Design world veteran Ronit Cyjon has demonstrated her capacity to turn complex software into refreshing experiences that users love. As the director of Product Design and UX Research at monday.com, she leads a team of 35 professionals who shape how millions interact with workplace technology.
From award-winning brand designer to product design leader, Cyjon's career is littered with powerful lessons for creators and users everywhere. Today, she shares these insights gleaned from decades of experience.
The Art of Making Complex Things Simple
"Creativity is a muscle. Flex it," says Cyjon, whose artistic sense, empathetic leadership skills, and design philosophy have driven measurable results at monday.com, increasing sales leads and conversion rates significantly. Ronit, alongside her teams, holds a secret weapon in a novel scoring system called Product Sentiment Analysis–which measures user perception to use as a guiding tool, allowing her team to prioritize vision and roadmap and to reveal critical issues or opportunities they may have overlooked.
This type of data-based creativity developed from Cyjon's early career victories. At Firma Business Design, she rescued Kinley, Coca-Cola's struggling Israeli brand, through strategic rebranding, earning global recognition. Later, as head of Design at Elementor, she helped drive the transformation of a WordPress plugin into an all-encompassing platform serving more than 10 million web creators and as much as 12% of the world's internet.
"The idea is to listen to your audience. Develop a more empathetic approach. This way, the product you create will resonate with what is truly needed–utilize aspects like personalization and tone of voice to solve the problems people are facing. Get as close as you can to your users, create alongside them, and allow them to test out your creations early in the process. Essentially, the heart of what I do is understanding the way they react and behave," explains Cyjon. "Get rid of perfection. Keep high standards, of course, but you need to design with the user in mind, particularly in small increments based on observations. Work fast with iterations to get as close as possible to perfection."
Building Design Systems That Scale
However, Cyjon's talent shines brightest when tackling B2C2B to mid-market and enterprise-level creative problems. At monday.com, she drove AI-based personalization that streamlined user onboarding and predicted user needs. This personalization system takes advantage of the natural conversations large language models are capable of producing, providing the user with light and easy conversation that encourages them to reveal how they can be helped best. Essentially, this creates a more empathetic product that harkens back to the human side of the experience, basing itself on emotion and tone.
In addition, Cyjon and her team filed eight industry-shaking patents for visual clarity and anomaly detection, enabling users to gain actionable information and quickly gain valuable insights in as little as 60 seconds.
With such hefty creative direction and leadership, Cyjon and her team relied on her innovative mindset and visionary style to bring adoption and growth–in part contributing to monday.com's CRM product growth from zero to multi-million dollar revenue in under three years, with the company itself achieving 33% growth in the third quarter of 2024. An undeniable success, the monday.com team also employed multiple methodologies, combining rigorous data analysis, solid leadership skills, and creative experimentation–what the monday.com team calls the Visual Value Proposition (VVP), in tandem with the CEO and the chief product technology officer.
Wisdom for Rising Designers
Contrary to the belief of many, modern design demands more than a strong sense of aesthetics. For Ronit Cyjon, design is an ever-evolving discipline that requires a balance of intuition, experimentation, and a relentless drive to push boundaries. She subscribes to what is referred to as a "wine-tasting" mindset for product evaluation, where the team works with its own products in order to develop more advanced iterations. This method transforms subjective opinions into actionable insights, creating measurable improvements that resonate with users and stakeholders alike.
Cyjon's philosophy is deeply rooted in the idea of training creativity like a muscle—an ethos she instills in her teams. "UI is fashion," she says. "You must constantly keep your eye on the cutting edge; it's job security for us."
For her, every design decision is an opinionated choice informed by taste, experience, and the courage to experiment quickly. In situations where data may be insufficient, she emphasizes the importance of developing intuition through reflection and practice. "Emotions are mirrored. It's the basis of all empathy. Design, at its core, needs lots of empathy. Solve real problems for real people, evoke emotions and inspiration so that they remember your work. It builds loyalty, satisfies needs and fosters a relationship between the audience and the product," Ronit elaborates.
By encouraging her teams to analyze past decisions and refine their instincts, she fosters an environment where creativity thrives and evolves.
"Our work is about pushing boundaries, forming strong opinions, and making bold decisions based on our knowledge and taste," she explains. This philosophy defines her leadership yet closely mirrors the sentiment on how modern design can drive meaningful change in the SaaS industry.
"Ultimately, you're designing for real, living people. It's an important distinction that so many designers lose sight of," Cyjon emphasizes. Such a customer-first mindset drives her team to create experiences that feel personal, helping their users better connect with the brand and its products at an emotional level. They analyze user sentiment, study interaction patterns, and continuously refine their designs based on real-world feedback.
For aspiring designers, Cyjon's career offers a blueprint for merging creativity with human-centric impact. Her path from the Rhode Island School of Design to leading global design teams exemplifies how artistic vision—rooted in emotion, transparency, and passion for problem-solving—can redefine industries.
Cyjon's philosophy centers on crafting unique experiences and memorable moments through creative workshops that channel collective energy into solutions reflecting humanity and enthusiasm. This approach thrives in collaborative environments where team bonding prioritizes experimentation over perfection, fostering openness to bold actions and unconventional perspectives.
Embracing "failure" as a catalyst for growth, her teams redefine success through daring innovation, proving that authenticity and artistic courage can elevate entire organizations.
Whether crafting digital experiences for institutions like Harvard Business School and MIT or leading art direction for major Hollywood films through her work at Prologue in West Hollywood, she demonstrates how strategic design drives transformative business results. Her experience spans building a global design agency and collaborating with cross-continental teams at companies like monday.com, cementing design's role as a catalyst for operational and creative excellence across industries.
Cyjon sees design's future in the measured application of AI and machine learning as a means of creating more empathetic user experiences and greater efficiency at scale. Her team's work in predictive analytics and contextual understanding points toward a future where technology adapts to users, not the other way around. Cyjon's toolbox of wisdom is a powerful starting point for designers ready to meet this future.
