Inside Marketing Design at monday.com

Welcome back to Inside Marketing Design. This is a show where we go behind the scenes with tech companies and learn about their brand and marketing design processes from the people who are doing that work. I'm your host Charli Marie. I'm the Creative Director at ConvertKit. And I'm very excited about today's guests. Yes, plural, there are two of them. 'Cause they work on the marketing design for a tool that I use every day in my work at ConvertKit. 

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In this episode, I'm speaking with Noga Grinberg and Danielle Hassan from monday.com. monday offers workflow management tools that help teams to collaborate on projects and stay productive. They are a global team with offices in the US, in London, in Sydney, in Poland, as well as Tel Aviv where Danielle and Noga are based. They've both been at the company for about two years and they each cover different sides of branded marketing design at monday.com, working on different channels, which is why it was great to have both of them come on the show to be interviewed. I know you're gonna get a lot of value from hearing about their approach to data and ownership as well as hearing about the process behind creating a Super Bowl ad, which I definitely love learning about. 

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First though, a huge thanks to Webflow for sponsoring the season of Inside Marketing Design. If you find that you're not able to iterate and make changes to your marketing site without it requiring a lot of dev time, then perhaps you should consider switching to Webflow. Not only does it have a visual canvas that you can build the site in, but it also has a really powerful CMS that lets you create collections of content and easily work with that content, and the data stored in it in your designs. If you've been stuck using something like WordPress in the past for a while, then I know you're gonna be mind blown at the possibilities that come from having total control over CMS fields and how they appear in your design. I know that was something that really stood out for me when I first switched my sites to Webflow. You can learn more about it at insidemarketingdesign.com/webflow. 

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But now let's take a look inside marketing design at monday.com. Welcome to Inside Marketing Design, Danielle and Noga. Let's start by you telling us a little bit about each of your roles at monday.com.

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Danielle: So I am a Creative Designer at the web presence team, which is basically in charge of the homepage of monday and the website, and the entire experience of the users and tier signups.

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Charli: Nice. And what about you, Noga?

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Noga: I am also a Creative Marketing Designer. I am part of the app marketplace channel, a user marketing which is a new channel which will probably elaborate more about it and the brand awareness channel.

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Charli: Nice. And where do your roles fit into the team at monday?

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Danielle: So we are part of the marketing department. Our channel, which is another name for teams. This is how we call it in monday, are a part of the marketing department. And we are also a part of the Design Guild which contain all other designers product, internal brand, user research, video and motion. And it's around 90 designers.

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Charli: Whoa.

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Danielle: So, yeah. We are 16 creative marketing designers within the guild and we are also in the marketing department.

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Charli: So within that, do you report up like in the org structure to marketing, but then you are part of the design guild you meet as a like cross-functional team.

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Danielle: Exactly.

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Charli: Nice. So you mentioned, channels is like your way of having teams. How many different channels are there and do you work on like more than one channel as designers?

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Noga: We have about 15 channels. It's social acquisition, organic social, YouTube, SEO, partners, user marketing, app marketplace. Like there's a lot and we keep adding more. I think, since I started monday, I always have two channels, even three like right now. But it really depends on how wide. I mean, you could be like 70% in brand awareness and another 30% of your work week would be like another channel.

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Charli: And what is it like for you that split?

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Noga: So it changes. But right now, I'm like 70% on the app marketplace. 'Cause it's really like a focus of the company right now.

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Charli: Yeah.

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Noga: And it's an area that didn't really have any marketing till now and it really grew organically. So now in this point of time, my focus. But before that, I was like 50-50 brand awareness and like the other channels.

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Charli: Yeah. And what about you Danielle?

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Danielle: I'm a hundred percent in web presence. When I started, I was in Google Adwords and web presence was smaller. But over time, we saw, okay, we have tons of work here. Let's do it at that time. So it's very dynamic.

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Charli: Yeah. And you mentioned that there's about, what did you say, 16 of the creative marketing designers?

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Danielle: Yes.

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Charli: So how many designers per channel?

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Danielle: Usually, it's one per channel.

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Charli: Okay. Is that, how it is for you? Is that, are you the only one on web presence? I'm gonna guess, that there's more on that side.

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Danielle: Yeah, good guess. So for a while, I've been the only one. But I think three or four months ago, we got another amazing designer.

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Charli: Nice.

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Danielle: So now we are two. But I think, it's the only channel that have two. Yeah, design.

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Charli: Wow.

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Noga: Also, brand awareness.

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Charli: Ah, also the brand awareness. Okay. So brand awareness has more than one as well, especially at the moment, given that your focus is more on the marketplace. That makes sense.

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Noga:- Right.

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Charli: Yeah. It's really interesting to me to hear that a company, the size of monday.com had just you Danielle on web presence for a while. 'Cause I mean, it's at ConvertKit, it was just me on our marketing site but we were only a team of 60 at that point. So it made more sense.

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Danielle: I think, it's a matter of growing like over the time, the planning to record more and more designers. It's a matter of time.

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Charli: I know that at monday.com, there's a real sense of like ownership of the channels that you work on as well. Tell me more about what owning a channel really means at monday.com.

