Juggling tech & product: Meet monday.com Mobile Team
How the mobile can juggle the best product and fascinating tech?
It’s all about the challenge and people who pursue it: How can you convert an amazing web experience of Monday.com to a mobile app and keep the same slickness, great usability, and design craftsmanship? How can you make a small device your users’ best friend and productivity tool?
At monday.com, we believe that engineers are the key players in making an outstanding product. They know how to find the best solution for the problem. They know what works best for the platform and the tradeoffs of different approaches. To make the right decisions, each developer works closely with a Product, Business Analyst, and Designer. The true full stacker.
In our team, each and every member has an opportunity to make an impact.
Android
We rebuilt the LayoutManager and called it CollectionLayoutManager. Why?
Any Senior Android developer knows the pain of supporting 14 K devices, dealing with immature framework and APIs, and many other “specialties”. Our team is no different, and we are not compromising on quality and usability. When needed — we don’t hesitate to rebuild the framework components to support our needs.
Sahar, who is a young father of Dor, has recently completely rewritten the LayoutManager for our board view. Thanks to that we now enjoy smooth scrolling, sticky headers, collapsing columns, footers and other functionality which the standard GridLayoutManager couldn’t give us. The reworked board is used 38% more than the old one.
Now, Sahar wants to make this custom LayoutManager an open-source library and contribute back to the community.
Custom views are not enough though. We need a solid infrastructure that can support large amounts of data being displayed in this Board View.
Ronen, who lives in Ashdod and is raising three kids, took the mission of building a robust infrastructure to support fast-loading of thousands of items in Board View and also of making this infrastructure easy to change and adapt to our growing needs. For that, we used a lot of different concepts of reactive programming with Kotlin Coroutines, a single source of truth using the in-memory cache, and many more. This infra allowed us to create 37 new smart columns in less than a month. We even had a live template to create all boilerplate code:
Having a Fast Loading Board with the right infrastructure is great, and there is more to come. Our users should be delighted with an experience they get on Monday.com, therefore we invest a lot in craftsmanship and UX of our app.
Amit, our master of Animations and Ayala’s proud father, recently invested a lot in improving the looks of our Item view. It became the main component that we want to open from any place in the app. The behavior of this item had to be very intuitive, and all animation should guide our users on how to use it. Thanks to Amit it has become more engaging, nice, and easy-to-use.
We’re releasing this new shiny component and expect that it will significantly improve the in-app navigation logic and user experience. We understand that the results of our work might be useful to others and we’d love to contribute back to the community, so we are going to release the Item view as an open-source library.
I’m Yoni, the Team Lead of these incredible folks. I learn from each one of them and give them a hand where I can — by creating focus, planning, helping with hard tasks, and just being there when needed. I’m working hard on improved visualization of our progress like performance, product health or quality dashboards.
I dedicatedly pursue two main goals: help everyone align with the problem that we are solving and let everyone in the team grow, learn and create impactful things when they want to. The main KPI if at the end of each sprint/iteration everyone in the team feels that “it was a crazy two weeks! We accomplish so many great things”. And of course, I’m a coder as well and recently worked on improving our Login Funnel which leads to more than 12% in success rate.
The effort of making our app delightful is a joined team’s daily endeavor. We don’t know everything, but we learn on the go, we invest a lot in educating each other and help every member to achieve new heights. Usually, we do that by having weekly tech sessions, discussing dilemmas, and reviewing each other’s code on a daily basis.
And this is just the beginning: