Manic Monday
Just like one is likely to be introspective on any given Monday and concentrate on the tasks of the workweek ahead, monday.com (previously dapulse) is good for lurking but not so much for collaborating.
We are assessing leading collaboration tools against four criteria that we see as critical to the future of this space. The criteria we used to assess monday.com’s effectiveness as an enterprise tool are:
- Debates lead to elegant solutions.
- Project partitioning and allocation is efficient.
- Progress monitoring improves capital allocation.
- Risk mitigation improves project outcomes.
Image Source: SoftwareReviews
monday.com is using the 50M USD raised in 2018 series C funding to expand the breadth of features: the number of column types available on the project dashboards (location, timeline, due date, numbers, world clock, ratings, tags, vote, check); how those columns are viewed (map, calendar, timeline, files, chart); and their availability on any mobile computing platform.
Our Take
monday.com epitomizes the current crop of startups burgeoning in the software collaboration space. Its intuitive and compelling design makes for an efficient and responsive tool, but once past the gripping color themes and handy menu items, there is little to address our key criteria. Using the concept of transparency to reconceive email and spreadsheets is a creative approach that leads to a productive end; monday.com easily meets our second criteria but only gets a partial of the way there on items 1 and 3 while not doing much with item 4. The tagging function is a powerful search feature and being able to discuss actions items enables transparency but monday.com still does not do enough to track risk, ascertain capital allocation, and promote debate.