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Noga: So each channel is a team. Some are bigger, some are smaller as we said. And a team can consist of a marketing manager, a content writer, a product marketing manager, and of course, a designer. And basically, it means owning the professional aspect of design in the channel. We're not service providers, we work as a team. The design guild that monday is an integral part of the decision making process like setting the KPIs and the priority of project in the channel. And I really think, that what's unique about monday is that every stakeholder, is viewed as a thought partner. All of our voices are really relevant to the strategy and sometimes even lead the decisions we take as a team. I can and actually am expected to challenge the content writer for example. So I can see something and say, hey, it doesn't make sense to say it this way. And they listen and change accordingly and vice versa. Or sometimes, we think of the copy when we mock something up and it just, we go with it. 'Cause everyone on a team like it. And also, if I have an idea for a new creative, there's no reason I won't start kicking it off the next day and promoting it. And this is what I'm expected to do too. Raise the ideas, I go, I check it, I user test it. I share it with the team. And it also puts me in the position of leading the team and the team's decisions.

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Charli: I love what you said about how your integral partners and not service providers. 'Cause I think that is, in my opinion, that's the key to succeeding in the roles that we work in is thinking in that mindset and not just churning out the work, doing exactly what someone like spells out in a brief. But like bringing your own thoughts and opinions to it as well.

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Noga: Right. It's not the top down approach. We're part of the strategy completely.

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Charli: Yeah. That's fantastic. And does that mean that every designer at monday, or at least on the creative marketing roles, is everyone quite at a senior level to be making those types of decisions?

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Noga: Titles change, but the designers at monday, and I think all the people that work here have critical thinking and a broad view of things, and have a senior state of mind. So whatever a channel or a project will be, is what we make of it. Yeah, I think it's kind of like the culture and the people that work here.

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Charli: Yeah. That everyone has that like critical thinking aspect to them.

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Noga: Right. We're like a little bit of entrepreneurs each in our own channel. Yeah.

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Charli: I've heard that be described before as entrepreneurs where you are like being entrepreneurial but inside a company. Yeah, I like it. Tell me more about the culture of feedback then. That comes from this idea of everyone owning decisions and like you can decide what is the best design for the projects that you own. But what does that mean for feedback and how do you share feedback on each other's work?

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Danielle: So in general, as we say, we have a very pro feedback culture in monday. And we really encourage to hear everyone voices and to hear the inputs from everyone. 'Cause we work with experts, each one in its own field and it's very valuable for us to learn from everyone. But if we're like drill down to the channel level, we actually kick off every project with the team brainstorm and we set the quarter KPIs and goals together. In general, we are part of aspect, sorry, with the team. And we also have the design guild that we are doing peer to peer review inside of it, design reviews. And we also meet on a weekly and monthly basis. And even though we work on different teams and the day to day, we all share the same design values in a way of work. So the guild is really built to give us the support and each one has its own like unique skill set, and we complete each other. And also, like despite all of the feedbacks, I would definitely say that no one is there bottleneck. Like at the end of the day, I have the full ownership and autonomy, decide on the project I'm in charge of. I can take all the feedbacks, decide what is like good for it or not, and continue with this for the good and for the bad. So the ownership aspect is really present in everything we do.

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Charli: Yeah. And you're using feedback like as information, but you are not beholden to addressing

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Danielle: Exactly

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Charli: every single thing. Yeah. You said that you meet as a design guild weekly or monthly. Is that all like 90 or so designers are together in a room giving feedback?

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Danielle: Not exactly.

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Charli: That's a lot of people.

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Danielle: Yeah, that's a lot of people. We meet one on one for design reviews. So usually, I will meet with someone who's kind of related to the project or I know can bring me added value for this. We meet on a weekly basis just the creative marketing designers and then we like 16 people, so we can still do brainstorm sessions and share stuff, and get some feedbacks. And like once a month, we meet the entire design guild. But we have a kind of long meeting, but it's more of like high level stuff that we share and stuff like this. So it's escalate.

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Charli: Yeah, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So with this, with every designer responsible for making decisions and 90 people contributing to what good design means at monday.com, how do you ensure consistency in your brand? What do you have in place to make sure that every designer has like the right guardrails on their decisions that they're making?

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Danielle: In general, it's important to understand that monday as a company and as a product, is constantly evolving. And as a result, also the brand is keep changing, is growing and growing all the time. And for designers, it creates like a space for experimenting and iterating on everything we do. And it also brings a lot of challenges. So we can definitely say, monday is a breathing brand and it's very dynamic. But at the end of the day, we all commit to the same brand book. We share the same like design assets and the same rules we all commits to it. And this is exactly why we are doing design reviews for answering those questions or to brainstorm of the stuff. Like sometimes, you don't know the answering you like need to figure it out together with other designers. 

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Noga: And also, like Danielle mentioned before, the peer review is done in context. The brand has like slightly different rules on each channel. Internal brand is different from the blog or the partners or social organic. So the review is done with the designer who has experience in that area. And we're part of the business flow. The review is not only at the level of the colors or the brands or the shapes or the layout, it's more like holistic. We go over the flow that the end user will experience. How do they get to this banner? Does the CTA make sense? What page will they land on? Is there a visual connection between all of these steps? Is there a messaging connection? So we make sure that the flow makes sense. On a more technical level, we work with a design system on Figma. So we have a lot of the marketing assets already in there, different types of boards or brand colors, shadows. If we change anything, we change it in the design system and it updates pro scale.

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Charli: Nice. And so that way, that you're not really having to give feedback and check at that granular level. 'Cause everyone's using the system. And so, you can focus the conversations more on-

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Noga: Right.

