From developer to builder/system designer, managing AI agents like team members & monday.com’s evolving R&D playbook w/ Daniel Lereya #239

When you talk about people and agents walking together, many times it's not only about achieving the success with a specific task. It's about thinking it's on a project as a whole. And in that sense, you know, you need to invest much more time in planning, you need to invest much more time in splitting the walls and what you want to do. You need to invest much more time in creating these control points. The reality is that you need to manage the agent's fork. And at scale, it's a huge challenge. And many of these are around like having the transparency about what is going on, having the ability to control, having the ability to pinpoint a specific thing within a loud scale of tasks. And in my eyes, this creates actually a new category in the software, which is like actually a software that does work execution for you and manages execution of agents and on-site dealments. Hello and welcome to the Engineering Leadership Podcast brought to you by ELC, the Engineering Leadership Community. I'm Jerry Lee, founder of ELC, and I'm Patrick Gallagher, and we're your hosts. Our show shares the most critical perspectives, habits and examples of great software engineering leaders to help evolve leadership in the tech industry. In this episode, Daniel Lureia, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Monday.com joins us to deconstruct how their operating model is evolving from developer to strategic builder and system designer. We explore why managing AI agents requires the same skills as managing human employees in a fascinating case study where they used AI to decompose a legacy monolith with the agent autonomously managing the project board and assigning strategic high-risk tasks to humans. Let me introduce you to Daniel. Daniel Lureia is the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Monday.com where he focuses on advancing their multi-product vision in driving operational efficiencies to support the company growth. He previously served as VP of R&D and Product leading global teams to shape the company's product strategy. Before joining Monday.com, Daniel held leadership and engineering roles at IBM and SAP. Enjoy our conversation with Daniel Lureia. First off, I just wanted to say welcome. Thank you for joining us on the show. How are you doing? How are things? It's Tuesday. So first of all, thanks for having me. It's pleasure to be here with you. And yeah, you know, it's like a super backed and challenging time. So we're exactly in the middle of the week. I would say extremely intensive, but also like a lot of things are progressing. So overall, great. Yeah. Love it. Well, I wanted to start off with some context for our conversation. Just to kind of frame where we're going to go. When I was reflecting on what I was really excited about for this conversation, I reflect on our conference that happened about two months ago and some of the core problems we were trying to focus on. And there was this one topic where we know that ways of working and how teams operate together, what organizations look like, and then like the strategies and how you assemble those groups to then accomplish and build together is dramatically changing. And so we know that there's a lot of different ways that that's going to look and expand. And what I was excited about with our conversation is, you know, in a conversation of where workflows and organizations are changing, we should talk to somebody who's at the cutting edge of defining what those experiences and what those new capabilities look like to help us build and do new things. And so when I think about your journey at Monday, you've been there for over eight years from 40 people to over 2,500 people and from the earliest days to over a billion dollars AR. And so this is a huge scaling journey. And you know, you and I were talking about the F1 metaphor in this sort of safety car compression and a new race sort of restarting and you've got to, you've got to now execute and sort of this next moment. You're now at another big moment for Monday and helping kind of redefine work in a lot of different ways. And so I think maybe to kick off our conversation, Daniel, like, you know, you've seen a lot of things in this scaling journey and developed perspectives on the frameworks or the playbooks that worked then. And now it's sort of this new moment where the top drivers on the race have to now deploy different strategies and things like that. So I guess in this moment, when you're thinking about where Monday.com is at and where things are going and evolving, like, what's your perspective right now? Like, what are you really tuned into and what are you focused on in terms of how engineering and product are changing right now? Like from this holder, I know this is kind of a big question. So we can kind of unpack this in a couple different ways. But I just kind of want to say like this has been a big moment. Like you've been with Monday.com for a long time. And now there's a big major shift going on. How are you thinking about that shift? Maybe we'll start with there. Yeah, it's a very good question. And yeah, right. Like, first of all, I say extremely fortunate to be, you know, with the company and like to undergo this kind of unique journey of scaling. So I can really say that during this journey, there were a lot of points in time in which the operating model is how we manage the company, the engineering and so on and needed to be shifted. But to your point, I think it might be off to start with how we see a good organization or like at least what is our culture and what do we feel is extremely important in it. And I can say that what's unique about Monday is in the culture. And my eyes is that we really built the culture around free main principles. First, it's ownership, which means that we really want to give people the full ability to act, to operate, to take decisions, to make mistakes. And we really believe that if