An evening with Monzo
A meetup that was a bit different for me last night, organised by the Monzo bank's community team. They have had events in their office in London and have expanded this to a roadshow visiting different locations around the UK. Luckily for me they came to Brighton a couple of streets away from my office.
Monzo is a new take on banking that makes use of technology to innovate. It's similar to Root, which is really bare bones "build your own bank", or Entropay, which is going for those that want to easily create online virtual cards. But Monzo is going for a standard bank product, at the center of your finances and re-imagined in a swish app way. It's an overused cliche, but in terms of experience it's like Uber comparing to traditional taxis. I like the product and what they are try and do to help people.
The two talks were “Inside the Partnerships Team” by a developer in that team and "Working from home - not remotely difficult!" (Remote working culture) given by a customer operations team member.IN the first talk Robin from the partnerships team discussed the history of the team and its goals. He then gave a run down of how an upcoming feature went from ideation to development. One thing I took away was the team autonomy, but also how each job function from each team meets to do reviews. From the designers doing critiques, to the product managers in the product council. We have a similar system at 15below for requesting comments, but I really liked the format that Monzo used with nice use of icons to give them a bit of identity.
The second talk by James about remote working revealed a bit more about how that process was supported by the culture. From the "remote first" approach that leads to consistent and constant recording of what's going on. I though it was interesting that he talked about "1 to 1s" to keep in touch with others referred to anyone in Monzo. I have worked remotely before and work with remote people now and haven't quite experienced that. In my limited experience that kind of regular touch points are with team members or line managers.
It was an interesting evening, I do wonder how much they can grow before the culture changes. But they seem to be making a lot of effort to keep it working as they grow. I think the way that they approach the community model like a startup rather than a bank, will also help this. For example the community voted on how they wanted ATM fees to work, I can't imagine Lloyds doing this! I can't even think of many app companies that collect feedback on their business model that directly.
Monzo is a new take on banking that makes use of technology to innovate. It's similar to Root, which is really bare bones "build your own bank", or Entropay, which is going for those that want to easily create online virtual cards. But Monzo is going for a standard bank product, at the center of your finances and re-imagined in a swish app way. It's an overused cliche, but in terms of experience it's like Uber comparing to traditional taxis. I like the product and what they are try and do to help people.
The two talks were “Inside the Partnerships Team” by a developer in that team and "Working from home - not remotely difficult!" (Remote working culture) given by a customer operations team member.IN the first talk Robin from the partnerships team discussed the history of the team and its goals. He then gave a run down of how an upcoming feature went from ideation to development. One thing I took away was the team autonomy, but also how each job function from each team meets to do reviews. From the designers doing critiques, to the product managers in the product council. We have a similar system at 15below for requesting comments, but I really liked the format that Monzo used with nice use of icons to give them a bit of identity.
The second talk by James about remote working revealed a bit more about how that process was supported by the culture. From the "remote first" approach that leads to consistent and constant recording of what's going on. I though it was interesting that he talked about "1 to 1s" to keep in touch with others referred to anyone in Monzo. I have worked remotely before and work with remote people now and haven't quite experienced that. In my limited experience that kind of regular touch points are with team members or line managers.
It was an interesting evening, I do wonder how much they can grow before the culture changes. But they seem to be making a lot of effort to keep it working as they grow. I think the way that they approach the community model like a startup rather than a bank, will also help this. For example the community voted on how they wanted ATM fees to work, I can't imagine Lloyds doing this! I can't even think of many app companies that collect feedback on their business model that directly.
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