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Josh Schachter:
Welcome, everybody, to this special episode of Unchurned. I’m your host, Josh Schachter. I’m going solo today. Christy and John, well, they weren’t invited. Don’t tell them. But I was so excited to talk to Leah Baumann, who is the head of enterprise product alignment. She’s gonna tell us what that means, at monday.com, Monday, which is just crushing it in the SaaS world. Last I checked.

Josh Schachter:
Last I checked. And, you know, UpdateAI, my company is all about voice of the customer. Like, our thesis behind everything we do is how much the customer matters and customer centricity, customer customer customer. And in my background is in product. And I found out about about Leah a couple months ago. It’s probably Leah. Right? You’re Israeli, so it’s probably Leah. Yes.

Josh Schachter:
About Leah a couple months ago, and what she’s doing at Monday, I I was like, wow. I have to talk to her because she like, the the the structure they put and the resources they put behind behind customer insights and aligning with product per her title are second to none. I’ve haven’t seen that yet in the space. So, Leah, thank you so much for joining me on this program.

Leah Bauman:
It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me, Josh.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Absolutely. So, well, for anybody who’s, you know, hiding under a rock, and we’re we’re in 2025 now, what is Monday? What do you do? Who do you sell to? But, like, really quickly because everybody knows.

Leah Bauman:
Okay. So firstly, that’s very flattering. I I hope that everybody knows.

Josh Schachter:
Well, I see it in the subway on the 4, 5, 6 every day. So, you know, I know.

Leah Bauman:
That helps everybody know. I actually have a friend who was at my house yesterday, and he told me that even though he’s pretty much off the grid and doesn’t really use any social media or or anything like that, He knows what Monday is, and I thought that was very impressive. For those of you who don’t know, monday.com is a platform that runs all core aspects of work. It’s a work management platform that gives anyone the power to build and improve how their organization runs. So that’s a little bit about Monday.

Josh Schachter:
That’s so broad. What’s, like, the top use case that people love about Monday?

Leah Bauman:
That’s a great question. I think it’s it’s hard to pick 1 because we are

Josh Schachter:
What’s your favorite use case? I’m gonna fill

Leah Bauman:
you down. My favorite use case is customer feedback and how we manage that on Monday. I also am am pretty obsessed with our projects and portfolio and and how we’ve really made it easier for people who manage projects to not hate their lives. So I think that’s pretty impressive.

Josh Schachter:
I think that’s what I saw on the subway, by the way, as the tagline. Making it easier for people that manage projects to not hate their lives. 1 person at a time.

Leah Bauman:
Yeah. So suggesting that to marketing tomorrow.

Josh Schachter:
I mean, I feel like, you know, in the middle of January here as we record this in in the winter of New York, like, that would really people would that would really resonate. You know? Voice of the customer right there. Okay. So you are your your title is not voice of the customer. You are the head of enterprise product alignment. What does that mean?

Leah Bauman:
Okay. So, if you haven’t heard of product alignment before, you should not feel too bad, because because

Josh Schachter:
Oh, I think it’s but I yeah. I think nobody has heard, just to be clear.

Leah Bauman:
Nobody has heard of product alignment before. Maybe definitely, we’ve been we’ve been ringing the bell on product alignment for a couple of years now, so we have a few people who heard of it for sure.

Josh Schachter:
Okay.

Leah Bauman:
I also had the chance to present on it at our user conference this year in London and then in New York. I I’ll tell you a little bit about the role and what was the origin of the role. Maybe I I oftenly, I often jokingly refer to myself as the big accounts lawyer. My team manages the highest tier of product related escalations that we are predicting will cause us large amounts of ARR or annual recurring revenue from across the life cycle of an account, whether it’s from new business expansions, implementations, or even downgrade, and churn. And we manage a lot of the feedback that comes in from our larger customers, and from the types of customers that we want to be attracting as a business.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. So you’re the VIP or you’re the team for the VIP customers to take their feedback and to facilitate it with product to make sure it’s listened to?

Leah Bauman:
It’s also for current clients, but it’s also about understanding why we aren’t attracting the type of clients we wanna attract, what features might be missing, what’s what’s the feedback that’s coming in that stops people from using monday for use cases we think they should be using monday for?

Josh Schachter:
For people that are not yet clients.

Leah Bauman:
For people that are not yet clients. So clients and potential clients. And maybe you’re not a VIP client today because you’re not in our, you know, top segment, but you’re an enterprise company, and we believe that we should have a bigger foothold. What’s your feedback? What’s stopping you from growing? What’s stopping you from executing?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. I I love that. I mean, something that we all struggle with or we could all improve upon is making sure that, like, everybody in SaaS is that whether you’re a client or or not, that everybody out there knows exactly what you could be using the platform to leverage. Right? Everybody thinks about UpdateAI as being a really good AI meeting notetaker. I’m like, no. No. No. No.

Josh Schachter:
That was the mousetrap. That was so 2021. You know, how about this, this, and this? And it sounds like that’s kind of what your group is. It’s like, you know, where can we where are there misconceptions or or product education that we can be required? I’m not saying that’s the program you’re running, like, at scale or anything.

Leah Bauman:
We have an enablement team. We have an enablement team. If it exists in the platform and you should be doing it, probably the enablement team is teaching our client facing teams how to support you. Yeah. If you have feedback and there are gaps and the product the product can’t do what you want it to do Yeah. And you wanna talk about it, that’s us. That’s that’s product alignment.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. And and did you carve this out for yourself, this role? And and and and tell me a little bit about the organ the organization, like, the group. Like, because I think you guys sit under CRO. Is that right? Tell us, like, a little bit about the role, the the layout, and and how you got to this role from because you were in sales before.

Leah Bauman:
I was in sales before. So let’s talk a little bit of the origin of the role. My the origin of my role, as head of enterprise product alignment, it’s a bit of a long story. So I’m gonna tell you sort of a condensed version. You can double tap on anything in here, and we can talk about it. But I’ll I’ll give you the high level. I started my tech career in sales, which I really love and really enjoy. I came into the sales team at Monday, and I’m gonna age myself here, when the sales team was almost brand new.

Leah Bauman:
We had, like, 3 people on it. And At the whole company? No. At the sales team. The sales

Josh Schachter:
team But within the whole company, only 3 people in sales?

Leah Bauman:
There were only 3 people in sales, and there were only 74 people in the company. For contacts, we’re we’re over 3,000. 25100 employees will be over 3,000 employees pretty soon.

Josh Schachter:
Oh my god. How do I join a giant company that early on? Well, I guess I did found 1, but yeah.

Leah Bauman:
You guess. You guess. When I was when I was applying for Monday, I also applied for a job at Gong. Do you know Gong?

Josh Schachter:
No. Never heard of him.