you give ownership to the right people, they can take the company to the best place. So we really don't believe in like, you know, a situation in which there is a mastermind and then a lot of people that are doing like all the things that this mind actually thinks about, other you can think about it like a set of nuance that's running. And we always love to say that this is one of the reasons why we scale with planes and not with hands. The second thing is about transparency. So we believe strongly that if you give people the context, if you give people all the information. First, it creates a different dynamics within the organization. It teaches politics because everything is open for everyone from the financials, all the way to how people engage with the product, all the way to the problems that we share with the board. And this gives them the perspective and the ability to act for a different place. Okay, as if they have like the same context as you have. And the last thing is about the speed of execution. We build the entire organization around speed, around the fact that we'll be able to have very fast iterations that will get to the market extremely early and get feedback and continue and run fast. And you know where we said strategy is extremely important. But you can think about it that if you have like, I don't know, 30 bullets in your ammunition, you can do much, much more than if you have free and you need to make sure that you hit. So we really believe in that sense that speed of execution is a strategic advantage. And we built everything around that. So the builders in Monday and we can elaborate later on what that means. But basically it's the product engineering, product design and data. Everyone that builds the product with their own ends. We always wanted to have relatively small amount of people. But with very high talent density, making sure that everyone counts, that everyone makes a change. I think that many many of these things like currently served us in an amazing way with the challenge of AI and with the opportunity with AI. Because maybe just in a high level, then we can dive deeper. But I think that what AI actually allows is taking these concepts to the extreme. Because suddenly the impact that an individual can have increased significantly. Suddenly, the boundaries between the different professions are blurred. And you can have people that run forward with full stack capabilities all the way. And suddenly you can push speed of execution to a different place. So like in many aspects, I feel that with AI now, organizations can take these principles and actually implement them in a much like water or deeper way. And this is how I see it. So in many ways, you know, I feel that AI actually allows us to accelerate these kind of things and also implement them in scale. Because when we were like 50 people or 100 people in the build us organization, it's one kind of a challenge. But when you want to scale it, it's a different kind of challenge. And I think that now with AI, because the power it brings to people, you can actually do it even at scale. Just in reflecting on what you're sharing. So, you know, we're talking about like the operating model had to shift a lot at Monday.com. And what I appreciated how you deconstructed this was you sort of dove into the operating model change but the types of culture and the goal of these organizations sounded like it stayed consistent around like the culture of ownership transparency and speed of execution. And this vision that this is a culture of builders and a small amount of highly talented people building extraordinary things like that was the goal is like let's build a culture, a system and an organization around these qualities and conditions. And then for you to talk about how AI sort of allows you to implement and accelerate building that type of culture, I think that's an interesting, there's an interesting sort of perspective layer there. There's one particular practice as you're sharing this that I'd want to get into because I can see this being a key operating model that helps bring a lot of these qualities and characteristics to life. And this is something that I know you've talked about around the shifting role of developers from being just a developer to being strategic builders and more system designers. And so I'm wondering if you can maybe reflect on that a little bit and tell us a little more about like what do you mean by that? And what are some of the ways you're starting to see that show up at Monday.com? So first I just want to say like what is the builder's concept? So we really believed that teams should operate in many ways like a startup. And we try to think what is so unique about startups that allows them, you know, to do it impossible and to create a value from zero to one and to win like big company. And in many ways we felt that one very important thing is that they share the same destiny regardless to their profession. So a builder's team in Monday actually owns a real world target and everyone acts together. So they win and face together. And it doesn't like matter if I did my world for instance, we all care about the result. And then the boundaries are also blurry and we allow people to excel not only in the defined profession, but also between these gaps. So now with AI, I think that the builder's concept takes even more prominent part in how we see things moving forward. So we are now thinking about creating a builder world, which means that it's not like we operate as builders, but we need each and every function within the builders in order to operate as one builder. Then it's a new type of profession in which you can do more than one profession in one person. And I think that of course there are challenges in which it's very good fit. And once that are not that are complex and you need profession and depth and so on. But I do believe that anyway, we see developers that can now take things from end to end. You know, they have the product sense, they can do things in a more holistic and a