the other way around. monday.com was surprisingly quick and easy to set up and onboard the entire team. We were running full speed ahead with monday.com by the end of day two.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

We leveraged our very comprehensive software evaluation matrix and implemented concrete pilots with the best in final candidates. I wouldn't change that.

Relationship with monday.com

Pre-Sale Experience

Before the IPO, this was a 10. Since the IPO, we add seats yearly and go through the same used car sales-feeling new vibe at monday.com, which feels much more corporate and profit-first now where it used to feel people-first. They told us on a call once "sorry, we're more focused on bigger accounts than yours now"

Post-Sale Experience

Same as previous, post-IPO corporate culture took over.

Dealing with monday.com

Expect to lose any grandfathered in arrangements despite being a loyal/growing customer for years, and costs to increase significantly YoY especially if monday.com usage gains any traction at your org. Expect to need the enterprise plan if you have any significant need to control access and permissions in any meaningful, long-term sustainably capacity.

Comments

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monday.com brings joy and agility to product, project, and team management