Making dreams a reality with our new landing page builder

May Kishon
4 min read

So it all began when I started working as a product designer in monday.com a little over a year ago. My manager told me: “We need you to design, write and build an amazing landing page that shows our company’s key accomplishments from this past year. You’ll be the only person working on this and, oh yeah, you have only 2 weeks. Go!”

My panicking self started thinking – WHAT THE %$# ???

This whole experience introduced me to our old landing page builder, or “The Generator,” as we call it. The Generator is a tool everyone in monday.com is using to design, create, and build amazing web pages without wasting the precious and oh-so-expensive time of our lovely developers team. 

After that experience, I earned the title, “Master Generator” and became the go-to person for everyone who needed to use this tool. We are a big company, so imagine tons of people coming to you daily seeking help. [Drama alert] It was a living hell. 

So, my team and I decided to give it a makeover – and we dove into planning, designing and executing this super cool project and here are the steps we took:

  1. Map out all the existing problems
    1. The old version was not intuitive and hard to understand so I had to master it in order to create the page I wanted. 
    2. Every task I had to do with the old version felt like solving the world’s biggest puzzle. Even just editing the smallest bit of text caused a lot of frustration. Imagine doing this with a text-heavy page!
    3. It had a really bad reputation – people in my team were afraid to use it. When people heard the words “Do it in the Generator,” their faces switched from red to yellow, purple and then blue. It was such a complex tool to use people were terrified of using it. 
    4. It was very limiting. Well, When you think Design – You think, Endless options. Ok so, nope. This tool had only much you could do with it and it was very frustrating for the designers especially.
  2. Vision is the key
    We’ve made a prototype focusing on what’s important for this project to be successful, and tested it on people from other teams.
    Finally,  we had our design vision and we were able to prioritize the tasks and decide on what would be a must for launch and what we can gradually release after.
  3. Sharing is caring.
    Sharing our vision with people from other teams helped us collect many feedbacks and eventually use all the insights to build a better product.
  4. Be smart executors!
    Since we wanted to stay on schedule, we decided to plan a 2-day Hackathon for our developers to bring our vision to life. It was a challenge since you have to teach, show and explain everything you’ve been working on so they can also take part and contribute. And all this in a really short amount of time.
  5. Be technically creative
    While building this product (basically from scratch) we faced some challenges and had to play along and make some smart and quick changes while keeping the show going and not missing our deadline.. 
  6. Ready, Set, Launch!
    It finally went live!

The reactions from people in monday made us feel like we totally nailed it. We felt like their problems and fears from the mighty, complex and outdated tool clearly faded away.

We barely needed to have guides and tutorials, since the tool was so much more intuitive and pretty much explained itself. 

This whole experience taught us a lot. We learned that thinking big is not a bad word. We also learned that you can stay focused on big goals, while making adjustments along the way. We had big dreams but still stuck to a tight schedule by staying in sync throughout.

Really listening to our peers’ pains, thoughts and ideas only helped us bring a better solution to the table. 

Our landing page builder came a long way, really quickly. It’s far from perfect, but it’s an ongoing journey. We plan to keep improving it by adding new design layouts, new templates, and keep working on it to make it a better tool.  

Want to check out our new generator tool? We’re hiring ????

author avatar
May Kishon is a Product designer at monday.com. Worked in the Growth team for two years and now is a professional lead in the People & Interactions team