more rounded way, especially with things that are like zero to one run extremely fast. And many of that is due to AI because you know, many of the things right now, you can suddenly like it's much more accessible. You want data about what you're developing and analyze results, you can do it. You want to create, you know, a prototype and to go to customers and get feedback, you can suddenly do it. And you are much less, I would say, contained to your own specific profession. And we always felt that each and every one of the builders should be accountable for the result. This means that they need to be very rounded in their skills. And they need also to be very holistic in how they understand the problem space and also the solution space. So back in the days, even like nine years ago, you know, we had developers that are like actually looking at AB test results and getting decisions and so on. I think that now it's the renaissance of death like on steroids. Okay. Anyway, so I think the developers like now, aside from the fact that we look for more holistic perspective, now they can actually operate on it. And this is super interesting. And this is all, by the way, for other professions as well, like two weeks ago, we had a designer that saw something within the product that she really wanted to change it. It was around, you know, things around like very specific design issue on padding and borders and so on. And it always got, you know, pushed to their next situation and so on. So she asked one of the developers to sit with her and to have like Castle running and walking for her. And she said, I would try to fix it. And she created a pull request. This pull request actually was accepted by the developers. You know, and this is like a new world, right? Suddenly, when you look at a team like tasks, products can contribute, you know, design can contribute. And this is only from the coding aspect. So I think that, you know, this is true also for the prototyping and other things that we said. So in my eyes, like the eye as much as going to progress to allow more people to be builders by profession. And I really believe in it. And I think that for some cases, it can create a total new dynamics and push, you know, the on a ship and push the speed of execution to a whole new. Wanted to dive into it to an example here. Because I think as soon as you start talking about the some of the actions the designer took and what that blurring role looked like for them. I think that's a really powerful illustration of like the new types of actions and the speed of execution that become possible. And so you, you were talking about how you build a roles and these like builder groups own a real world outcome. So then what does it look like for them to work together? Is there a project or a launch that you've been particularly excited that kind of represents? Or signals the kind of the promise of this optimizing roles around this type of function? Yeah. So I can share that everything that we do in Monday starts with what are we trying to achieve. We really believe a strong believers in like setting goals and KPIs that we really believe in. And in many ways, like first really understand the problem and what you're trying to achieve before you start thinking about solutions. Okay, so this is true for everyone, but if I be more specific, I think that you know, I give you an recent example, which I really love. And I think really embody this concept and where it can go. So we launched for an early preview a product called agent factoring. And it's basically you can see it. It's live and it's basically a product that helps you build your own agents with no code with just plain text. You write like with a point what you want to do and you can continue and edit it. And the end result is a document that specifies what this agent does. And before launching it, we started discussing about the fact that we really believe that the world of focus shifting. And software should transform from managing your work to actually doing the work for you. And a huge part of it is like allowing businesses to have agents working for them. Not only for things that we know and believe are important, but also for all the wide space that they have within the organization. So we want to create a platform to create exactly that. And then we started so many discussions. How it should look like should agents be like that should the experience be like that. Should it be like a text base or should it be more of a world flow builder and so on. And so for so many questions and discussions and then one of the people in the team south, which is actually leading the major part of the efforts in Monday. He went to weekend and he came back with a walking portal. And you know, you suddenly see if you think about it, he thought about like the product. He thought about the design. He created the code, you know, and he created the product that actually looks good. And suddenly the reality was, you know, the based on for the reality changed dramatically. And it's really changed like, first of all, the iterations that we managed to do on it because suddenly everything became concrete. Suddenly we could experiment and see how it went. We can put it in front of customer's face. And I think in that regards like this is exactly the spots of like the builder mentality and the fact that you have one engineer. In that case, is an engineering, you know, it's is an engineering director and it took like a weekend and food that weekend actually moved us, you know, for bleep forward. Since he did it also people within the team are doing it. So we have less discussions about like should he be like that? Should we actually, you know, think about and hypothesis. And then the person who actually deal with the problem can actually push us forward to a walking software that we can validate. I think it's that's an incredible story to hear kind of the origin of an agent factory and that it came from a major prototype effort of like a worked weekend. Here it is. And then to see the