Leah Bauman:
You’re joking? Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
I’m joking.

Leah Bauman:
Oh, okay. Yeah. So either one of those, I think, would have been a good bet. And and I I think that, like, Gong would have been really solid, but I went with Monday because I was in love with the product. Yeah. And and, obviously, for me, it was a great choice. But it it at an early stage, you’re you’re always kind of guessing.

Josh Schachter:
It’s a guess. It’s a guess. Okay. Anyway, so, I I I threw you off track. So, so you were in sales. You you joined Monday very early on.

Leah Bauman:
Yes. And when at most tech companies, the sales team is kind of the the leader, and at Monday

Josh Schachter:
tech companies. Yeah. Keep going.

Leah Bauman:
So at Monday, it was very different. The sales team was not the king at all. In fact, every team in the company seemed to be, like, all in on the self serve funnel, which is our no touch funnel. And they really believe that the correct way for Monday to take over the world is going to be that people just come in and sign up, and you don’t need a sales team, to sell it. So we we were at the bottom of the food chain, in the company when I first started, which was a very Interesting. Like, it was it was kind of like a a very strange feeling for a salesperson, I would say. And we were trying to close bigger accounts on the sales team than what were being closed in our self serve funnel. And and the sales the the sales team, which started to grow a little bit, had clients and leads that were telling us all day, every day why they wouldn’t close or why they wouldn’t grow, and why they weren’t satisfied, and what use cases they wanted to manage in Monday, and why they couldn’t.

Leah Bauman:
Yep. But the sales and CS, really had no way of communicating that to product.

Josh Schachter:
Yep.

Leah Bauman:
And I I I don’t think I can describe how frustrating it was to be a top salesperson and then a top account manager who absolutely knew what features would lead to explosive growth without having a channel to actualize any of that feedback. Well,

Josh Schachter:
go ahead and describe it. Describe it. Try to describe it in words. In one word, how did it feel to have that that you knew it, but it it just you couldn’t actualize it. It was

Leah Bauman:
frustrating. Frustrating. It was very, very frustrating. And and to me, it felt like I just couldn’t connect the output of what was coming on the road map to the needs that I was seeing in the field. Yep. And it was true across the sales team that we felt like we knew and the CS team, by the way, because there was barely a difference back then between sales and CS. There was, like, a a a big crossover between those two roles.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. That’s that’s Leah’s way of saying that there was no CS. It was salespeople that were operating.

Leah Bauman:
I did my own CS, and it made me a better salesperson. And it made me a better human. I’m just

Josh Schachter:
gonna say. It does. Yeah.

Leah Bauman:
It does. It really

Josh Schachter:
does. Yeah.

Leah Bauman:
And we felt like we knew what the product needed, and we felt like enterprise was the right way forward for us as a business. And it it felt like nobody really wanted to listen. And then output would come on the road map. We’d be expected to sell that output, and it didn’t align with the needs we were seeing in the field, and it felt

Josh Schachter:
Where were you where were you where were you, nobody was listening. Where were you talking? Like, were these Slack channels set up? Was this a a biweekly, you know, meeting or Huddl? Like, they have Slack back then. Oh, like, what was that?

Leah Bauman:
There was nothing. First of all, we communicated almost solely on WhatsApp at this point. Oh, nice. Didn’t have Slack in there.

Josh Schachter:
International start up.

Leah Bauman:
Yes. Exactly. Exactly. There was there was a beer night once every 2 weeks where you could voice your displeasure, and we did. But, like, nothing, like, things don’t always move after you say something at a social gathering. Right? And then you would kind of have, like, teams where there’s a salesperson who needs something to close a deal, and he’s playing football with 1 of the developers. And the next thing you know, his item’s in a sprint. And that doesn’t feel like a very smart way for us to make decisions.

Leah Bauman:
It was frustrating.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Leah Bauman:
Right? Yeah. And product alignment really started as a side project when we were still under 300 employees. I think I had just closed our first half $1,000,000 account.

Josh Schachter:
Amazing. Do you remember who it was with?

Leah Bauman:
I do, but I can’t

Josh Schachter:
either say Just say a company that rhymes with it.

Leah Bauman:
I will tell you that they make video games.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. Cool. Alright. So Activision, you sign on board. I’m just making a random one. Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m not.

Leah Bauman:
And at that point, this was a client who was telling me exactly touch feedback, to talk about the feedback coming in from clients and from

Josh Schachter:
Do you spearhead this to create the channels and the and the the recurring meeting?

Leah Bauman:
At the time, it was spearheaded by product, who needed to start aligning with someone on the sales team. I spearheaded it from the CRO side. We had one representative from sales, one from CS, one from product, one from r and d, and one from design. So we, together, represented all of the facets of, like, how you make decisions. Does the sales team need it? Does the CS team need it? And is it possible? How much is it gonna cost us in story points?

Josh Schachter:
So, you know, we we had we have some questions planned here to to keep going with stuff on the the the culture today, a voice of the customer, and why it’s so critical at Monday. And I do wanna get into all that. But I actually I wanna keep on diving into this piece too, like, this origin story, because a lot of people out there listening are probably from companies of under 300 people, and they’re probably in a situation right now where they could be spawning this up themselves where they want to or they tried and it didn’t work. Right? So, hey, everybody. It’s Josh. I’m taking a quick break from the podcast to tell you a bit about UpdateAI. I started UpdateAI to solve 2 major challenges for CS teams. The first is that we save CSMs 4 to 5 hours per week with our productivity through AI.

Josh Schachter:
Secondly, we give leaders a window into all the conversations across each account and the entire portfolio. So we help knowledge transfer, we help increase the coverage model of your CS teams, and we help you detect emerging patterns and what your customers are telling your CSMs across all the risks, product feedback, advocacy moments, and expansion opportunities. So come check us out at www.updateai. It’s completely free to sign up and trial. A lot of people out there listening are probably from companies of under 300 people, and they’re probably in a situation right now where they could be spawning this up themselves where they want to or they tried and it didn’t work. Right? So, I’d I’d love to understand, like, you know, in short, what worked and what didn’t work, but maybe, like, how you structured some of these cross functional conversations in the early days.

Leah Bauman:
Okay. So we had we started with a board. We’re Monday, so we use Monday. But if you don’t use Monday, you could use whatever work management tool you use or even an Excel spreadsheet. And the first place is having a submission, like, a log of what are people asking for, and just tracking, like, what are clients saying, how many clients are asking for the same thing. That’s sort of, like, your source of truth for feedback. Right? And it all starts with making sure that you’re documenting it, because the worst thing that happens in the tech companies is he says this, she says that, one salesperson says, and you’re not aggregating data over time that allows you to give weight to specific features. So just having it all in one place and being able to count how many times a feedback is coming and what is that feedback, and then sitting in a room and saying, from a product and dev and design perspective, do we understand the request? Right? Do we do we know what they’re asking for, how it connects to real world use cases, having a conversation around it? Yep.

