1.5 years, 17 squad members, 14 Figma Design files, 26 sprints, 43 Figjam workshops, and 8 research projects— that's how immense the journey has been to launch Monzo Bank Business EXPENSE CARDS for small businesses this week! 🚀 This zero-to-one project, alongside features like bulk payments and payment approvals (from other squads in the Business Banking team), has culminated in the launch of our brand new Monzo Business TEAM subscription. 🥳 Inspired by one of my favourite quotes lately from Joshua J. Marine: "Challenges are what make life interesting, and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful." Here are the few challenges from the project that stood out to me: 1. Being thrown into 2 months of Discovery when I first joined Monzo, with no prior finance experience. It was just me + our fantastic researcher and project manager figuring out how we were going to enter the spend management market and identify our customers and their pain points. One of many involving envelopes of physical receipts processed manually... 2. Expanding an app historically designed for personal use to cater to businesses with multiple team members. How do we evolve the business owner's Monzo Business app when our iconic Monzo card at the top of the screen no longer represents just one card? And how does the expense card holder app look like? Every experience designed was in careful consideration of the different stakeholders at play. A strong information architecture was key. 3. Running user research with a niche market, not part of our existing 500k customers, with little data to start with. Now that we’ve launched, the team is thrilled to finally have customer insights to inform future decisions! 4. Collaborating across multiple squads and building different parts of the product owned by other teams. We knocked on many doors, learning about niche topics like financial crime, customer support, card logistics, and even account closure. 5. Adjusting to Monzo’s way of working with long-form written communication and documentation. It took me six months to train one side of my brain to articulate my thoughts clearly while still flexing the creative side to deliver on design. (As demonstrated in this lengthy post!) Thank you to everyone who made this possible: Catherine Hughes Caroline Wilcock Margaret Chidothe Christa Huber Siba Fadda Anastasios Morfopoulos Samuel Branter Nour Saab Heldiney Pereira 🇺🇦 Carl Worricker Lauren Williams Candice Hardman Kushal Babla Jesse Cogswell Juan Francisco Brito Sarah Simpson Amee D. Carmen Agimof Craig Jamieson Igor Khomyanin Izak ☀️ Nel Jake MacGregor Jennie Williams Luke S. Pavel Dotsulenko Max White Rose Tucker Jake Roberts Matt M. Paloma Liniers Villamana This was a massive undertaking, and I can’t wait to celebrate with everyone at Monzo! Then I’m off for a much-needed holiday to celebrate my 30th birthday—on safari, no less! 🐘 I’m incredibly proud of this team and the people who made it happen. #productdesign
🚀 I’m super proud to announce the launch of our new “Team” plan from #MonzoBusiness - now for bigger small businesses! With Team, businesses can seamlessly manage expenses with our new (cool translucent blue) expense cards 💳✨, save hours of admin through bulk payments, and feel secure with new spending controls and payment approvals for the whole team. Five years ago, we set out to fundamentally change the way banking works for small businesses. Now, a new Monzo Business account is open every 2 minutes. Over 500,000 businesses bank with Monzo Bank, nearly 10% of all businesses in the UK! And, they’re loving it. Our businesses recently voted us the the 2024 Best Business Banking Provider! 🏆 But, what I’m most proud of, is that we’ve continued to keep our businesses at the heart of everything we do. Just like when we started 5 years ago, we built Team working closely with a small group of ~100 businesses -- dedicating hundreds of hours to listening, learning, and designing this new plan to uniquely meet their needs. This is still just the beginning, and I’m so excited for everything still to come from Monzo Business. Business feels better with Monzo. ❤️ #NewProductLaunch #SmallBusiness #BusinessBanking #SpendManagement #BulkPayments #ExpenseCards #Monzo #Team 👇 Link in thread to learn more 🤗