acceleration of conversations and the impact of that is really powerful. What is it looked like to operationalize like that type of behavior across different teams and build some of these more builder groups? What has it been like to sort of scale that out into different groups beyond just that senior director? Yeah. So first of all, like, I need to be honest that, you know, we're in the process of, you know, when it's still far away from what we want to be. But I think that many of the things that we did are actually serving us as fundamentals for this one. So first of all, in order to create this kind of motion, I think that transparency is key because if you want people to do these kind of things, they need to understand the challenges of the company. They need to understand the strategy. They need to live and breathe the numbers. They need to be extremely connected to customers. So I think that transparency for many companies actually means that the information is somewhere, you know, but for me, it means that we intentionally share and create a short context about, you know, the challenges that we have the problem space and where we want to be. And most strategically, and together with in the day to day, all the numbers that helps you get feedback from the real world. So I think this is the first very important thing that people need to do if they want to take this approach forward because this builder role can only be someone that really understands the bigger picture and can take something in a very holistic way. And you can do it if you don't understand the bigger picture. So maybe I'll share just one complete example. Please. Yes. That was going to be my next question because it's usually talking about that. Like that is the hard work of leadership is to be able to share that context that people can make effective action around. So I'm like, oh, yeah, context would be great. I'll give you an example from the early days of Monday and maybe how it's like scaled with us, what is yours? But back in the days, we really believe in dashboards. If you come to our office, you see that every team has its own space, a lot of dashboards, we have like so like the walls within the builder's floors and in general in Monday, I'll cover it with TVs. And the reason for that is that we really believe that if everyone are looking at success on the same way and also get the feedback from the real world in terms of like our successful or not. It's the best nor star is the best way to take decisions. They don't need to ask me if I feel it's the right direction. They have the reality for that. And this is very important. So at the beginning of the company, we had a one major dashboard with the number of paying customers that we have. And you know, even having that this single number created alignment with flow walls with everyone around the company. Because before that people could say, listen, I'm doing this effort and this effort and it's great. But suddenly everything is rooted back to did we manage to increase this number as much as we wanted. And if yes, great, we can all celebrate together. If no, we failed. Okay, so today we build an infrastructure in Monday and within an internal system called big brain, which is like an internal tool that we use within the company and each team can do with just few simple clicks, say what are the numbers that he lives by and then it gets like a daily message with this number. And for instance, for agent factory, okay, so the first thing that we did is actually drafting this message and the discussion around what success looks like actually took the form of like, how do we want to see them then like numbers each and every day. And it drove a very meaningful discussion from that on every day like the first paying customer for agent factory was like a huge huge conversation within the channel in Slack. It's like daily numbers. And I think this is just an example of how we can really align people to a specific goal and to create transparency that matters that is actionable. It's not just like sharing high level context and so on. Suddenly they have like the sense whether they're moving in the right direction or not. Yeah, I love the idea of like operationalizing transparency in this kind of way. And some of the other parts that you were talking about with helping people understand the challenges, the strategy, the numbers and connect them to customers. Are there other mechanisms or structures in how you communicate that information. So like when you're helping people understand, you know, this is the problem space that we want to be in. Like what does that typically look like from your side to help create that shared context around some of those things that maybe are not as concrete as a dashboard or delivered in in a repeatable way similar to the daily numbers. How about some of those other other like a problem space type pieces of context. Yeah. So this connects both to this and ownership. A lot of the efforts that we start with start with the sound on in the tweak call internally a kickoff meeting. And a kickoff meeting is usually a meeting for the team that is working on it together with the most significant stakeholders. So it's a very small form and the kickoff meeting is basically usually it's the product leading this meeting, but not just the team actually explains about the problem and why that it's an opportunity for Monday. So think about it that you spent like around 20 minutes in making sure that everyone see the same problem and opportunity and a good out of this meeting would be that during this, you know, chapter of the meeting everyone that sits in the room are like starting to say, well, it's crazy. We need to do it. We got to do it. We have ideas about how to solve it. This is a good proxy that you did a good job, but we don't talk about solutions at all. We just talk about the opportunity. And for instance, I can share that Monday is a multi product company and even the products that we initiated started like that. We started with the keycom rating for