monday.com Elevate 2025 | Josh Soto, MITER Brands

Clips
More from monday.com Elevate 2025

Josh Soto

Sr. Marketing Operations Manager

MITER Brands

play_circle_outline Introduction of Josh Soto from MITER Brands at Elevate 2025 event.

play_circle_outline Navigating Chaos: MITER Brands' Path to Operational Excellence with monday.com for Window and Door Marketing

Info
Transcript

Josh Soto, MITER Brands

Josh Soto

Sr. Marketing Operations Manager MITER Brands

Discover how MITER Brands is standardizing marketing operations with monday.com in this insightful conversation from theCube’s coverage of Elevate ‘25. Josh Soto, senior marketing operations manager at MITER, sits down with theCUBE’s Paul Nashawaty to share how the company turned a chaotic, siloed environment into a streamlined, collaborative system powered by automation and workflow design. Soto explains how involving “the doers” first, from graphic designers to web developers, helped build efficient intake processes, increase accountability and free teams t... Read more

explore Keep Exploring

What is the role of Josh Soto at MITER Brands and how does it relate to operational excellence in marketing? add

What was the environment like before implementing Monday, and how did it impact the standardization and collaboration among the different teams and brands? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Josh Soto, MITER Brands

search

Paul Nashawaty

>> Hello and welcome. I'm Paul Nashawaty coming to you live from the show floor at monday.com at Elevate 2025. I'm joined today by Josh from MITER. Josh, how are you doing?

Josh Soto

>> Good, good. How are you?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Good, good. You want to introduce yourself to the audience and a little bit about MITER?

Josh Soto

>> Yeah, sure. My name's Josh Soto, senior marketing operations manager for MITER Brands. MITER Brands is a company of industry leading window and door manufacturers. So being in a manufacturing industry, operational excellence is a very, very key component. So my job, my role was really to bring sense of that mantra of operational excellence to marketing, and we used monday for that.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Awesome. Awesome. Well, that's great. What a great show. I mean, this first day it's been busy, lots of traction. The keynote was really, really inspiring.

Josh Soto

>> It's been pretty amazing so far. Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Show going all right for you?

Josh Soto

>> Yeah, no, there's been a lot of different things to sign up for. So it's been a little bit cumbersome for us to get in a part of all the different lessons and whatnot, but there's just no shortage of just things to learn from monday.

Paul Nashawaty

>> To learn. Yeah.

Josh Soto

>> Honestly, networking and talking to the other customers has been really the highlight for me.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, monday.com has grown significantly over the years, and the interest is obviously here. So let's jump right into it for MITER, right? We look at some of the business pain points. So there's some marketing challenges that you kind of overcame and you looking at, can you describe your environment before you went to monday, and then why you chose to go to monday?

Josh Soto

>> Yes. If I had to sum up the environment before we went to monday was pretty chaotic. There was no standardization. So MITER Brands, we house, or we support multiple brands across the country. So we have ones out in the West Coast, out in Northeast and down in South Florida. So there was no standardization in how we can leverage our different marketing resources to support all of our different brands and the various teams along with those brands. So monday has been instrumental in allowing us to standardize that approach and actually be able to lead the company in proper usage of monday and be able to be a bit of a thought leader from that capacity.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, that's awesome. I mean, I know that operational excellence is really where people want to get to. They want to have operational performance and increase their performance. So when we look at prior to you using monday, it sounded like you had some siloed activity, maybe not a lot of collaboration between the teams, but monday has brought that together, is that what I hear?

Josh Soto

>> I would argue so, yeah. A lot of things were all done via email, and even still though, when you get into the concept of resistance to change and you have to take those people that are very reliant on those other really, I'll just say archaic approaches to managing projects and different kind of requests like that and getting them more involved there. So that's been probably one of the bigger hurdles that we've had. But a lot of the other products that monday has been releasing, specifically the workflow builder has been able to sell to really sync a lot more things together, different work spaces and teams to make it feel a lot more synergistic.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, that's actually one of the questions I was going to ask you is-

Josh Soto

>> Oh, fantastic....