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Charli: like strategic things that you were mentioning. I like that. It's like the brand is self governing in a way. And that everyone is responsible for it and everyone is responsible for calling each other out. If you see things happening that you know are not on brand, that becomes a discussion. I really like that approach to it. Ultimately, 'cause you mentioned that you'll work from the same brand book. So what happens when you decide, I don't know, that like we need a different style or shadow or a different style color. Who decides that and like gets that implemented? Is that a group effort as well?

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Noga: If we wanna change anything on the brand, we will probably assemble some kind of task force for that. And we'll probably start with some kind of hackathon with the whole team. And then that task force will continue working on that and we come back to the team, share it with the team. And sometimes, we even let the team play with it for a week or two. And see like does it work? Does it work in acquisition? Does it really work in on social? So I can't say that it happens every day. So it did happen now.

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Charli: Yes. It's rare now to add different colors and things like that. We don't don't do that every week.

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Noga: Right. It did happen now with the group, rebranding. And that's sort of like what this process looked like.

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Charli: Cool. So again, it sounds very similar. And that it's like a self-governing group effort, there's not one person in charge, but you are deciding as a group. So let's talk then about measuring success of the work that you do. Because I am definitely getting the sense that there are like a lot of things in place for this. It seems like you've got a lot of really good structures in place at monday.com. Yeah. Are you each responsible for certain KPIs for the channels that you own?

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Noga: So first I'll say that at monday, if we can't measure it, we won't do it. Yeah, it's really like that. The KPIs of course, are set for a project and each project KPIs are sets according to past results in similar campaigns or if it's something completely new, we will sit down and understand what's the right KPI. And each project in each channel is measured differently. But yeah of course, we have it.

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Danielle: Yeah. And for example, like if I can just give some example from different KPIs.

Like on my team on web presence, we measure soft, hard, and qualified signups. And on the brand awareness team, they can measure a cost per new visit. So the KPI might be different from channel to channel. But like overall, we all align to the high level of marketing KPIs. And at the end of the day, it's not the same. We're here to move the need. We are really using this data and we want to make a difference by using it. 

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Charli: I think that's kind of rare, honestly, for designers to have that connection to data which is why I was so excited to talk to you two. 'Cause I'm big nerd for data and things as well. Does this mean that your like personal performance at work is like these KPIs have an impact on it as well. Where like if a project doesn't meeting its goals then your performance reviews that would be brought up. Is there like personal accountability towards them as well?

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Danielle: I would say in general, we kind of approach failures. 'Cause if you don't try, you won't fail. So it's okay to run like a crazy test and it'll completely fail, and it's even good. 'Cause when you have drastic fail, you can really learn from it. So I won't say, okay, someone didn't make the KPI and it affects like his or her job. We really encourage like on the company level to try stuff to like work fast, try stuff. It doesn't have to be perfect. Let's send it out to the world, learn from it, iterate it, make it perfect. But we are not afraid of failures. 

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Noga: And it also connects like, how we work in teams and channels. No one really is deciding for the whole team. Like we make decisions as a team, we like experience success as a team and failure as a team. So, yeah.

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Charli: So does that mean that you as designers are having an input on what the goals are in the first place? They're not handed to you as a KPI. Someone's gonna suggest it, I guess, and you can push back and say, I think, we should go for this instead. You can be involved in that goal setting process.

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Danielle: Yeah, totally. We have like a general goals for each team. But I can tell you like on our team, we meet before every quarter starts and we say okay, this is what we want to achieve this goal. And we are really doing, team brainstorm with all different worlds, developers, designers, content. Like each one, we want to know what they think will be the best projects to work on as a team. And we do voting and we like have a full day around it. And then we decide, okay, this is what we are gonna focus on in the next quarter. So no one is deciding. We decide it together as a group.

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Charli: I'm sensing a theme here. That a lot of things are like great group decisions at monday.com. So given this focus on data, right. And that you are paying attention to KPIs, that's how your work is measured. You don't do work if you can't measure it in that way. What role does data play in your day to day work then? What access do you have and what are you looking at?

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Noga: In the brand awareness team for example, when we're thinking what's gonna work, what's gonna register with people, we make assumptions. And sometimes, our assumptions are wrong. We're here like we're kind of biased. So before we make final decisions, we conduct user research. And user research at monday is something that everyone in the company uses and is encouraged to be used all the time. It's accessible for everyone. And we constantly, constantly check our messaging, our pages, our designs. And before we go ahead and put a 100% in something that we believe in, we test the water. We could test a certain direction or if we have a few possible directions, we conduct a comparison survey. Define age, country, and other filters. And we ask, are you understanding the message? What company is advertising? Was anything unclear about the ad? What's the product in the ad? It's really important to us to stand behind our promise and that people will understand the value in the most accurate way and that they will understand that we're advertising a SAS product. And that it's supposed to answer a certain pain point. In every out-of-home campaign, we have to choose what our goal is. In a company like monday, there are a lot of messages we can choose to focus on. And we need to make sure that whatever we choose, registers with people when they see the creative. Of course, we take the results with a grain of salt. We don't look at it as a crystal ball that predict the future, if it's going to work or not. But most times, we let it influence the decisions we make. And it gives us a strong signal or it raises issues of things that we didn't notice even.

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Charli: I really like that. Because brand awareness is so freaking hard to measure. I'm responsible for the brand studio team at ConvertKit. And so, like awareness and brand affinity is something that I'm responsible for. It's very hard to measure. And so what it sounds like you are doing, is you are doing the measurement upfront in a way. You're testing the ideas that you have and getting like sort of like a focus group of how this might play out in the market. Because obviously, it's hard once and out-of-home campaign ships to do the measurement after of like people on the street. Oh, did you see that billboard up there? Tell me what you saw.

