Since the dawn of office work, people have disliked both Mondays and fiddling with the various tools available to them for managing their ongoing projects. It might have continued on this way until the end of time, but then monday.com came on the scene, bringing with it workflow management that is helpful, productive, colorful, and even enjoyable — finally giving people a reason to love Mondays.
monday.com bills itself as a modern “Work OS”, providing over 186,000 customers in more than 200 countries and territories the tools they need to manage their businesses. The monday.com platform is highly adaptable, giving teams from many different backgrounds and industries (whether local florists or multinational aerospace engineering firms) the building blocks to easily tailor the platform to their specific use case.
monday.com is built with three different types of users in mind: mobile-only, web-only, and web+mobile. Their mobile-only users do hands-on work in the field away from a computer and make up a substantial (and increasing) portion of their total user base. This means their mobile apps cannot simply be companion apps for the web, but instead must be fully-featured versions of monday.com that their customers can rely on with no compromises. So it’s important that the mobile teams ship quickly while maintaining a high bar for quality, ensuring their power users have access to all the tools they rely on to do their jobs.
To support the continually growing number of users who rely on their apps to get things done, monday.com’s mobile team were committed to frequent iterations, cutting a release branch every other week. Though there were some small variances in each platform’s routine, both had release manager rotations set up, with processes running half manually and half via internally-written automated scripts they had to continually maintain.
But despite a seemingly straightforward process with some amount of automation in place, releases felt tenuous.
“People were hesitant to manage releases, even though we had a board that covered step-by-step what needed to be done. Most of the time I had to get on a call to help whoever was running a release.”
Eran Lunenfeld
Android Developer
Even for monday.com’s very experienced teams, manual processes made for intimidating processes. Needing their developers to step away from their usual day-to-day work to manage a release for which they understandably only remembered half the steps at best led to a lack of confidence on the team around releases:
Releases became stressful events instead of the simple, straightforward end result of implementing new features.
“If anything went wrong, it would entirely interrupt the workday of the release manager and the team — scrambling to figure out what happened with a particular script or having to just manually take care of the entire release by hand.”
Shai Mishali
Senior iOS Tech Lead
If something went wrong they would need to involve the more infra-inclined members to support as soon as possible, creating bottlenecks that put an unfair burden on those team members while generating frustration and added work for everyone involved. This was very far from ideal.
The monday.com mobile teams didn’t initially set out to find a tool like Runway. They knew their release process could be better, but improving it always seemed to be a task they were saving for a rainy day — like a hobby if hobbies weren’t fun.
However, like any good engineering org, they were always on the lookout for new tools that could help them get more done.
“There were any number of tools we thought might improve the dev experience. But Runway filled an interesting gap that none of the other tools did.”
Shai Mishali
Senior iOS Tech Lead
Upon diving into Runway and seeing what it could offer — with the entire release process broken down into steps with individual statuses, customizable checklists to plug in pieces of their unique workflow, and powerful automations — they immediately saw how Runway would be able to solve many of their problems. To try things out they set up Runway’s scheduling automations for kickoff, submission, and release and watched as Runway took care of creating the release branch, bumping versions and later submitting and releasing automatically. Next they enabled release notifications which kept the whole team plugged into the release’s progress. Piece by piece, release tasks that were previously taking hours of engineering time were finally just working, instead of requiring lots of work.
“It was like, ‘Oh, I guess we don’t have to do all that anymore’. People were really excited… as much as a developer could be excited about a new piece of tooling, right?”
Shai Mishali
Senior iOS Tech Lead
Soon enough, with Runway more fully integrated and additional automations turned on, the team found that there were far fewer internal scripts to keep around and maintain, and far less confusion. This meant fewer calls required to walk people through things and less time spent clicking through endless browser tabs to make sure everything was working properly. The fragility that caused frustration, slowdowns, and bottlenecks was fading away.
“I love Runway’s vision of one place for the release process where you can see everything. You don’t have to move from Google Play to Firebase to GitHub to CI. It’s all in Runway.”
Eran Lunenfeld
Android Developer
“With Runway, there’s so much less stress. People don’t have to go look at a long checklist and try to follow it. And getting rid of that stress is important stuff.”
Eran Lunenfeld
Android Engineer
It used to be that every two weeks on a Monday morning, monday.com engineers would start to run down their checklist, get scripts running, and triple-check to make sure they didn’t miss any steps.
That’s all in the past. Today, releases just get out the door. It works. Everything is streamlined and mostly automatic, with no additional drama. And it’s so much easier now for monday.com to onboard new developers to the team and let them manage releases — there are no longer unknowns around how their process works, and no one has to fear the release process anymore. Developers can keep building, and the releases just flow smoothly in the background.
“We don’t have to think about releases anymore. We just do our work and then releases happen in the background.”
Shai Mishali
Senior iOS Tech Lead
When hotfix releases are required, the monday.com team runs their hotfix process through Runway — with its automatic branch creation and optimized workflow — instead of the usual error-prone process of doing it by hand. After all, there’s nothing worse than creating a bug in the process of fixing a bug.
What this all adds up to is a release process that largely runs itself — saving many hours of monday.com engineering time every month. That’s now time they spend building new features instead of fiddling with their release process.
“If Runway disappeared tomorrow, we’d be forced to try and figure out a way to build some of it ourselves. I couldn’t go back to doing releases by hand. I’m too spoiled at this point.”
Shai Mishali
Senior iOS Tech Lead
