The 'Impossible Goal' Execution Model
by Daniel Lereya • Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO) at Monday.com
Daniel joined Monday.com when it had roughly 40 employees and $4M ARR, guiding the product and technology organization through hyper-growth to over 2,500 employees and $1B+ in ARR. He has overseen the transition from a single product to a multi-product platform.
🎙️ Episode Context
Daniel Lereya shares the internal transformations Monday.com underwent to scale from a small startup to a multi-product public company. The conversation centers on a pivotal moment where competitor speed forced them to reinvent their engineering culture, the implementation of 'radical transparency' to turn employees into partners, and the necessity of shifting from feature-output to impact-outcomes. He also discusses the counterintuitive risks of not taking bold leaps and how to operationalize ambition.
Problem It Solves
Teams getting stuck in incrementalism, where standard processes yield slow results and 'working harder' isn't the solution.
Framework Overview
A framework for shattering velocity plateaus by setting a target so ambitious that current workflows are mathematically impossible to use, forcing the team to reinvent their underlying infrastructure and process.
🧠 Framework Structure
Identify a 'gift' from the market: Us...
Set a non-linear target: Instead of '...
Build the infrastructure first: Spend...
Hackathon the delivery: Compress the ...
When to Use
When a team is shipping slowly despite high effort, or when a competitor has significantly outpaced you in feature delivery.
Common Mistakes
Setting the goal without allowing the team to change the process (leading to burnout) or failing to build the shared infrastructure before the sprint.
Real World Example
Monday.com realized competitors shipped 30 new column types while they were building one every four months. They re-architected the column infrastructure and held a hackathon, shipping 30 columns in 1.5 months.
If we're going to add 25 more, multiply it by four months... we are lost. So we said, 'Okay, we need to take upon ourselves an ambitious goal, like 25 columns in one month.'
— Daniel Lereya