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Noga: Yeah, I mean we actually do have tools.

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Charli: Tell me about them. Please give me your secrets.

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Noga: Okay. As Danielle mentioned before, the main KPI is cost per new visit to our website. And in our online brand awareness activities, it's easy to track. And in the offline activities, it depends on the campaign. So for local offline activities, for example, a new offline campaign in New York. We have a method that checks incremental visits or signups. We look at the city, we want to check the performance ads in terms of the number of visits to our homepage and the number of signups in that city. Let's say, Boston. And we take seven other cities that roughly behave like Boston. If let's say, they have been behaving like Boston for the past year, it is likely that they will behave like Boston during the campaign period as well. If an average, we see that in those cities and in Boston, we usually have a thousand visits to our website a day. And suddenly in Boston, we see 25,000. We will attribute that to the campaign. And we also have a short-term and a long-term way of measuring brand awareness by a brand awareness survey. So for the long-term measurement, we conduct it every month in chosen cities in the US and some in Europe. And it helps us measure the marketing efforts across the company. We also do it before and after a campaign. We take a group of people. They randomly sample people in a certain city and ask them how well they know the following brands and they show them monday.com. And whoever answers monday.com, they ask them about the sentiment about the brand. And then we get an idea of the percentage of people who know the brand. And after they campaign, we do the same with another test group and we can see if the awareness of the brand has increased. So these are the main ways. There are also two other ways that we also use. I'll just mention them.

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Charli: Please.

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Noga: The first is like a question in the signup flow. When a person signups to monday.com, there's a dropdown menu that like, how did you hear? When we have a campaign on, we add billboards and media in the train. So that's an indicator. And we also have recordings of sales calls. In the US, all the calls are recorded and we can search the word train or highway. Yeah. 'Cause it's transcripted. And then we see a lot of people say highway and it skips us, reinforcement that or really a big account, so that out-of-home, that's what convinced them to close the deal.

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Charli: Wow. That's a lot of data that you're gathering. And that's really exciting that you as a marketing designer have the access to that as well, and that you're using it in your work. I find that super inspiring. Thanks for sharing all the secrets. Might be some I can steal for myself.

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Noga: Yeah. No worries, Charli. PR won't let me share your secrets.

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Charli: We'll say that, just in case they're listening. And what about over on the web presence team, Danielle? What data are you looking at for the marketing side?

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Danielle: Yes. So we are looking for all of the data around the website obviously. And we just to like understand how much we close with the data. We start daily with going over all of our data, of running tests or general performance of the website and everything. So we are really like on it. And I also want to tell you about like super cool internal tool we are using to gather all this data.

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Charli: More secrets. Great.

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Danielle: Yeah. It's not a secret, but it's very internal too. We have something called big brain, which is basically like the place to gather all the data monday related. Like every visit, every click, every sign up, everything. Like every failure and every success is in there, inside this big brain. So this is what we look every day inside this tool. So we can see our test that's running inside and everything is measured over there. If we're like Zoom in a bit to the marketing area, we can see inside all the AB tests that's running in monitors over the Dell. And we can really look and see how like the changes we made affect signups and even length deeper in the final. For example, we can really see like the how changing an image or a button or a title in any of our pages affects the number of signups, which is crazy. It's really help us to make smarter decisions. And like obviously, every designer here is a good designer. He know how to create great visuals and beautiful pages. But I think, what's the really makes the difference and the real impact, is how we connect to the data and we use it to design better. We are very aligned to the business goals, which in the marketing case is conversion, is so we constantly around the data. And it's something that's very benefit us on our day to day.

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Charli: Did that come naturally to you, this embracing of data? Because it doesn't, for a lot of designers. We fear data where like, oh, don't like look too closely because there's things that can't be measured. Yeah, exactly.

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Danielle: Yeah. I can totally relate to it. I can say to myself. Like when I see first live to monday and I saw all like, I can show you the office right now. But everywhere, we have like dashboards with tons of number, it's like surrounding gas all the time. So we can't escape the data. Slowly, like you just understand, okay, this is how we work here. It's very accessible and like we are not expected to know it like by ourself. We have one onboard these sessions and you have so many talented people to help you and understand it. So you just became like more comfortable with this over time. Once you understand, okay, it's amazing. I can really use these scary numbers to change what I'm doing and to make it better, then you embrace it. But I understand you, it's like not the most natural thing for a designer from the way I see.

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Charli: But it's fun though, right? To be able to directly see how your work is impacting people and impacting the business, and learn things from it. I personally find that data can help me make faster design decisions. Because the more tests you run and you see how things are functioning, you can be like, well, I know this worked last time, so it might work here as well. So we'll try that first and it makes it easier. So speaking about like the investments that you're making in the monday.com, brand and awareness, and all of that. I know you recently ran a Super Bowl campaign. I mean that's the biggest type of campaign that I think you can ever run in the world. Tell us more about it, Noga. What did that involve?

