monday.com — I love you but you confuse me.

• Please note, this article is from 2022, monday has absolutely changed their external messaging since.

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I’m a self-proclaimed New Work tool nerd (Not sure what New Work is? Check this article out; for non-German speakers, you can just translate it on most browsers).

I’ve tried out some of the most popular products in the New Work paradigm, from ClickUp to Basecamp, from Mooncamp to Notion — and I swear by some of these forever (Mooncamp and Notion are amazing, by the way. 🙌).

monday.com has been one of the most interesting ones I’ve used, because of its intuitiveness and simple automation capabilities. I stumbled upon it accidentally when I was learning project management during my master studies and Googled ‘Project Management Tool’:

There’s something funky going on with their advertising (the language translations are all over the place, but this isn’t an article about search ads).

So what is monday.com? It’s a tool that helps you track tasks, create and document workflows, collaborate across teams, and more.

Here’s what I looove about monday.com:

I’ve only ever been able to use monday.com in its limited form (more on that later, that’s one of my gripes with the product.). Here’s why I love monday.com:

It’s so intuitive.

Right from the beginning when you sign up, the tool takes you through a survey that helps the tool customize your experience.

When you first reach their homepage:

You can pick what you’re trying to do, and depending on your function, monday.com provides you with a template and a view that is best suited for your needs.

I picked marketing.

During the sign-up, they probe deeper.

Just to show you what I mean, here’s what they asked and I picked something most of us may have stumbled upon at some point — content calendars.

After you pick what you’d like to focus on.

They tailor your experience based on what you pick. For content calendars, they probe deeper:

See that image they’ve placed to the right of this modal? That’s, indeed, how the board looks once you’ve chosen what you want there to be.

They have some amazing templates.

To run with the content calendar example, I just started building a board using one of monday.com’s templates — the content calendar. Here’s what it looks like:

Their onboarding flow is awesome.

They have specific onboarding flows for each template. Check out this one for another of their templates I tried out (the Marketing Strategy template):

And the video details how to use the template to build a marketing strategy workflow.

The UI is pretty

As an outsider to the countless UX vs UI debates I’ve seen on LinkedIn, all I can say is — I love the monday.com UI and it makes me want to use the app more. Is that because they’ve combined great UX with UI? Possibly.

But the problem really is that I haven’t ever had the chance to use monday.com enough to say with conviction that their usability is amazing.

monday.com — I love you, but you confuse me. Here’s how:

My love for this product comes with a ‘but’ — A but about their overall customer experience and positioning (what, you thought I was done talking positioning?! Pffft, never.).

Customer Experience Mystery — Pricing

As an enthusiastic productivity tool user, I do pay for several of these tools. But my decision-making process is quite long, simply because my uses for these tools aren’t very extensive — I just play around with them to stay updated with working trends; and then I may or may not use the same tools again.

But with monday.com…I’ve never been able to get very far with using their app before because it came with a 14-day trial. And that’s fair, they don’t owe any of us free plans (yes, not even utter nerds like me). But recently, I had a look at their website as part of a competitive analysis I was doing for another company.

When I saw they have a ‘free forever’ plan, I signed up! 😁

…Only to receive this in my Inbox.

So, which one is it, Monday.com? 14-day free trial or free forever? 🙄 Quit playing — just tell me if you’re free or not, and I won’t ask again.

This is certainly a communication problem. But where does it stem? Does it go back to their pricing strategy? Or if they did, indeed, change their pricing like I assumed, does it go to their marketing automation team that set up this email to be sent out?

Positioning and Messaging Mystery: Targeting and Consistency

Sorry @ folks working on this awesome tool, but I don’t understand your messaging.

Your headline says, “A Platform Built for a New Way of Working.” And then you ask, “What would you like to manage with monday.com Work OS?”

So here’s what confuses me:

• A platform
• Work OS
• New way of working

Is monday.com a platform or an OS? Because those are actually two different technical concepts. And a software person would know the difference. But I’m willing to let it slide, because perhaps only a software person would know the difference, and monday is targeting a whole bunch of personas…

How about a new way of working? As a fun test while writing this blog, I decided to conduct some informal, unstructured, coffee-time interviews with some folks at my work place across creative teams, software, and marketing. It turns out, when they use productivity tools, they’re not actually looking to reinvent work. Even secondary, published data says so, in case you didn’t believe me. People don’t necessarily want to try a new way of working.