Paul Nashawaty

>> when you look at these silos, you looked at harmonizing this across your organization, there's obviously other options out there from monday.com. What made monday the right fit for you?

Josh Soto

>> Well, before MITER, I've worked in a bunch of different other project management systems. I won't go through the list of naming them all. But I think what really helped the MITER land on monday was just the robustness of it and how they could use it from different departments, from IT, marketing, and elsewhere. I'm sure there's other parts of the company that use it. So just being able to support all those different customer journeys and use cases, I think is what really set them apart.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Very cool. Very cool. Sorry, let me take a little bit... double-click down into a couple of the things that you're working on.

Josh Soto

>> Good.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So when we look at workflow components and design elements, there's your intake customer form that you have and that customer form that really has a request that comes in, who submits it? How is the fields included? How are the requests routed and prioritized?

Josh Soto

>> Oh man, okay.

Paul Nashawaty

>> There's a whole bunch there, right?

Josh Soto

>> Okay. How much time you got, Paul? No, I'm kidding. So when we built that out we really focused on going to what I call our doers. So we have our shared services within the company. We have essentially what surmises to an in-house marketing agency, but there's really no standard and how to use them. So when we built out those forms and built that intake, the first thing was, "Hey, creative team, graphic designers, what do you need to do your job efficiently? Web developers, what do you need to do your job efficiently?" And then we start from there because if they're not operating in the means that they need to be operating, then any workflow you build is going to be bound for failure otherwise. So we really start from that perspective and then just built up from there.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So how did automation help with this? I mean, think of the AI and the automation pieces. Did you jump completely to autonomous kind of workflows, or did you still have a human in the loop? How does that all work?

Josh Soto

>> Yes, so that's a great question. And because everybody wants to just jump right into AI and automations, and somebody told this to me a long time ago, and it really stuck with me, "Technology can make a good process better, but it can't make a process out of nothing." And so what you really want to do is walk it up. You want to make it so that everything that you're doing is very manual, and then you find ways to automate those manual components till you get to the point where it's completely automated, and then from there you can stack on any other kind of what I like to call quality of life upgrades to those automations, to those workflows, to make it feel a lot more seamless and more like you're in an app or a program that's customized for you. So it's pretty fun.

Paul Nashawaty

>> You're leveraging automation, but you still have the ability to have a human in the loop when there's a need to have that.

Josh Soto

>> Of course.

Paul Nashawaty

>> If you look at the maturity of where organizations are, would you consider yourselves to be very mature or you could say learning somewhere in the middle or maybe in your infancy?

Josh Soto

>> I would say not quite the infancy. Maybe we're hitting puberty, if you will. So we have people that are starting to embrace the changes that are coming in. And what's been amazing is since we did start with going with those doers, with those service providers, now we're getting the feedback from them to really drive change.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Nice.

Josh Soto

>> Before they felt like they didn't really have the ability to get in the driver's seat or put the signature on anything. And so now as we've been able to develop this and grow these workflows that buy-in to really continue it is what's going to get us deeper into those deeper stages of maturity.

Paul Nashawaty

>> All right. So when we're looking at that deeper stage of maturity, you moved away from siloed environments. Let's talk a little bit about how there was an impact on collaboration, visibility and reducing those workarounds. What does that mean after you've implemented monday and having a more unified centralized view? How has that collaboration and visibility, how has that improved over time?

Josh Soto

>> Well, it depends who you ask. So probably one of the biggest buzzwords of the commonality, what we really try to accomplish is accountability through these workflows. And so accountability is great when your workflows are running fantastic and there's really no bottlenecking, but when these workflows actually start highlighting different bottlenecks, maybe personnel, maybe processes, and really starting to drive that, you get a little bit of friction. But for the most part, I think the... Yeah, I'm sorry, I was going in the wrong direction there.

Paul Nashawaty

>> No, that's fine.