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Noga: I'll say, it involved a huge challenge that I didn't expect. First of all, it was all managed on a monday.com board. On our team, we were two designers, two copywriters, one producer, one creative director, and the head of offline brand. We started with defining the goal, which was raising brand awareness and get monday.com in that group of companies that are in the big game to gain that kind of trust from potential customers. We had a 30 seconds ad on TV, two teasers, special online edits, and the behind the scenes video, My role on the team was designing the out-of-home campaigns, billboards, subway, and bus ads across the national US that connects to the televised ad. So we had two challenges. One is that we had to create something that was visually and aesthetically coherent with the creative concept of the TV ad and at the same time, completely independent. Because there will be people that will only see that ad of home and didn't watch the ad. So it needed to be like a stand alone thing, but also connect to the ad in case the person saw both. The second challenge, and here's what I didn't expect, is that on the day we filmed the ad, the tagline for the campaign wasn't finalized yet.

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Charli: Oh no.

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Noga: Yeah. Which meant basically, that we couldn't utilize the shoot to create the images for the out-of-home design, which would probably be the best way to connect the two. But yeah, we couldn't do that. And about two weeks before the out-of-home deadline, we finalized the tagline. So we went with work without limits. And only then, we set together with our VP of design and our CEO, and we started brainstorming on a bunch of different creative directions to best express the work without limits, chosen tagline in the visual. So it could have been just a topography, it could have been the tagline as a title of the board. It could have been the tagline, breaking through a computer screen or, and this was where like we had our “aha” moment. One of our initial mock-ups was a series of images with the work without limits tagline in different locations, the desert, Antarctica, the ocean, and space. And that's when we got it. Space, the definition of limitless.

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Charli: Yeah.

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Noga: And it fit perfectly with our new branding of the monday universe. And we had the last scene in the televised ad where people flew out of the ceiling and into the sky. So why not have them fly into the very space background that worked for our brainstorm session. And this is how I got to create brand recall for both. And it worked and the ad included our design of space, and brought the message across in the best way possible. So it worked as a standalone creative and also connected, and like served as an extension to the TBI.

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Charli: Did you say that it was two weeks then that you were doing the creative, like between the tagline getting finalized and the assets being due, there was two weeks for you to work on that?

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Noga: Yeah.

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Charli: Wow.

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Noga: It was crazy.

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Charli: That must have been a busy two weeks.

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Noga: It was, definitely was.

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Charli: You can tell that the like strategy behind the campaign was strong though. Because I'm very surprised that the tagline came last. Because watching the TBC, it's like well, yeah, it seems like this imagery here is being created to demonstrate these taglines.

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Noga: Yeah. Of course, we knew like what we wanna say, you know.

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Charli: Of course, yeah.

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Noga: So we had a few options. Like we had two or three options we were considering to say like the same message but different wordings. But you know, in order to create a design that is amazing for a campaign. At this scale, you really need to have like the actual wording.

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Charli: Yeah. Especially for things like out-of-home where you're dealing with like different billboard sizes and things. You can't really like just make a mock up and add the text later, because that can completely throw off the whole design.

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Noga: Exactly.

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Charli: Wow. Okay. So your part was two weeks, but how long was the whole process of making the campaign?

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Noga: We worked on it for five months. As we said we're part of the strategy, so it's not like I came in those.

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Charli: Yeah. Just in the last two weeks.

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Noga: Yeah, yeah. We were in touching with the creative agency that we work with. And made sure that everything's on brand and like see the different aspects of the production, choices of location, styling, color grid. But it was five months.

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Charli: So that means that as the creative marketing designer, you got to have input on those decisions about the set and all that to do with the campaign too.

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Noga: Yeah. And the wardrobe and the location that we chose. Yeah.

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Charli: This just sounds super fun to be a part of.

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Noga: It was super fun.

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Charli: How often do you work on something that large? 'Cause I'm guessing, this is one of the biggest campaigns that monday.com has done.

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Noga: Yeah. It was the first time we had a big game ad. But 360 campaigns in the major cities, we aim for twice a year and another market. Yeah.

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Charli: Yeah. And do you tend to have a different strategy behind each campaign? So like a different message that you're trying to communicate?

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Noga: Of course, yeah.

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Charli: And you mentioned, working with a creative agency on the TVC. Is that something that you do a lot at monday.com, is work with like outside agencies for things like this?

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Noga: So again, the big game was first. The agency that we worked with was like, they had a lot of experience with these kinds of campaigns. They're from the US. So it was also important for us to have like someone local really knows, you know. So that's why we decided to go with that.

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Charli: So this was the first campaign at this scale that you'd done. But what learnings did you take from past campaigns or localized ones that you brought into the big game man?

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Noga: Yeah, so in the first few times in our iPhone campaigns, we placed our logo wherever it fitted with the design. We also placed in the bottom corner, the same way we do with online banners. But in one of our past campaigns, the team went to San Francisco and saw that there are a few billboards where you can't see the logo, 'cause a tree grew there. And we didn't see that tree on Google Earth, so.

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Charli: Damn, nature.

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Noga: So now, we always place the logo at the top corner.

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Charli: Okay.

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Noga: And we work the design around that. So it could be an amazing campaign but if no one sees what's behind it, it's all worthless. When you are in Israel, designing for San Francisco, there could be many surprises.

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Charli: Many trees.

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Noga: Yeah. So in general, for an ad out-of-home campaign, the team always goes there to understand the general sentiment.

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Charli: Cool.

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Noga: Which places are best to advertise in? What's the areas people drive in, et cetera.

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Charli: How did this campaign go. You've shared before how you measure brand awareness in general. I'm assuming you did all those same things for this campaign too. But what learnings did you take from this campaign that you think you'll bring forward into future ones?