Leah Bauman:
That’s the first step. And then having the a developer say it’s t shirt size it. Right? Saying it’s small, it’s medium, it’s large can give you a a feeling for, is this something I could just put into a sprint during a quarter, or does it need to wait for a quarterly kickoff to get added in? Or maybe it’s so big that it’s a yearly item, and we need the buy in of a of a higher level who’s dictating a yearly strategy for this. So just t shirt sizing could really get you, an understanding of where you might wanna report on that, and that made a really big difference for us.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. Helpful. Helpful. Okay. So, that how has that evolved? How has it how has the culture of voice of the customer evolved from those early days, and and what’s kind of been the time horizon too? Are we talking about 6 months or 6 years? And, you know, how’s it evolved to to where it is today?

Leah Bauman:
So it is a really great question. I I would I would tell you that, like, the question is more how many times and how many different ways have we systemized the process for VOC. Monday is one of the fastest growing SaaS companies out there, and we have outgrown our processes at least every 2 years since I’ve started, which challenges us to level up and create something that’s better every couple of years. So over the years, like, the the VOC has evolved and the culture of the VOC has evolved. But one thing has really stayed the same, which is that Monday is feedback obsessed. And the thing that never changes is that we really want to hear the feedback and the insights coming from the field, and we believe that this is what is gonna make our product, win out over everything else, which is understanding the problems that clients have, and surfacing them to the people who are building the product. So I think that hasn’t changed, but the structure has changed over over the years quite significantly. So a piece of our VOC, a very significant piece of our VOC sits inside of the support team, and that’s the team that answers Zendesk tickets.

Leah Bauman:
So they have a system for pulling insights out of Zendesk tickets and slicing and dicing what our clients asking for in tickets. Right? And that is really helpful for a certain type of user. But as accounts get bigger and you work with specific personas inside of accounts, who are decision makers, who are more I’m sorry.

Josh Schachter:
What tool I’m I’m I’m apologize for cutting you off, like, a delayed reaction here. What what what what tool are they using to because I think this will be interesting for other folks as well. It’s not enough at AI, but what tool are you guys using to synthesize all the insights from that support layer from the Zendesk tickets?

Leah Bauman:
That’s a great question. We are using interpret, which is a system that we just started using, I think, about 6 months ago. We had a tagging system in Zendesk, and we moved over to interpret, to put that layer of AI on top of everything and to be able to slice and dice and pull the insights out much better. Great.

Josh Schachter:
Great. So for all those listening out there, go visit one of my competitors, interpret. I’m an equal opportunity podcast host here. But, no, I think it’s helpful for people to know, how you’re actually doing these things. So so that’s for the longer tail. Now you were talking about the the more higher touch, you know, larger accounts that have a little bit more of the white glove service and perhaps more of, like, the the stated needs from those interactions. Tell us about that.

Leah Bauman:
So you you have a persona inside of an account that makes decisions, that makes growth decisions, that makes makes decisions about what the team is going to use and invest in. And those are the personas that our account managers and customer success managers are more working with. They’re also a persona who’s much less likely to write in a ticket because they are working directly with customer success and account managers, And they’re not probably gonna go into the community and vote for things, which is another great channel of the VOC, but you miss out on the more strategic personas who don’t spend time in communities and tickets.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Leah Bauman:
So that’s where your client facing teams really come in, and they need a place to put feedback that is different, that says, I spoke to a strategic persona in the account, product perspective to come in in a structured format. Right? It has to come in in a structured format. It has to come in, with numbers attached to it. It has to connect to your CRM so you can see which clients are asking for what. And I’m, like, gonna shamelessly tell you that monday.com changed our lives, in enabling us to use a form to catch the feedback from the client facing teams, to integrate with our CRM and pull in metadata from which client is asking for what, and how much is that client paying us, and what’s the size of the company, how much opportunity is there. Right?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Leah Bauman:
And to give product managers on the other side the tools that they need to prioritize between literally thousands of requests that are coming in. So, the form goes to the board. The board is organized by use case as are our product domains, so it’s very clear which feedback belongs to which product person, which is also key to this whole system working. And then from the product manager side, they’re responsible for going through, their items on a cadence and filling in whether or not it’s on the road map or if it’s being considered to give more information about why it’s not on the road map, which is something clients really like to have access to. I don’t know why. A no is a no. But when they hear the why behind the no, it often helps them contextualize.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, there’s so much research behind that, by the way, that if you say the words because after, like, it it just completely, like what’s the there’s some it completely converts people’s, like, attitude towards it. Right? Okay. They they did they did a test, I think, some some, professor of, somebody wanting to, like, skip the line of, like, a Xerox copy machine in the office place. Right? And they’re like, can I, you know, just asking, can I skip the line? And, like, no. F you. I’m in I’m waiting in line here. And then you just then the person says, like, can I skip the line because I I I need to wait less time? And they’re like, oh, okay. All you said was, like, the obvious that you wanted to wait.

Josh Schachter:
But just because you used the words because and why, that helps. I’ve just digressed. I apologize, Leah.

Leah Bauman:
But I agree with you. There is. There’s something there that when you explain to them your line of thinking behind why, and it gives tools to a customer success manager Yeah. To manage what’s often a very difficult relationship of being the person who always has to say no that wasn’t Yeah. Making it onto our road map.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. I I remember one of our advisors early days, Amelia, Dansica, was talking about, like, no jutsu is game that CSMs have to always play. How do you the art of saying no? But that’s part of the art. It’s like giving in your arsenal, the rationale, the why. No because of this. Right? Or no, not now, however. Okay.

Josh Schachter:
So so what you just described, that that workflow, that’s current day? That’s your current day for capturing?

Leah Bauman:
That is one one of the mechanisms we use for capturing current day feedback.

Josh Schachter:
K.

Leah Bauman:
That board is huge. All the product managers use it for road mapping and for and, like, to understand what are the biggest requests coming in from strategic personas inside of accounts that are managed by our field teams.

Josh Schachter:
Now are you able to this is a pipe dream for many companies that I talk to. Are you able to close the loop at all and get back to those customers when there has been a request that 6 months later was was, completed?

Leah Bauman:
So it’s a great question, and the answer is yes. Although we rely very heavily on the client facing teams to be the ones who close the loop. In Monday, one of the one of the KPIs we have for the feedback board is how many feedbacks actually make it onto the road map. Mhmm. So the feedback board is connected to our release board, and there’s a connection between those 2. And we my my team will manually update on the feedback board. When something has been released, they make that connection so that they can see more details about it or whatever. And there’s an automation that pings anyone who made that request and says, hey.