Josh Soto

>> But I think for the most part it's been pretty well received. And again, we're starting to really, really get greater feedback and be able to drive us forward.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So I mean, it sounds like you're freeing up time for people-

Josh Soto

>> Yes.....

Paul Nashawaty

>> so they're becoming more productive. What are they able to spend their time on, if they're freeing up their time? Is it better quality of life? Is it better work like production? What has the time been allowing you to do?

Josh Soto

>> Well, I would say that it allows us to really focus on the things that really drive us. People get into a specific role or specific specialty because they like doing that, not necessarily all the things around it. So for the case of our web developers, they're spending more time being able to code and stay in the website for our our graphic designers or whatnot, they could spend more time in that creative element and less time chasing down revisions and emails, chasing down other stakeholders or people that are submitting requests in. So it's just one of those things where it really lets them do what they enjoy more and the reason why they even got it to the specialty that they got into the first place.

Paul Nashawaty

>> That makes a lot of sense. In my research in theCUBE Research where I focus on a lot of my data, what we found is that there's a tremendous amount of, basically we're calling them applications, tremendous amount of applications being created by the lines of business. And the lines of business are now, whether it's marketing or finance or sales, they're what we would say a citizen developer. So somebody that is out there developing, not a professional developer, but a citizen developer using tools like AI in order to do this. So it allows for that productivity like you're talking about and the collaboration, the unified upfront. But what about, can you talk a little bit about maybe some of your data sets that you had before? Was it hard to take the existing data sets and move it and have it in monday, or was that seamless? Was that a lift and shift? How did that work?

Josh Soto

>> So I got into monday by way of acquisition. So before I was marketing operations manager for another company, and then MITER Brands bought us. So by the time that I stepped into it, they already had essentially, it built out. For the most part, they brought in an agency to get things going. But when I stepped in, it was taking those bones and really being able to scale up and be able to make it scalable and more agile to the point where I can use it right now. So to me, the big challenge that I had was taking essentially what somebody else made and then left behind and then being able to bring that up. So I was very fortunate in the sense that I didn't have to come over it and migrate in from a different system, but I did have to take those existing workflows or one existing workflow and then make it dynamic. So for me, it was pretty easy and actually gave me a bit of a leg up in that space so that way I can put my own spin on things, but still leverage the few things that were working in the previous state.

Paul Nashawaty

>> That makes sense. That makes sense. Okay. All right, I'm going to ask you this, Josh. We're at Elevate 26 next year, a year from now. We're sitting here having this conversation.

Josh Soto

>> Fantastic.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And then we're going to look at this and we go, how did MITER take what you're doing today with monday.com and what do you see happening a year from now?

Josh Soto

>> Oh man, okay. That's a loaded question there, Paul. A lot to that. So right now some of the bigger investments that we're doing inside of MITER from a marketing perspective, which I think is pretty serendipitous for the timing of this, is really doubling down on the content of the marketing operations and creating standards not only just for marketing output in the way of graphic design and web, those kinds of requests, but really taking that to standardize how we do larger cross-functional campaigns. Things like product roll-outs, rebates, things that would typically be very, very siloed across a lot of different departments, and then bringing those in and standardizing it. Not only for the companies that are currently underneath MITER brands, but any kind of acquisition. So that way marketing is leading the charge on how we're going to be operating from a sales perspective. And also we are thought leaders and brought in when any kind of acquisition or any kind of growth comes in, so that way we can offer all of the wonderful products and the values that come in from being a MITER brand to any other oncoming acquisition.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Josh, it sounds like fun. It sounds like you have your hands full. It sounds like there's a lot going on.

Josh Soto

>> That's fair.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Exciting times ahead.

Josh Soto

>> It is, yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> But thank you for joining me on the show today.

Josh Soto

>> Absolutely.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Thank you for your insights. I really think it's really helpful for the audience. And thank you to the audience for watching. I'm Paul Nashawaty coming to you live from the show floor of monday.com at Elevate 2025 on theCUBE, your leading source for tech news.