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Noga: The day the big campaign went live, we had a situation room set up in the office. We had two shifts of employees to all launch it together. Not only as a way to celebrate this unique milestone, but also we had a mini task force assembled with content writers and designers, and legal people, and PR, so we could tackle like real time marketing efforts and any comments that could come up on social media. We had also programmers to handle the massive traffic to the website. And we understand now that we should have prepared for the event. Also, in the context of social media. There were comments on Twitter, you know like in the US, they watched the game and they're on Twitter all the time. So there were comments on Twitter that we had to design in real time. And like next time, we want to be ready for it. 'Cause most of the big brands were released their ads teasers before their event. So it's possible to be like not to respond, to be like starting the conversation.

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Charli: By that, do you mean that you can release the teaser and then like you get a sense of how people are gonna react, so that way you can prepare things?

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Noga: Yeah, we had a avocados from Mexico. On the day of the game, they published like a gift of avocados, flying out of the building instead of people.

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Charli: Okay.

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Noga: Yeah, or the minion stage. They put a minion face on the twins that we had in the ad. So we could have like do that and start a conversation with another brand even before, you know.

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Charli: That's fun. That's cool that the ad had an impact that people were like, oh, let's jump on this. This is a fun like meme to play with. That must have been pretty rewarding to see, honestly, to see when your work like transcends and goes beyond the place that you put it in and people take it on for themselves. 

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Noga: Yeah. It was really special being here in the office with everyone. Yeah.

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Charli: Yeah I can imagine that must have been a really fun environment to be in. How did the campaign transfer onto the marketing website as well? Because that I'm imagining, is like the main property that people were coming to after seeing the ad. And so, were you involved in that side of it, Danielle?

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Danielle: A few weeks before the big game, we started to think, okay, we need to also connect it to the website. It was all kind of connect, like come together at the same time. We changed the revamp of the homepage was a bit before this. We now have a bit of a start theme in the first fold, which is also connected to the ad. So it works well. We also change the tagline for a few weeks to work without limits, to match it also. And I think we had a banner to send to the ad like at the top of the page. So people who came to the monday website was also like, if they saw the ad and they came, it was like a continuous experience for them.

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Charli: Yeah. So it really is a project that all the different channels get involved in, right.

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Noga: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone in the company was really around the event.

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Charli: That's so cool. How often you mentioned a homepage revamp just then, Danielle? How often does that happen? How often do you revamp the homepage?

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Danielle: In general, because we are enjoying a very high number of traffic in the homepage. We use this this area for doing a lot of tests, 'cause we can learn very fast and then it can trickle down to other areas. We're doing a lot of small tests all the time. But the full revamp like the one we did a few months ago, it's something we do around a year or two. It's not very common.

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Charli: So there's like a big revamp every year or two, but then lots of little revamps.

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Danielle: Yeah. All the time, we try to perfect our page. Yeah.

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Charli: Let's go back then to this latest revamp. And like how do you decide when it happens? Is it like it's been a year or two, it's time for a new homepage. Is there some sort of like data trigger that tells you, it's time to start this project.

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Danielle: So I think it's kind of both. We kind of felt as a team and I think as a company, that the previous version is no longer really telling our story as a company. Like in all level in the term of value proposition, messaging, and design. 'Cause you know, we became a public company. We went through rebranding and we understood we need to rethink about this page. But obviously, as everything we do in monday, we had also data to motivate us. 'Cause we saw that we have a high bounce rate in the homepage and that people don't really score for the page. And we also saw a very short session time. We had like all the reasons to go for a revamp.

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Charli: Does that mean that the project goals then, were to essentially improve on those metrics?

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Danielle: Yeah, yeah. We had a few main goals. Like we first wanted to create a continuous unstructured story. 'Cause we really felt like the previous version is a bit of a mishmash of stuff that over the years like, we had small test here and there, and it wasn't like a coherent experience. And we also really want to give like a what's in it for the visitor to like really go with the value first approach and show it right away, so people can understand immediately. Okay, this is for me or not. We also had a new value proposition. You know monday is going for changes and we released new products, so we wanted to reflect it obviously, in the homepage. And we kind of wanted to have like a better experience as well. Like more interactive, more animations. We needed to progress from the old version we had.

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Charli: And I'm sure that like yeah, more interactions and animations that increases the scrolling and the time.

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Danielle: Exactly. Exactly for those reason. Like it's all supported the problems.

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Charli: Yeah. How did you tackle this project? Like where does it start? Does it start with a copywriter? Does it start with a group brainstorm? How do you approach starting a new homepage?

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Danielle: This is a massive project. But like every project we tackle as a team, we start with a kickoff. We have goal. We are doing kind of a brainstorm. Like we say, okay, this is the goals. Let's start to think about it together. And then after we came up with the content and the PMM, like on the general structure and frame for the page. I started to iterate on the design and at the same time, to send it out for feedback from different states.

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Charli: Oh, that early.

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Danielle: Yeah, yeah. That early, like very, very early. Even a bit before the actual design when we were still like in wire frame. We say, okay, we want this section, this section, this section. We send it out. 'Cause it was super important to us as a team to create a homepage that everyone in the company will be proud of. Not something we do every day. Super sensitive area. We want everyone to be on board with us. So we share it a lot in multiple phases and we kind of share it like with all the marketing department. On several occasions, we got feedbacks. Like we really involved everyone inside of it. And also, around the design guild, I did a lot of brainstorm sessions with multiple designers. And we did even hackathons around it, which was a really event, like a big event that everyone in a way, one way or another, was a bit involved in.