Leah Bauman:
This request is now released and closed. Go check it out on the release board and talk to your clients about it.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, I love it so much. And and and so this is kind of a way that you’re able to measure the success of your group as well is the metric of how many requests really are impacting the the the product road map. Is that right?

Leah Bauman:
That’s right.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Leah Bauman:
That’s right. And it’s very interesting. Like, if you ask a a product person let’s say you tell a product person, hey. We completed 15% of the requests on the feedback board this year. Right? They’re gonna tell you, wow. That is amazing. 15% of the request. Incredible.

Leah Bauman:
We are gods. Right? And then you go to client facing and you say, product completed 15% of the request on the feedback board, and they’re like, nobody listens to us. Nobody cares about us. And it’s a wild mismatch in expectations that you also have to manage, right, as part of aligning between those two groups. What does success actually look like?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. You know, I posted on LinkedIn a few weeks ago, this thought that just kinda came to me overnight. I hadn’t put too much, like, thought into it. But why doesn’t CS report or excuse me, why doesn’t product report to, like, the chief customer officer? Everything about that, That would ensure that what the customers want is prioritized by product rather than just, you know, new feature releases of things that are not necessarily validated yet. Now I understand that you you might curb a little bit of innovation.

Josh Schachter:
People don’t know what they want, etcetera, etcetera. You could have a a Tiger team outside for that, but that was one thought that came to mind.

Leah Bauman:
So I also had that thought that not exactly that thought, but very definitely a similar line of thinking for a long time. And, years of watching the relationship and, like, have have turned me into a believer that we cannot answer client requests exactly as they’re framed, and build the best product out there. Yeah. And I could give you an example of, like, from the early days, I had been managing feedback, client requests for probably a year at this point, and I had a laundry list. I had a list. It was prioritized. Like, I knew what the top requests were. I had validation from teams across the company, from clients.

Leah Bauman:
I had numbers. I had everything. And then they said they’re gonna go in and do a hackathon, and, like, they can’t gonna come out 2 days later and get excited. Everything’s gonna be, like, it’s gonna be amazing. They sat us down 2 days later, and I’m, like, oh my god. Which one of my requests is on the list? And they came out with a feature nobody had ever asked for. And I I I took it so personally. I was, like, how could you do this to me? Like

Josh Schachter:
Yep.

Leah Bauman:
I did everything you asked me to do, and you went in a room, and you came out with something no one has ever asked for. The feature was our forms feature. Right? It was answering so many of the requests in a way that I could not wrap my head around in the first moment that I saw it. Right? Yeah. And they solved a problem that our clients had in a way that no one ever asked for. No one ever would think to ask for that because it it’s it’s a bit of product genius, but it actually crossed the check box on so many of the requests that I had. And there are so many examples of that. Oh, my gosh.

Leah Bauman:
The biggest biggest argument I think I ever had was when we came out with the Llama Farm. You know our Llama Farm?

Josh Schachter:
No. Educate me.

Leah Bauman:
Let me tell you that no one ever asked for a Llama Farm. Okay? No one ever asked for a Llama Farm. It was another one of those hackathon items. Basically, you have the ability in Monday to create a widget that represents all of your statuses as llamas, and the color and size of the llama relates to the status color and priority of the task. You’re in product, so you’re smiling. Okay? You get it. It’s fun. It’s engaging.

Leah Bauman:
I I was, like, devastated. I was, like, nobody ever asked for this. Nobody wants this. Like, we have actual clients with real life use cases who asked us for things. You have the nerve to go in a room and come out with a llama firm. Like, I can’t even look at you guys right now. K? And it was like a kind of a big fight, and it was actually our, turned out to be our founder’s feature. And

Josh Schachter:
Oh, there you go.

Leah Bauman:
Yeah. Yeah. No. Listen. He was, like, you you have no imagination. And I was, like, I no one asked me to have imagination. I came in to manage these requests, and I’m not doing that. But over the years, the amount of clients who have told me that the Llama Farm has made a difference in the buying process of Monday, I never would have predicted that with all of the data I had, with all of the clients I spoke to.

Leah Bauman:
Nothing could have ever prepared me that in the buying process, having something that’s engaging and fun would actually help them to close. When you have competitors who do things that are sometimes feel similar.

Josh Schachter:
So funny.

Leah Bauman:
Enterprise clients Yeah. Love the llama farm.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. You know, everybody likes personality, I think. And so it’s it’s an injection, which is probably what your your your founder had had seen.

Leah Bauman:
Yes. Yeah. Because it’s not about always, like, giving a request as a client asks for it. It’s about deeply, deeply understanding the problem, and letting the product be geniuses, and fix it in a way that is new, that maybe you didn’t think of. And I think that’s that’s for me is the power of product alignment. It’s like helping orient them towards problems and not towards feature requests.

Josh Schachter:
So I I wanna wrap up with this. What’s the the number 1 you know, I read a book on podcasting recently. I shouldn’t ask you what’s the number one that puts more pressure on the response. What what is, like, a a key piece of advice that you would give to companies? Again, let’s go into a company of 200 people or below that clearly are not gonna be as advanced. Well, I was you know what? Maybe they might be more advanced to smaller companies. Right? Because they might actually be more tethered together. But anyways, a company that’s not as advanced in analyzing voice of the customer as yourselves, what would be the first step you would take to to systematizing this?

Leah Bauman:
Okay. The first step is acknowledging that client facing and product teams need each other, and they have to work together, and it has to be intentional. That’s the first step. And I think a lot of companies stop. They never get to that place. And product works in a silo, and customer facing works in a silo. They have totally different KPIs, and you have teams that are moving further and further away. So first step is saying we want to be, in a joint task force.

Leah Bauman:
We want to understand the client better, and we want to build the best product for the client. So I think that’s the first step. The second step is creating a source of truth where your client facing teams can record the things they’re hearing, not from every client, but from strategic clients, from strategic personas, and to give them a place to put that down and a task force that’s actually looking at it and prioritizing between the things that are coming in. And that’s the first step.

Josh Schachter:
Love it. We’ll leave it there for now. Leah Baumann, head of enterprise product alignment at monday.com, having been there for seven and a half years through some hypergrowth, of the company, some really successful times there, and wishing you the best this year for even more continued success.

Leah Bauman:
Thank you. You as well, and I hope that this will be a year of collaboration for us.

Josh Schachter:
Yes. Absolutely.

Leah Bauman:
Unchurned is presented by UpdateAI.

Josh Schachter:
And and so this is kind of a way that you’re able to measure the success of your group as well is the metric of how many requests really are impacting the the the product road map. Is that right?

Leah Bauman:
That’s right.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Leah Bauman:
That’s right. And it’s very interesting. Like, if you ask a a product person let’s say you tell a product person, hey. We completed 15% of the requests on the feedback board this year. Right? They’re gonna tell you, wow. That is amazing. 15% of the request. Incredible.