instance for Monday service, one of their, you know, product leaders that we added the company was at the maternity leave during her maternity leave. She did a lot of research and she got to a conclusion that for us, like internal requests or enterprise service management is a huge, huge opportunity. She did this. She actually built this kick off the first part is about like the ability of understanding the public space and their PM actually shares, first of all data, it can be both qualitative and quantitative. It shows the competitive landscape and shows why he thinks there's an opportunity there for this option basically flowing get you a lot of points that makes you understand both the opportunity at the challenge story, but also the opportunity to operate on it. So the second part is to say, okay, this is the team commitment with this in mind will really believe that we can drive this and that goal. And I think this is a very important step in the meeting. It's not just it's an opportunity. Let's go. No, we thought about it's really hard and we have a foundation to believe that we can actually drive a significant impact. The last part which is usually extremely short is about like the first steps and the next thing date, but I think the most important point here is about like really understanding the public space and also our ability to operate within it. And this is true for like setting up a new product and this is true for major features. And it's also true for both efforts. So we are the team that says listen, we did a huge research on the final of Monday, you know from add all the way to conversion. We spend a lot of time there, we have a very strong PRG motion to say, listen, we really believe that we can improve conversion by 30% and let us show you how and then they did like the department space and they showed us customers, the channels and they showed us data and how people thought they showed us different products and how they do things that we do not in the same good way, but we have a lot of phone for improvement. And then we believe we can drive it in 30% and I think that this is a very important method. You need to have access to all the data, you know, for instance, in that case, then that example, this PM need to know the entire company numbers, the funnels, everything, you know, in many companies, this is not transparent. So people can relate on it, they can't even detect problems, challenges, opportunities. So this is one and second, once the team is the one doing like they actually kick off, they own it, you know, it's not the twisted, we need to improve conversion. No, they are actually convincing us as leadership that this is what we need to do and this is how success looks like. So I think this is one very important, you know, method that you can actually implement that both like relies on this transparency and create the sense of ownership. What has been an unexpected result of our conversation, Daniel is, you know, I'm looking at ownership, transparency and speed of execution is we've been sort of deconstructing like the modern ways that these show up in terms of how organizations operate. And I'm very excited about that because my next question is about speed of execution and what I really wanted to talk about was some of the dynamics around AI agents and how it's impacting how organizations and teams start to work together and like how this starts to fit in because I know that with some of the different products and money. You all are starting to think about some of these collaborations and what are, what is the future look here. So when I'm thinking about like, oh, like the goal is also speed of execution. I see this is probably an important sort of capability or manifestation of helping drive speed of execution or empowering teams around that. So I think maybe a gut check is that accurate. And then maybe two is like, I would love to kind of dive into some of the ways that you're thinking about seamless collaboration between humans and AI agents and the different stakeholders knowing that this is something that like internally how you operate is really important. But then also to when you think about teams using Monday.com how this is going to empower them in those types of relationships and collaboration structures. So okay, I was kind of a big question there, but I guess like thoughts reactions. Let's dive in. It really depends. Okay. I don't know if you feel the same, but there are many aspects in which agents and like agentic outcomes actually creates more world for you. Like I'll give you just a few examples, you know, first, suddenly everyone are writing a lot of documents, very long ones. And you see like this kind of behavior where I only wanted to chat with you about two three points. But then I put it in, you know, one of their chats in order to make it look great and professions on what actually the other side is doing is taking that and put it again in the chat to get what you wanted in the first day. So this is just an example, but it's tough for everything, you know, for marketers, flying stars, you know, suddenly you can do 10 different concepts for marketing campaign. Someone needs to review them and actually decide. So this abundance of like ability and I think that if it's not being used correctly or in the right way, it can actually create more world. Okay, and this is an important thing to say, but with that, if you look at the world ecosystem and space, I also believe it presents a huge, huge opportunity for businesses. And you know, first, I think that with agents suddenly companies are not bounded to their headcount. This is like a huge, huge transformation. If you think about it, so think about, for instance, the dynamics between SMBs and enterprises, it's going to shift dramatically right because suddenly SMBs can have a global go to market team, which is a genetic that is talking every language that answers like follow up on leads instantly 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And suddenly they can compete and they have also the expertise because agents can be bring a lot of expertise into, you know, specific and vertical topics. So I think this is one opportunity that suddenly workforce is infinite. And in that regard, I think it's going to transform dramatically the dynamics of different companies companies that will adopt that. I think we'll see great success and we'll see that they managed to achieve more fastest and also faster and also in higher quality. This is another impact of agents that I think with a very short amount of time, the level of service companies are providing will be different. The expectations would be extremely different. You'll expect everything immediate. You'll expand everything to be in a very high bond, so on and so forth. To that respect, I think that now we started implementing a lot of agents doing the work for us. Our personal experience was that first you take a specific mission and then you do it with agents. Let's say for example, okay, we'll take an example from go to market team, they take like we implemented internally an agent that is doing an SDR. It's actually contacting leads or people that left their details within Monday's contact sales form and qualifies them. So at the beginning, you do that and you see the immediate gain because you managed to do it and it's amazing. But then you start to scale and elaborate that and there comes the new complexity. I think that for many people like the role would actually change. Okay, so if let's say in the past, I had the team of SDR that I needed to you know work with and I come in the morning and I see what age and everyone of them has done and sit with them to actually improve and like make sure that we continue to you know to improve how we do it. Now in the morning, I need to come and see what my agents have done and in many ways, I think it shifts the challenge and makes it a bit different. I think that with agents suddenly being like very precise about what you want to achieve creating these feedback points in the in your processes, creating the touch points in which you can actually see that the agents work is done correctly and also investing a lot of training in them suddenly become a call part of your days. So this is something which is shifting with agents because with people, you know, people are creative, they create one out of zero. I think that with agents what we see is they need their own like very specific instructions. But from the other hand, you know, working with agents, especially when you do it in large scale, there are also similarities in working with people right because I recently been in our customer conference and elevate and we announced on the agent factory and we announced all these kind of things around the eye and I had a customer saying listen, managing agents is pretty much like managing people because my employees currently I need to work with them. I need to make sure that I have the right feedback points, I need to make sure that everyone are clear about what they need to do and what how they actually do the handshake. So I think that for one hand, there is a lot of similarities and but from the other hand, there are things that I feel for my experience that working with agents really pushes you intellectually because you need to constantly move a machine and that this machine actually does exactly what you say. In order to improve it constantly, you need constantly to raise the ball in terms of how you guided and I think that with humans many times like the machine improves itself is way because people are creative and people are doing things that are not necessarily defined to them. When I'm thinking about what are the capabilities that teams or leaders need to have, it's how to essentially build the framework like the operating approach to this practice and like become familiar with how to actually manage and like strategically deploy. And so part of my question is like to continue to dig into how to do that and like what that looks like and I think one of these sort of paradigms is this idea of like a developer becoming a system designer. And so I think I wanted to kind of unpack maybe what that looks like a little bit because like as you're describing this like you're describing like very intentionally architecting a workflow and approach and a system of how things get done from driving clarity to then building in the feedback points. Can you talk a little bit about like the shift that you're seeing for people moving to this systems design approach across different capability so not just development, but as you're describing like the go to market teams are like yeah like the whole go to market system is totally changing. So can you be talking about like this approach of shifting to systems design? Yeah, maybe we'll take a like a little example which is really recent formal engineering so every engineering organization we have the huge huge you know challenge of what we call splitting the monolith basically something that we're working on for years it's like making the transformation from one big server and service into like a lot of micro services or services architecture and it's endless right each each and every organization have it is that it takes years and so on. And we said okay now we want to do this and try to see if we can actually do this with AI and to see the benefit of it with AI because we feel that this is from one hand it's very complex task because there are a lot of things you need to consider dependencies and like how it affects different portions or parts of the system but from the other end we really know what we want to achieve. So one of our engineers took actually a month and tried to build this new way of doing the split of the monolith with agents and he had like an incredible journey. First of all it's important to say like in the first week he came back and said listen AI is not good for that. It's going sideways you know and we said no we will invest the time let's be persistent and try to do it and then he started building a lot of things with