Growth changes everything.
As technology companies expand, their products broaden, their customer base diversifies, and their go-to-market requirements grow more complex. What worked when a company had a single product and a relatively straightforward sales motion often stops working when that company becomes a platform.
That is exactly the challenge facing monday.com.
The company has grown from a project management application into a broader work platform spanning CRM, service, development, and increasingly artificial intelligence. That expansion creates new opportunities for customers, but it also requires the partner ecosystem to evolve alongside the business.
The old model of expecting every partner to sell everything is becoming less practical. As platforms broaden, specialization matters more. Some partners will gravitate toward CRM. Others will focus on professional services, implementation, vertical expertise, or workflow transformation. The goal is not necessarily to turn every partner into a universal seller, but to create an ecosystem where different types of partners can contribute value in different ways.
AI is accelerating that shift.
Customers are under pressure to adopt AI, but many are still struggling to understand where it fits, what problems it should solve, and how to turn experimentation into measurable business outcomes. That creates an opening for partners to move beyond implementation and become advisors — helping customers identify needs, build strategies, and connect technology to actual work.
For vendors, that means partner programs must evolve beyond recruitment, transactions, and incentives. They increasingly need to support specialization, services, enablement, and economic opportunity. Partners need clear ways to build expertise, create profitable practices, and participate in the vendor’s growth.
The challenge is balancing expansion with focus. As vendors add products and capabilities, they're tempted to push every partner to do more. But sustainable ecosystems depend on giving partners room to build around their strengths while still creating paths into adjacent opportunities.
Sarit Chalamish, head of strategic emerging partnerships at monday.com, joins Larry Walsh on Changing Channels to discuss how growing technology companies must evolve their partner ecosystems, why specialization matters, and how AI is changing partners' role in delivering customer outcomes.