Leah Bauman:
We are gods. Right? And then you go to client facing and you say, product completed 15% of the request on the feedback board, and they’re like, nobody listens to us. Nobody cares about us. And it’s a wild mismatch in expectations that you also have to manage.

Josh Schachter:
Welcome, everybody, to this special episode of Unchurned. I’m your host, Josh Schachter. I’m going solo today. Christy and John, well, they weren’t invited. Don’t tell them. But I was so excited to talk to Leah Baumann, who is the head of enterprise product alignment. She’s gonna tell us what that means, at monday.com, Monday, which is just crushing it in the SaaS world. Last I checked.

Josh Schachter:
Last I checked. And, you know, UpdateAI, my company is all about voice of the customer. Like, our thesis behind everything we do is how much the customer matters and customer centricity, customer customer customer. And in my background is in product. And I found out about about Leah a couple months ago. It’s probably Leah. Right? You’re Israeli, so it’s probably Leah. Yes.

Josh Schachter:
About Leah a couple months ago, and what she’s doing at Monday, I I was like, wow. I have to talk to her because she like, the the the structure they put and the resources they put behind behind customer insights and aligning with product per her title are second to none. I’ve haven’t seen that yet in the space. So, Leah, thank you so much for joining me on this program.

Leah Bauman:
It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me, Josh.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Absolutely. So, well, for anybody who’s, you know, hiding under a rock, and we’re we’re in 2025 now, what is Monday? What do you do? Who do you sell to? But, like, really quickly because everybody knows.

Leah Bauman:
Okay. So firstly, that’s very flattering. I I hope that everybody knows.

Josh Schachter:
Well, I see it in the subway on the 4, 5, 6 every day. So, you know, I know.

Leah Bauman:
That helps everybody know. I actually have a friend who was at my house yesterday, and he told me that even though he’s pretty much off the grid and doesn’t really use any social media or or anything like that, He knows what Monday is, and I thought that was very impressive. For those of you who don’t know, monday.com is a platform that runs all core aspects of work. It’s a work management platform that gives anyone the power to build and improve how their organization runs. So that’s a little bit about Monday.

Josh Schachter:
That’s so broad. What’s, like, the top use case that people love about Monday?

Leah Bauman:
That’s a great question. I think it’s it’s hard to pick 1 because we are

Josh Schachter:
What’s your favorite use case? I’m gonna fill

Leah Bauman:
you down. My favorite use case is customer feedback and how we manage that on Monday. I also am am pretty obsessed with our projects and portfolio and and how we’ve really made it easier for people who manage projects to not hate their lives. So I think that’s pretty impressive.

Josh Schachter:
I think that’s what I saw on the subway, by the way, as the tagline. Making it easier for people that manage projects to not hate their lives. 1 person at a time.

Leah Bauman:
Yeah. So suggesting that to marketing tomorrow.

Josh Schachter:
I mean, I feel like, you know, in the middle of January here as we record this in in the winter of New York, like, that would really people would that would really resonate. You know? Voice of the customer right there. Okay. So you are your your title is not voice of the customer. You are the head of enterprise product alignment. What does that mean?

Leah Bauman:
Okay. So, if you haven’t heard of product alignment before, you should not feel too bad, because because

Josh Schachter:
Oh, I think it’s but I yeah. I think nobody has heard, just to be clear.

Leah Bauman:
Nobody has heard of product alignment before. Maybe definitely, we’ve been we’ve been ringing the bell on product alignment for a couple of years now, so we have a few people who heard of it for sure.

Josh Schachter:
Okay.

Leah Bauman:
I also had the chance to present on it at our user conference this year in London and then in New York. I I’ll tell you a little bit about the role and what was the origin of the role. Maybe I I oftenly, I often jokingly refer to myself as the big accounts lawyer. My team manages the highest tier of product related escalations that we are predicting will cause us large amounts of ARR or annual recurring revenue from across the life cycle of an account, whether it’s from new business expansions, implementations, or even downgrade, and churn. And we manage a lot of the feedback that comes in from our larger customers, and from the types of customers that we want to be attracting as a business.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. So you’re the VIP or you’re the team for the VIP customers to take their feedback and to facilitate it with product to make sure it’s listened to?

Leah Bauman:
It’s also for current clients, but it’s also about understanding why we aren’t attracting the type of clients we wanna attract, what features might be missing, what’s what’s the feedback that’s coming in that stops people from using monday for use cases we think they should be using monday for?

Josh Schachter:
For people that are not yet clients.

Leah Bauman:
For people that are not yet clients. So clients and potential clients. And maybe you’re not a VIP client today because you’re not in our, you know, top segment, but you’re an enterprise company, and we believe that we should have a bigger foothold. What’s your feedback? What’s stopping you from growing? What’s stopping you from executing?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. I I love that. I mean, something that we all struggle with or we could all improve upon is making sure that, like, everybody in SaaS is that whether you’re a client or or not, that everybody out there knows exactly what you could be using the platform to leverage. Right? Everybody thinks about UpdateAI as being a really good AI meeting notetaker. I’m like, no. No. No. No.

Josh Schachter:
That was the mousetrap. That was so 2021. You know, how about this, this, and this? And it sounds like that’s kind of what your group is. It’s like, you know, where can we where are there misconceptions or or product education that we can be required? I’m not saying that’s the program you’re running, like, at scale or anything.

Leah Bauman:
We have an enablement team. We have an enablement team. If it exists in the platform and you should be doing it, probably the enablement team is teaching our client facing teams how to support you. Yeah. If you have feedback and there are gaps and the product the product can’t do what you want it to do Yeah. And you wanna talk about it, that’s us. That’s that’s product alignment.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. And and did you carve this out for yourself, this role? And and and and tell me a little bit about the organ the organization, like, the group. Like, because I think you guys sit under CRO. Is that right? Tell us, like, a little bit about the role, the the layout, and and how you got to this role from because you were in sales before.

Leah Bauman:
I was in sales before. So let’s talk a little bit of the origin of the role. My the origin of my role, as head of enterprise product alignment, it’s a bit of a long story. So I’m gonna tell you sort of a condensed version. You can double tap on anything in here, and we can talk about it. But I’ll I’ll give you the high level. I started my tech career in sales, which I really love and really enjoy. I came into the sales team at Monday, and I’m gonna age myself here, when the sales team was almost brand new.

Leah Bauman:
We had, like, 3 people on it. And At the whole company? No. At the sales team. The sales

Josh Schachter:
team But within the whole company, only 3 people in sales?

Leah Bauman:
There were only 3 people in sales, and there were only 74 people in the company. For contacts, we’re we’re over 3,000. 25100 employees will be over 3,000 employees pretty soon.

