Competitor-as-Gift Ambition Reset
Turn a competitor's leap into permission to set a goal so ambitious your old way of working can't reach it
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 95%
When a competitor does something you thought impossible, treat it as proof-of-possibility rather than a threat. Set a goal so aggressive that working harder or longer can't achieve it — only working differently can. This forces the team to rebuild the underlying approach instead of grinding out incremental features.
Origin
Developed by Daniel Lereya and monday.com's founders (Roy Mann, Eran Zinman) around a moment when a main competitor shipped 30 new board columns overnight while monday.com had five and was hand-coding the sixth. Lereya explicitly connects it to the 4-minute-mile effect (Roger Bannister) — once someone proves it's possible, others follow.
Core principles
- 01A competitor doing the 'impossible' removes your excuse that it can't be done
- 02Ambitious goals translate to 'work smarter,' not 'work harder' — reject any framing that just means longer hours
- 03If you can't name the single most transformative thing you shipped in the last 3 months, you have a focus problem
- 04Real speed comes from doing the right things, not from skipping stages (that's fake speed)
How to run it
- 1
Catch the leap and admit the gap
When a competitor ships something transformative, stop and honestly ask: what is the single most meaningful thing WE shipped in the last three months? If the answer is 'so many things' but nothing specific, name that as a focus problem.
Pro tip Take the leadership team physically out of the office to have this conversation without operational noise.
Watch out The hardest part is emotional — admitting that despite working like crazy you didn't actually transform anything. Don't skip past this discomfort with denial ('no one needs that').
- 2
Set a goal that breaks the old method
Set a target so ambitious that the existing approach provably cannot reach it, even sleeping in the office. monday.com went from 4 months per column to a goal of 25 columns in one month.
Pro tip Pick a number where everyone understands from the first minute that working the same way guarantees failure — that's what forces new thinking.
Watch out A soft goal (e.g. '4 months to 3 months') gets heard as 'work longer hours' and changes nothing about how people think.
- 3
Rebuild the shared infrastructure
The forcing goal makes you define the primitive for the first time. monday.com asked 'what IS a column?', specified shared capabilities (export to Excel, filter, sort), and built one infrastructure so adding a column became only about its unique product.
Pro tip The reusable definition is the real prize — it makes every future unit cheap.
- 4
Compress with a hackathon and ship to production
Have each developer take one unit and implement it in a single day on top of the shared infrastructure. monday.com ran a hackathon where each engineer built one column in a day; two weeks later 30 columns were in production.
Pro tip Have one person (a tech lead) build a reference example the night before so everyone arrives knowing exactly what they're solving.
- 5
Repeat on every building block
Once the drill works, run it again on the next primitive. monday.com repeated it on dashboards, widgets, and automations — and now applies it even to things no competitor has done, trusting the exercise itself.
In the wild
A main competitor launched 30 new column types overnight while monday.com had five (Lereya was coding the sixth, each taking ~4 months). Instead of despairing, the team framed it as a gift proving it was possible, set a 25-columns-in-one-month goal, defined what a column fundamentally is, built shared infrastructure, and ran a one-day-per-column hackathon.
→ Roughly a month and a half later monday.com had 30 columns in production and repeated the same drill for dashboards, widgets, and automations — becoming, in Lereya's words, 'invincible' as a team.
Common mistakes
Mistaking activity for transformation
The team felt great about execution because their weekly update was long and full — but length of output masked the absence of any single transformative result. High execution does not guarantee you're working on the right things.
Denying the competitor's move matters
Lereya notes many companies react like early iPhone skeptics ('no keyboard, no one needs that') and deny a shift is real. Treating the leap as a threat to dismiss, rather than proof of possibility, forfeits the biggest favor a competitor can give you.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product and engineering leaders at a scaling company (roughly 50-200 people) whose execution feels busy but whose competitors are shipping category-defining moves
Not ideal for
Teams that need sustainable steady-state maintenance, or where the 'ambitious goal' would just be used to justify burnout crunch without rebuilding the underlying method
From the transcript
“We received a gift from our competitors. They showed us that it's possible.”
“we need to take upon ourselves an ambitious goal like 25 columns in one month”
“if you can't answer that and you say listen I'm doing so much thing but you can't point this exact thing you have a focus…”
“in two weeks we're going to have an acathaton in which each one of our developers is going to take one column and implement it…”
“there's fake speed, which means trying to do the same work by skipping stages or not doing the high quality that you want. But there's…”
From the episode
Inside monday.com’s transformation: radical transparency, impact over output, and their path to $1B ARR
Daniel Lereya (Chief Product and Technology Officer)