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Charli: You mentioned AB testing earlier as well. Did you run tests before the page launch to like decide what should be a part of it or?

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Danielle: Yeah, definitely.

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Charli: Or Yeah. Okay, tell me more about that.

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Danielle: Yes. So we work with a growth methodology which is basically mean that we iterate fast to learn fast. We start with hypothesis which is always our northern style and it's aligned with KPIs. For example, like in the homepage project, we had hypothesis that says, we believe that showing use cases. In the first fault of the homepage, we bring most signups. So this was the hypothesis. And then we came up with execution. So for every hypothesis, there is like million possible executions. In our example, execution was showing check boxes with different use cases. We design it. We develop it. And then we go live with execution as an AB test and get a results. A test could never fail as we said at the beginning, like it's also good to learn from the the failures. But in this project, I can tell you we ran over 30 AB tests, only on the first fault. Yeah. So we had so many execution for the same hypothesis. And we also like, learned from each one of them and go back to the like table, I don't know how to say, but like rethink about it as a team where end user interviews around it. We did usability hub. And we keep iterating it until we had a version that met the KPI and managed to improve. So definitely, AB test play a huge part in this revamp.

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Charli: Were you testing these before the full revamp launched or was this-

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Danielle: Yes.

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Charli: Yeah, wow.

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Danielle: Yeah. We kind of split it into first fall, 'cause we know it's the area that gets the most traffic and it's easiest to win.

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Charli: And people don't have to scroll to it.

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Danielle: Exactly. So we constantly, constantly released test. We had like stuff that we thought. Okay, it's gonna definitely win. But it wasn't. Like it was super interesting process.

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Charli: Oh that's always good in like nice and humbling, right, to test the design and then it doesn't meet what you thought. And you're like well, okay, I was wrong.

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Danielle: Yes. Definitely.

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Charli: So you kept the same hypothesis the whole time of the use cases and what you were testing was essentially different designs for showing this. What made you decide to keep trying different designs versus deciding the hypothesis is wrong, we were wrong about this idea, so let's move on and find something else.

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Danielle: No, the hypothesis can also change a bit. We also like sharpen it a bit or adjust it, or we can come with new hypothesis. But we just saw that it's always worked just to show use cases. We try to find the best solution in how to show it.

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Charli: Nice. So if I'm understanding correctly what might have happened was that showing use cases improved the KPIs. But then you were testing, okay, well, how do we get this to be even better?

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Danielle: And also, how do I show the use case in the best way? How it's like affect the signups? How will people understand, okay, I can manage all of this. I will sign up. So you can show it in many different ways and we try many different ways. But at the end, like the checkbox solution is always the best solution.

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Charli: Why do you think the checkbox solution won?

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Danielle: We were always asking the question here, 'cause we really see its works not only on the homepage but on the acquisition, everywhere, it's like such a good. I think, it's like the best way to crack it from what we had so far. It's super like understandable. It's simple. It's kind of playful also, like there is an interactive side to it which is also good. So I think this is why it works so well.

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Charli: And I see- 'Cause you sent me this amazing slide deck about the changes. That 80% of the users who click on the tags are then gonna click on the get started button.

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Charli: That is-

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Danielle: Yep, insane.

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Charli: High. That is amazing. Yeah. I wish that I could do that for our homepage. So this is good inspiration for me. And how does a homepage revamp apply to the rest of the site as well? 'Cause obviously, we wanna give user a consistent experience across the site. We don't want to hit the homepage and then go somewhere else and be like, this looks totally different. How do you handle that when you are one person, now two, work designers working on web presence. But still, that's a lot of pages to work on.

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Danielle: Oh, I can tell you like everyone is perfect and we get where everything right away. But we have to prioritize. We say okay the first, the homepage is the most important and then we split our quarters projects accordingly. And like one by one, we revamp it. And we also have like board cross changes that was like once you implement it here, it's takens to all other pages.

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Charli: Does that mean that you feel, you're like always working on a revamp of some page because-

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Danielle: Yeah, yeah. 'Cause it's never ends. Like you can always do it better. And like this is what we do in the growth like methodology. We keep get like searching for new opportunities to improve. There's always a page being revamped. There's always a test running that you're learning from.

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Charli: There's always nothing happening here.

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Danielle:- Yes. It also happens like on all of our lending pages. A lot of the changes we've done, we are doing the homepage, because we get like results very fast. We say, okay, we saw a big win here, let's share it. And then it like, trickles down to acquisition pages and all of our pages. 'Cause we are instantly like, how do you say, embrace it to other areas.

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Charli: Take the learnings from one and apply it to other things too, to move them up.

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Danielle: Yeah.

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Charli: I love that. How long did you work on the homepage revamp? How long do you get to work on this? 'Cause I feel like, our deadlines are often very short in house marketing design timelines. What did you work to?

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Danielle:- I think, one of the longest projects that we made, but we were really fast here. But it was around six months.

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Charli:- Okay, yeah. So six months from like deciding to redesign the home page to it launching.

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Danielle: Yes. The final launching. 'Cause we have like few launching along the way.

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Charli: How does that compare to other web presence design projects that you work on? Say a landing page or like a page further in the site? How long would you spend on that?

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Danielle:- It's was different on every level. Like the amount of people involved, the amount of of like traffic, we get to measure it. It's like you can't really compare. It's kind of unique projects, I feel. We work in the same like way for all projects but in like smaller scale.