this agents and first of all what he saw is that in many ways you need to split the walk into multiple agents that are doing the walk but then you need a central place to control that. So in one of the meetings that he showed the status suddenly opened the board with Monday board it's like the main entity of Monday where people actually manage the walk and he showed us that the board has been written by AI. AI is like there was an agent that he actually created of deconstructing the big big task into a very small task it was five by five that he listed there he said I got to have the board because I don't know what the AI did or not. And I need a way to control it and see that we're like on track so this is one thing that for me was like really mind blowing the fact that it's not that it's a black magic out there you want it to be white box as much as possible so in many ways you need one source of truth which everyone can see both people and agents that serves as their way to control and track which and what work has been done where you at and so on. And on this board you had it's actually one of the first boards that we had agents and people working together so it served both you know for control but also for collecting things and making sure that things don't go sideways and if they do you know exactly where and so on so this was one thing. The second thing is that he started working on this agency and create an agent that actually takes the code and like splitted what he saw is that this agent is actually starting to fix bugs that he thinks about during that process and we didn't want that right because it's super super risky as it is you don't want it to change be ever because you don't know the implications. So he came up with something that for me was mind blowing this agent instead of fixing the bugs left human to do is within the code like things that he said OK I find about a form the bug I didn't fix it but it created a task for people to fix it and this is another like very important point in my eyes is like really understanding what are the points in which the agents actually need the human to do the judgment the human to do that the fix and so on. And this human to do is a concept that we say OK all these human to do are things that we see people manage within Monday which is really crazy and there were a lot of things about it as well but I think these are just examples about how you know it changes how you walk and when we do this status meetings we went over the board and you know suddenly we had a dashboard about the projects and how we pulled less and so on and so forth. And most of the work and even the parking and creating the tasks was done by AI which is quite crazy I love I just have to remark on the week one this is not working it's going sideways and then very soon after then to have built this like pretty incredible infrastructure that's really actually putting into practice this sort of multimodal way of building and so like having the centralized dashboard having that kind of being written by AI and then to have that space is like a kind of a multimodal collaboration space I think is is really powerful. And so when you reflect on this story what does that make you think in terms of the future ways that AI and humans collaborate like where do you see this go from here either within Monday or or beyond like when you're thinking about like some of the patterns or the implications of this one engineer taking multi agents building out this new system doing this really complex project. We're what are you seeing kind of for the future this so first I think that when you talk about people and agents walking together many times it's not only about achieving the success with specific task it's about thinking is on a project as a whole and in that sense you know you need to invest much more time in planning you need to invest much more time in splitting the walls and what you want to do you need to invest much more time in creating these control points and I think this actually creates a new category for software of managing this kind of world the reality is is that you need to manage the agents walk and at scale it's a huge your challenge and many of these are around like having the transparency about what is going on having the ability to control having the ability to actually pinpoint a specific thing within a loud scale of task and in my eyes this creates actually a new kind of you know a new category in the software which is like actually a software that does walk execution for you and manages execution of agents alongside humans so this is one thing which is really important I also think that with human and agents something that really occupies our mind in Monday and how we build things for instance we have another thing that we recently launched which is Monday sidekick you can think about it as a core pilot but it's a core pilot that first of all it's a reflection of you meaning that within Monday he knows everything that you know he has the permissions for what you have the permissions for knows your role he knows your title he knows the relationship that you have the Fibre because they communicate within Monday so it becomes something that is extremely fitted to what you want I also think that with human and agents collaboration huge part of humans work will be around creating this kind of context making sure that it's from one hand wide as possible but from the other hand it's not and I would say relevant for this specific things that you are trying to achieve many of software that now provide agent solution don't pay enough attention to this point exactly of the need to actually train these agents and make sure that suddenly there is a new button for work you come to the office and you need to review agents work and you need to improve them and this is something that back in the days you had only daily meeting with your team now you need like a daily routine of like actually monitoring agents work and actually improving them on a day to day basis so I think this