Josh Schachter:
Oh my god. How do I join a giant company that early on? Well, I guess I did found 1, but yeah.

Leah Bauman:
You guess. You guess. When I was when I was applying for Monday, I also applied for a job at Gong. Do you know Gong?

Josh Schachter:
No. Never heard of him.

Leah Bauman:
You’re joking? Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
I’m joking.

Leah Bauman:
Oh, okay. Yeah. So either one of those, I think, would have been a good bet. And and I I think that, like, Gong would have been really solid, but I went with Monday because I was in love with the product. Yeah. And and, obviously, for me, it was a great choice. But it it at an early stage, you’re you’re always kind of guessing.

Josh Schachter:
It’s a guess. It’s a guess. Okay. Anyway, so, I I I threw you off track. So, so you were in sales. You you joined Monday very early on.

Leah Bauman:
Yes. And when at most tech companies, the sales team is kind of the the leader, and at Monday

Josh Schachter:
tech companies. Yeah. Keep going.

Leah Bauman:
So at Monday, it was very different. The sales team was not the king at all. In fact, every team in the company seemed to be, like, all in on the self serve funnel, which is our no touch funnel. And they really believe that the correct way for Monday to take over the world is going to be that people just come in and sign up, and you don’t need a sales team, to sell it. So we we were at the bottom of the food chain, in the company when I first started, which was a very Interesting. Like, it was it was kind of like a a very strange feeling for a salesperson, I would say. And we were trying to close bigger accounts on the sales team than what were being closed in our self serve funnel. And and the sales the the sales team, which started to grow a little bit, had clients and leads that were telling us all day, every day why they wouldn’t close or why they wouldn’t grow, and why they weren’t satisfied, and what use cases they wanted to manage in Monday, and why they couldn’t.

Leah Bauman:
Yep. But the sales and CS, really had no way of communicating that to product.

Josh Schachter:
Yep.

Leah Bauman:
And I I I don’t think I can describe how frustrating it was to be a top salesperson and then a top account manager who absolutely knew what features would lead to explosive growth without having a channel to actualize any of that feedback. Well,

Josh Schachter:
go ahead and describe it. Describe it. Try to describe it in words. In one word, how did it feel to have that that you knew it, but it it just you couldn’t actualize it. It was

Leah Bauman:
frustrating. Frustrating. It was very, very frustrating. And and to me, it felt like I just couldn’t connect the output of what was coming on the road map to the needs that I was seeing in the field. Yep. And it was true across the sales team that we felt like we knew and the CS team, by the way, because there was barely a difference back then between sales and CS. There was, like, a a a big crossover between those two roles.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. That’s that’s Leah’s way of saying that there was no CS. It was salespeople that were operating.

Leah Bauman:
I did my own CS, and it made me a better salesperson. And it made me a better human. I’m just

Josh Schachter:
gonna say. It does. Yeah.

Leah Bauman:
It does. It really

Josh Schachter:
does. Yeah.

Leah Bauman:
And we felt like we knew what the product needed, and we felt like enterprise was the right way forward for us as a business. And it it felt like nobody really wanted to listen. And then output would come on the road map. We’d be expected to sell that output, and it didn’t align with the needs we were seeing in the field, and it felt

Josh Schachter:
Where were you where were you where were you, nobody was listening. Where were you talking? Like, were these Slack channels set up? Was this a a biweekly, you know, meeting or Huddl? Like, they have Slack back then. Oh, like, what was that?

Leah Bauman:
There was nothing. First of all, we communicated almost solely on WhatsApp at this point. Oh, nice. Didn’t have Slack in there.

Josh Schachter:
International start up.

Leah Bauman:
Yes. Exactly. Exactly. There was there was a beer night once every 2 weeks where you could voice your displeasure, and we did. But, like, nothing, like, things don’t always move after you say something at a social gathering. Right? And then you would kind of have, like, teams where there’s a salesperson who needs something to close a deal, and he’s playing football with 1 of the developers. And the next thing you know, his item’s in a sprint. And that doesn’t feel like a very smart way for us to make decisions.

Leah Bauman:
It was frustrating.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Leah Bauman:
Right? Yeah. And product alignment really started as a side project when we were still under 300 employees. I think I had just closed our first half $1,000,000 account.

Josh Schachter:
Amazing. Do you remember who it was with?

Leah Bauman:
I do, but I can’t

Josh Schachter:
either say Just say a company that rhymes with it.

Leah Bauman:
I will tell you that they make video games.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. Cool. Alright. So Activision, you sign on board. I’m just making a random one. Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m not.

Leah Bauman:
And at that point, this was a client who was telling me exactly touch feedback, to talk about the feedback coming in from clients and from

Josh Schachter:
Do you spearhead this to create the channels and the and the the recurring meeting?

Leah Bauman:
At the time, it was spearheaded by product, who needed to start aligning with someone on the sales team. I spearheaded it from the CRO side. We had one representative from sales, one from CS, one from product, one from r and d, and one from design. So we, together, represented all of the facets of, like, how you make decisions. Does the sales team need it? Does the CS team need it? And is it possible? How much is it gonna cost us in story points?

Josh Schachter:
So, you know, we we had we have some questions planned here to to keep going with stuff on the the the culture today, a voice of the customer, and why it’s so critical at Monday. And I do wanna get into all that. But I actually I wanna keep on diving into this piece too, like, this origin story, because a lot of people out there listening are probably from companies of under 300 people, and they’re probably in a situation right now where they could be spawning this up themselves where they want to or they tried and it didn’t work. Right? So, hey, everybody. It’s Josh. I’m taking a quick break from the podcast to tell you a bit about UpdateAI. I started UpdateAI to solve 2 major challenges for CS teams. The first is that we save CSMs 4 to 5 hours per week with our productivity through AI.

Josh Schachter:
Secondly, we give leaders a window into all the conversations across each account and the entire portfolio. So we help knowledge transfer, we help increase the coverage model of your CS teams, and we help you detect emerging patterns and what your customers are telling your CSMs across all the risks, product feedback, advocacy moments, and expansion opportunities. So come check us out at www.updateai. It’s completely free to sign up and trial. A lot of people out there listening are probably from companies of under 300 people, and they’re probably in a situation right now where they could be spawning this up themselves where they want to or they tried and it didn’t work. Right? So, I’d I’d love to understand, like, you know, in short, what worked and what didn’t work, but maybe, like, how you structured some of these cross functional conversations in the early days.