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Charli:- So like pages further in the site would be a shorter deadline because they-

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Danielle:- Yeah, yeah. Shorter deadline, maybe less like people involved. 'Cause you can't involve the entire marketing development on every-

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Charli:- every page. Yeah.

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Danielle:- But yeah.

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Charli:- Yeah, they've got other things to do.

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Danielle:- For sure.

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Charli:- We've talked a bit in here about challenges that you've faced along the way. Whether that's like, the tagline coming two weeks before the end of the project or AB test not going how we thought. But what are some of the main challenges that each of you are facing right now, either as individual designers at monday.com or perhaps within your channels, within your teams?

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Danielle:- I would say one of the most interesting challenges right now, is the transformation of monday from a one product company into a multiple products company. On the web presence team, we trying to understand what is the best way to actually communicate it on our website and what is the best go-to-market strategy. So we're really busy around this area right now. And we are working on a lot of tests around the headline menu, and the home in general, the entire website, the signup process. So this is like top challenge at the moment.

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Charli:- That'll be exciting to watch it play out.

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Danielle:- Yeah, yeah.

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Charli:- What about you, Noga?

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Noga:- I think, I'm dealing with the same challenge from a different angle. 'Cause as the marketing designer in the app marketplace, which is a cross product, meaning it's relevant for all in each of the new products we launch. I need to make sure it's communicated in each of the funnels for each of the products and understand what's the right value prop in each product for each persona. And when is the right time to show it? Where's the right place to show it, and et cetera. So like it's different. 'Cause I need to know, talk with different teams in order to-

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Danielle: to sync everything together.

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Noga:- Yeah. .

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Charli:- You're like this connection point for all these different parts of the company.

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Noga:- Right.

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Charli:- And what about growth in your career or like in your roles. This is something that I know my listeners always really interested to hear about. What's next for you as creative marketing designers?

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Noga:- Yeah. So I mentioned in the beginning, that I'm now working on in a new channel. It's called user marketing. And it's a new area in the company. And I'm conducting a lot of research. It's going to be a lot of UX, UI design, which is very challenging and exciting. It's not my main expertise. And it's something that I've never done before. And it's a platform where users are gonna upload templates and others can duplicate it, and use the templates. So there's gonna be a lot of research after it's up as well. And to see what people understand and how they're using it, and if they're like liking it.

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Charli:- That's cool. I love that you get to shift around the areas of design that you are working in and learn these new skills, build these new skills within the company.

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Noga:- Yeah, it's amazing. It's a really great opportunity for me.

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Charli:- What about you, Danielle?

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Danielle:- For me, I think it's definitely to deepen my product and UX skills. 'Cause my role is kind of a mix between marketing and product. So I constantly try to perfect my abilities. But also, we talk a lot about data and then we mentioned, it's not always the most like natural things for a designer. So I definitely want to work like to feel even more comfortable with working with data and to use it more and more.

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Charli:- I think, that it's funny to hear you say that. Because you are one of the most like data savvy designers that have spoken to, as part of the series. So I love that you're still pushing. Yeah. I think it's fantastic. Okay, let's end by you sharing, in your time at monday.com, What is a project or an impact that you are most proud of having worked on? And maybe is it one of the ones that we talked about already?

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Danielle:- Yeah. Well of course, the homepage for me was a huge milestone. But I'm also very proud on part-time taking in the most strategic areas, which is a huge challenge. It's super interesting. And it's something we constantly dealing here in monday. So definitely, this is something I'm really proud of.

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Charli:- Love that.

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Noga:- Yeah. I think, of course, the big game campaign was huge. But also proud of a lot of different smaller project that made an impact. Could be a YouTube ad, could be like developing or photography language, for example. Yeah, as we said, like ownership and impact is something that we're all really proud of. And it resonates across all we do. And we're excited, and there is so much more to be done.

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Charli:- Always. Well, I feel like I could talk to you both for at least an hour more. And maybe, we have to do a take two of this, 'cause you just mentioned that Noga, developing a photography style. I'm like, ooh, I wanna hear more about that as well. But thank you so much for everything that you've shared. This has been fantastic. And I'm sure the listeners really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on.

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Noga:- Thank you. It was really fun.

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Danielle:- Thank you, Charli. It was so fun.

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Woo hoo. I love hearing about marketing designers getting involved with data. And if that's not an area that you've embraced yet in your design process, then I hope this interview inspired you to like befriend the data folks in your company and ask for more insights into the way that your designs are performing. 'Cause you can learn a lot from it. I also really loved hearing about the culture of feedback and ownership at monday.com. The way Danielle and Noga described it. It was very relatable to me, working at a small company where that level of ownership is just like needed to get things done with a small team and small resources. But it's something that often gets lost as companies grow and more like processes, and layers are put in place. So for the team of monday to have that, when there's more than a thousand people at the company around the world, is pretty special and obviously, allows for some really great work to happen. I'd love to hear your takeaways from this episode though. Feel free to comment them on the YouTube video or tag me on Twitter or an Instagram story. I'm @charliprangley on both those platforms. What stood out to you? What did you learn from this episode? Check out the show notes at insidemarketingdesign.com for links to Noga and Danielle. And you'll find all the previous episodes there too. Huge thanks once again, to Webflow for sponsoring this season of the show. You can create an account and like play around for free with that CMS that I was mentioning before at insidemarketingdesign.com/webflow. Thanks for listening. And I'll see you in the next episode.

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