is another important point that software should be focused on how we can actually make agents better overtime and better also means extremely customized to what you need to your specific challenge through the way you want to walk and so this is another thing in my eyes which is really important between agents and humans walk and last thing I would say is I really believe that it creates new roles okay like software developer that is currently only coding and executing task I think it's not not the right path in general but also now this is something that I would be amazing at and will continue to improve that in that sense all of like developers or builders is like deep understanding of problems making sure that they have a focused vision about what they want to achieve being able to articulate this kind of thing and to create the right context that augments this directions and this requires different way of thinking in a way I like I love to say that suddenly you know every builder is now a team lead in a way to build his team and one of the things that we were now doing in Mondays actually thinking about how to build these teams a major part of our walk is not only doing the walk within the product is actually doing the work on how we walk in order to achieve the work in the product with agents and with AI in general. Amazing did you already be mindful of our time we've got some rapid fire questions for anywhere couple minutes over I just want to check and see if you have maybe two or two minutes to do some rapid fire. Yeah, yeah, okay, perfect. Yeah, awesome. Okay, the first one. Where are you reading or listening to right now I really like to listen to podcasts. I feel like very interesting episodes that I think like really many think one is about like AGI I think it's a company that talks about like it's one of the leading people like building this kind of is talking about like what AI is currently really good at and with that what are the gaps that we need in order for it to be really like you know thinking as we like to think about it like creating new things or this is one last episode that really make me think because I feel that all of us need to actually deeply understand that it's super powerful. So this is one also very recently I listen to an episode with intercoms founder about the change that they did. I think it was in Lenny's podcast, which I also really love hearing about like the internal thoughts and challenges really resonated with me. So yeah. Okay, next question. What is a tool or methodology that's had a big impact on you one of the methodology is that had the big impact on me is like setting ambitious goals. In many ways we at Monday always wanted to think big and we wanted to create ambitious goals that you don't necessarily that makes you uncomfortable in your chair because you don't know how you're going to get there, but it drives you to think differently. So I think in many ways like this period in time is also like that because if you only said goals and things that you know how to achieve will probably won't do the radical change that is needed right now in order to be a winner in new world. So setting ambitious goals is a methodology that I'm like personally and also as a leader, I think it's one of the most meaningful ones in how we derive the life for process and how we manage to do transformations that are not just iterations, but also for blips in many ways. I really like this like this idea that you won't do the radical change necessary unless you're setting goals where you don't like the path to achieve them isn't super clear. I like that practice. Okay, what is a trend you're seeing or following that's been interesting or hasn't hit the mainstream yet. One thing that I'm watching watching closely is around vibe coding and you know, we took a very specific approach around vibe coding. So it's not something that has gone unnoticed. I'd but I do feel that a lot of trends now with AI have a hype around them, but you don't take it to the full extent of what it means in practice. I think in that sense like vibe coding, I really feel that it's a huge huge power and a huge huge I see it as something really meaningful. I don't think it's going to go away, but with that I also think it suited for specific things. It's not going to replace all the software on the planet and because creating products is a lot more than coding specific things. I really believe that with time we'll see that things that are not suited by coding and done with it will require, you know, support and services down below. I love that. All right, Daniel, last question. Is there a quote or a mantra that you live by or a quote that's been resonating with you right now? I give you a quote. We've been once in we take all the builders to build a ski golf. It's a huge event. It's global. We talk about strategy all the way to dims showing what they're going to do. It's a very exciting day in one of the last years we did it in Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv. It's a big university and there was a sign that the people who succeed are the ones who fall in love with the problem and not fall in love in the solution. I think it's super relevant to our days. Many of the things that we need to do is going back to what are we trying to solve for? Yeah, falling in love with the problem is something that really resonates with me. Daniel, this has been a pleasure to dive into some of the how ways of working or changing. Thank you for exposing all of the different insights in ways that you're seeing the world shift things are moving so fast. And it means a lot to me to have your help sort of translate and clarify what's happening and why and what you can do about it. It's been a ton of fun sort of taking a look at builders, the way agents are changing collaboration and how all this can amplify like the core cultural values that you want to have within your company. So I just want to say thank you. Thank you so much. It was pleasure. 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