Based on monday’s flashy logos, I’m making the assumption that budget holders don’t actually want a new way of working. They want people to go in and get work done. Just like my colleagues, who said they really want something that gets the job done, isn’t slow, isn’t difficult to use, can integrate with other tools, and doesn’t require too much admin support.

When you say you’re building something for a new way of working, you’re telling a decision-maker that they’re going to need to put a whole change management plan in place. Is that really worth the trouble?

Well, let’s look at a very brutal review to find out.

You can read the review here but the tl;dr version is — the change management part of adopting a new tool ended up in a company losing money. Partially because the tool was not easy to migrate to, and partially because the customer didn’t have a fair picture of what to expect.

Do people actually look at reviews to make decisions?

I mean, I’m a product marketer with experience in building case studies, and I’m working on a customer advocacy program as we speak, so I might be biased. Hoever, In 2018, G2 — a popular software review platform — reported that 90% people made decisions after looking at online reviews. Because let’s face it — if you’re not a productivity tool nerd and are, instead, working at a company looking to scale operations with a new tool, you’re not going to spend a whole lot of time playing around with random productivity tools like me.

Business buyers also look at your LinkedIn company page to make decisions. And that’s another bone of contention between you and me, monday.com. Your LinkedIn page is very well-written. But it doesn’t paint a specific picture of why I should use your product — unless you are targeting software developers, who understand the following things fairly instinctively:

• Work OS
• Open platform
• Build software applications

How can monday.com then improve these things?

The first thing to do, IMO, is to define your GTM strategy. It appears that monday.com’s best bet is to focus on positioning for context, and messaging for use cases. At the moment, it feels like they’re trying to be everything to everyone and their messaging is falling short because it’s so generic.

Here’s what I would do — I’d bring the monday.com product, marketing, and sales teams together to redefine these:

• Positioning
• Messaging
• Customer Experience

What does that look like in terms of next steps?

Evaluate positioning.

• Look for absolute, die-hard fans, and loyal users of the product. Ask them what they love.
• Send out exit surveys to people that stopped using the app to find out why. Or even document and analyze online reviews from churned users. A great place to look for users that churned: Reddit has great reviews that detail why users stopped using monday.com.
• Do a thorough competitive analysis — not just pitting yourself against ClickUp or Asana or Wrike. But instead, go one level deeper. Look at what resources you’re competing for — is it money? Is it time? Also consider people’s attitudes. If you’re marketing to small startups, change management isn’t necessarily a huge problem. But if you’re marketing to enterprises, would a senior manager prefer to stick to Google Docs and notepads?
• Get specific with your market. I see from LinkedIn that your paid advertising strategy is very specific and you do run specific marketing campaigns (loooved the ebook on how to build a great content management team, by the way!). But now, it’s time to replicate this specificity for your entire product. Whom are you serving and how big is this market — is it a specific industry? A specific function in a specific industry? Carve yourself a position around this market category.
• …And then understand why people within this market category need your product. I doubt that it’s about ‘a new way of working’. It’s inarguably about getting the job done and the possible use cases — recording workflows maybe? Establishing and documenting processes? Managing tasks within a team? Managing collaborations across teams? What I’m saying is — find the use case that really gets people to buy.

Then, tie it into your messaging.

• Explain how your product solves the needs you identified. Tie it to value pillars, proof points, and clear key messaging. Paint a picture of success for your user that shows them what life looks like once they’ve used the tool.
• And please cut out the jargon, unless it’s absolutely needed. I like what you’ve done on your own website with simple, clear messaging:

• Translate this simplicity across your online presence — and make it consistent.

And then, review your entire product and marketing mix to address user reviews:

• Is your pricing table up-to-date?
• Are your automations firing correctly?
• Do people get why they should pick you?
• Are you helping users achieve their goals through all your functions — from sales reps to account managers to online marketing?

The verdict is — great product, but unclear positioning, leading to scattered messaging. @ monday.com, I know a product marketer who would love to build out your messaging framework, in case you’re looking.