Leah Bauman:
Okay. So we had we started with a board. We’re Monday, so we use Monday. But if you don’t use Monday, you could use whatever work management tool you use or even an Excel spreadsheet. And the first place is having a submission, like, a log of what are people asking for, and just tracking, like, what are clients saying, how many clients are asking for the same thing. That’s sort of, like, your source of truth for feedback. Right? And it all starts with making sure that you’re documenting it, because the worst thing that happens in the tech companies is he says this, she says that, one salesperson says, and you’re not aggregating data over time that allows you to give weight to specific features. So just having it all in one place and being able to count how many times a feedback is coming and what is that feedback, and then sitting in a room and saying, from a product and dev and design perspective, do we understand the request? Right? Do we do we know what they’re asking for, how it connects to real world use cases, having a conversation around it? Yep.

Leah Bauman:
That’s the first step. And then having the a developer say it’s t shirt size it. Right? Saying it’s small, it’s medium, it’s large can give you a a feeling for, is this something I could just put into a sprint during a quarter, or does it need to wait for a quarterly kickoff to get added in? Or maybe it’s so big that it’s a yearly item, and we need the buy in of a of a higher level who’s dictating a yearly strategy for this. So just t shirt sizing could really get you, an understanding of where you might wanna report on that, and that made a really big difference for us.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. Helpful. Helpful. Okay. So, that how has that evolved? How has it how has the culture of voice of the customer evolved from those early days, and and what’s kind of been the time horizon too? Are we talking about 6 months or 6 years? And, you know, how’s it evolved to to where it is today?

Leah Bauman:
So it is a really great question. I I would I would tell you that, like, the question is more how many times and how many different ways have we systemized the process for VOC. Monday is one of the fastest growing SaaS companies out there, and we have outgrown our processes at least every 2 years since I’ve started, which challenges us to level up and create something that’s better every couple of years. So over the years, like, the the VOC has evolved and the culture of the VOC has evolved. But one thing has really stayed the same, which is that Monday is feedback obsessed. And the thing that never changes is that we really want to hear the feedback and the insights coming from the field, and we believe that this is what is gonna make our product, win out over everything else, which is understanding the problems that clients have, and surfacing them to the people who are building the product. So I think that hasn’t changed, but the structure has changed over over the years quite significantly. So a piece of our VOC, a very significant piece of our VOC sits inside of the support team, and that’s the team that answers Zendesk tickets.

Leah Bauman:
So they have a system for pulling insights out of Zendesk tickets and slicing and dicing what our clients asking for in tickets. Right? And that is really helpful for a certain type of user. But as accounts get bigger and you work with specific personas inside of accounts, who are decision makers, who are more I’m sorry.

Josh Schachter:
What tool I’m I’m I’m apologize for cutting you off, like, a delayed reaction here. What what what what tool are they using to because I think this will be interesting for other folks as well. It’s not enough at AI, but what tool are you guys using to synthesize all the insights from that support layer from the Zendesk tickets?

Leah Bauman:
That’s a great question. We are using interpret, which is a system that we just started using, I think, about 6 months ago. We had a tagging system in Zendesk, and we moved over to interpret, to put that layer of AI on top of everything and to be able to slice and dice and pull the insights out much better. Great.

Josh Schachter:
Great. So for all those listening out there, go visit one of my competitors, interpret. I’m an equal opportunity podcast host here. But, no, I think it’s helpful for people to know, how you’re actually doing these things. So so that’s for the longer tail. Now you were talking about the the more higher touch, you know, larger accounts that have a little bit more of the white glove service and perhaps more of, like, the the stated needs from those interactions. Tell us about that.

Leah Bauman:
So you you have a persona inside of an account that makes decisions, that makes growth decisions, that makes makes decisions about what the team is going to use and invest in. And those are the personas that our account managers and customer success managers are more working with. They’re also a persona who’s much less likely to write in a ticket because they are working directly with customer success and account managers, And they’re not probably gonna go into the community and vote for things, which is another great channel of the VOC, but you miss out on the more strategic personas who don’t spend time in communities and tickets.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Leah Bauman:
So that’s where your client facing teams really come in, and they need a place to put feedback that is different, that says, I spoke to a strategic persona in the account, product perspective to come in in a structured format. Right? It has to come in in a structured format. It has to come in, with numbers attached to it. It has to connect to your CRM so you can see which clients are asking for what. And I’m, like, gonna shamelessly tell you that monday.com changed our lives, in enabling us to use a form to catch the feedback from the client facing teams, to integrate with our CRM and pull in metadata from which client is asking for what, and how much is that client paying us, and what’s the size of the company, how much opportunity is there. Right?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Leah Bauman:
And to give product managers on the other side the tools that they need to prioritize between literally thousands of requests that are coming in. So, the form goes to the board. The board is organized by use case as are our product domains, so it’s very clear which feedback belongs to which product person, which is also key to this whole system working. And then from the product manager side, they’re responsible for going through, their items on a cadence and filling in whether or not it’s on the road map or if it’s being considered to give more information about why it’s not on the road map, which is something clients really like to have access to. I don’t know why. A no is a no. But when they hear the why behind the no, it often helps them contextualize.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, there’s so much research behind that, by the way, that if you say the words because after, like, it it just completely, like what’s the there’s some it completely converts people’s, like, attitude towards it. Right? Okay. They they did they did a test, I think, some some, professor of, somebody wanting to, like, skip the line of, like, a Xerox copy machine in the office place. Right? And they’re like, can I, you know, just asking, can I skip the line? And, like, no. F you. I’m in I’m waiting in line here. And then you just then the person says, like, can I skip the line because I I I need to wait less time? And they’re like, oh, okay. All you said was, like, the obvious that you wanted to wait.

Josh Schachter:
But just because you used the words because and why, that helps. I’ve just digressed. I apologize, Leah.

Leah Bauman:
But I agree with you. There is. There’s something there that when you explain to them your line of thinking behind why, and it gives tools to a customer success manager Yeah. To manage what’s often a very difficult relationship of being the person who always has to say no that wasn’t Yeah. Making it onto our road map.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. I I remember one of our advisors early days, Amelia, Dansica, was talking about, like, no jutsu is game that CSMs have to always play. How do you the art of saying no? But that’s part of the art. It’s like giving in your arsenal, the rationale, the why. No because of this. Right? Or no, not now, however. Okay.

Josh Schachter:
So so what you just described, that that workflow, that’s current day? That’s your current day for capturing?

Leah Bauman:
That is one one of the mechanisms we use for capturing current day feedback.

Josh Schachter:
K.

Leah Bauman:
That board is huge. All the product managers use it for road mapping and for and, like, to understand what are the biggest requests coming in from strategic personas inside of accounts that are managed by our field teams.

Josh Schachter:
Now are you able to this is a pipe dream for many companies that I talk to. Are you able to close the loop at all and get back to those customers when there has been a request that 6 months later was was, completed?

Leah Bauman:
So it’s a great question, and the answer is yes. Although we rely very heavily on the client facing teams to be the ones who close the loop. In Monday, one of the one of the KPIs we have for the feedback board is how many feedbacks actually make it onto the road map. Mhmm. So the feedback board is connected to our release board, and there’s a connection between those 2. And we my my team will manually update on the feedback board. When something has been released, they make that connection so that they can see more details about it or whatever. And there’s an automation that pings anyone who made that request and says, hey.

Leah Bauman:
This request is now released and closed. Go check it out on the release board and talk to your clients about it.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, I love it so much. And and and so this is kind of a way that you’re able to measure the success of your group as well is the metric of how many requests really are impacting the the the product road map. Is that right?

Leah Bauman:
That’s right.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Leah Bauman:
That’s right. And it’s very interesting. Like, if you ask a a product person let’s say you tell a product person, hey. We completed 15% of the requests on the feedback board this year. Right? They’re gonna tell you, wow. That is amazing. 15% of the request. Incredible.

Leah Bauman:
We are gods. Right? And then you go to client facing and you say, product completed 15% of the request on the feedback board, and they’re like, nobody listens to us. Nobody cares about us. And it’s a wild mismatch in expectations that you also have to manage, right, as part of aligning between those two groups. What does success actually look like?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. You know, I posted on LinkedIn a few weeks ago, this thought that just kinda came to me overnight. I hadn’t put too much, like, thought into it. But why doesn’t CS report or excuse me, why doesn’t product report to, like, the chief customer officer? Everything about that, That would ensure that what the customers want is prioritized by product rather than just, you know, new feature releases of things that are not necessarily validated yet. Now I understand that you you might curb a little bit of innovation.

Josh Schachter:
People don’t know what they want, etcetera, etcetera. You could have a a Tiger team outside for that, but that was one thought that came to mind.

Leah Bauman:
So I also had that thought that not exactly that thought, but very definitely a similar line of thinking for a long time. And, years of watching the relationship and, like, have have turned me into a believer that we cannot answer client requests exactly as they’re framed, and build the best product out there. Yeah. And I could give you an example of, like, from the early days, I had been managing feedback, client requests for probably a year at this point, and I had a laundry list. I had a list. It was prioritized. Like, I knew what the top requests were. I had validation from teams across the company, from clients.

Leah Bauman:
I had numbers. I had everything. And then they said they’re gonna go in and do a hackathon, and, like, they can’t gonna come out 2 days later and get excited. Everything’s gonna be, like, it’s gonna be amazing. They sat us down 2 days later, and I’m, like, oh my god. Which one of my requests is on the list? And they came out with a feature nobody had ever asked for. And I I I took it so personally. I was, like, how could you do this to me? Like

Josh Schachter:
Yep.

Leah Bauman:
I did everything you asked me to do, and you went in a room, and you came out with something no one has ever asked for. The feature was our forms feature. Right? It was answering so many of the requests in a way that I could not wrap my head around in the first moment that I saw it. Right? Yeah. And they solved a problem that our clients had in a way that no one ever asked for. No one ever would think to ask for that because it it’s it’s a bit of product genius, but it actually crossed the check box on so many of the requests that I had. And there are so many examples of that. Oh, my gosh.

Leah Bauman:
The biggest biggest argument I think I ever had was when we came out with the Llama Farm. You know our Llama Farm?

Josh Schachter:
No. Educate me.

Leah Bauman:
Let me tell you that no one ever asked for a Llama Farm. Okay? No one ever asked for a Llama Farm. It was another one of those hackathon items. Basically, you have the ability in Monday to create a widget that represents all of your statuses as llamas, and the color and size of the llama relates to the status color and priority of the task. You’re in product, so you’re smiling. Okay? You get it. It’s fun. It’s engaging.

Leah Bauman:
I I was, like, devastated. I was, like, nobody ever asked for this. Nobody wants this. Like, we have actual clients with real life use cases who asked us for things. You have the nerve to go in a room and come out with a llama firm. Like, I can’t even look at you guys right now. K? And it was like a kind of a big fight, and it was actually our, turned out to be our founder’s feature. And

Josh Schachter:
Oh, there you go.

Leah Bauman:
Yeah. Yeah. No. Listen. He was, like, you you have no imagination. And I was, like, I no one asked me to have imagination. I came in to manage these requests, and I’m not doing that. But over the years, the amount of clients who have told me that the Llama Farm has made a difference in the buying process of Monday, I never would have predicted that with all of the data I had, with all of the clients I spoke to.

Leah Bauman:
Nothing could have ever prepared me that in the buying process, having something that’s engaging and fun would actually help them to close. When you have competitors who do things that are sometimes feel similar.

Josh Schachter:
So funny.

Leah Bauman:
Enterprise clients Yeah. Love the llama farm.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. You know, everybody likes personality, I think. And so it’s it’s an injection, which is probably what your your your founder had had seen.

Leah Bauman:
Yes. Yeah. Because it’s not about always, like, giving a request as a client asks for it. It’s about deeply, deeply understanding the problem, and letting the product be geniuses, and fix it in a way that is new, that maybe you didn’t think of. And I think that’s that’s for me is the power of product alignment. It’s like helping orient them towards problems and not towards feature requests.

Josh Schachter:
So I I wanna wrap up with this. What’s the the number 1 you know, I read a book on podcasting recently. I shouldn’t ask you what’s the number one that puts more pressure on the response. What what is, like, a a key piece of advice that you would give to companies? Again, let’s go into a company of 200 people or below that clearly are not gonna be as advanced. Well, I was you know what? Maybe they might be more advanced to smaller companies. Right? Because they might actually be more tethered together. But anyways, a company that’s not as advanced in analyzing voice of the customer as yourselves, what would be the first step you would take to to systematizing this?

Leah Bauman:
Okay. The first step is acknowledging that client facing and product teams need each other, and they have to work together, and it has to be intentional. That’s the first step. And I think a lot of companies stop. They never get to that place. And product works in a silo, and customer facing works in a silo. They have totally different KPIs, and you have teams that are moving further and further away. So first step is saying we want to be, in a joint task force.

Leah Bauman:
We want to understand the client better, and we want to build the best product for the client. So I think that’s the first step. The second step is creating a source of truth where your client facing teams can record the things they’re hearing, not from every client, but from strategic clients, from strategic personas, and to give them a place to put that down and a task force that’s actually looking at it and prioritizing between the things that are coming in. And that’s the first step.

Josh Schachter:
Love it. We’ll leave it there for now. Leah Baumann, head of enterprise product alignment at monday.com, having been there for seven and a half years through some hypergrowth, of the company, some really successful times there, and wishing you the best this year for even more continued success.

Leah Bauman:
Thank you. You as well, and I hope that this will be a year of collaboration for us.

Josh Schachter:
Yes. Absolutely.