October Virtual Community Event Recap

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The Monzo US team recently held our second virtual community meetup. We were super excited to share the progress from the past six months, as well as meet and answer questions from many of our passionate users!

We really want to thank everyone who tuned in to the event - we had an even bigger turnout than the first event, and it was great seeing some familiar faces from this forum, Twitter, and the Simple Finances Discord ❤️

At our last community meeting, we talked about the challenges we had faced during 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and announced our new product roadmap.  If you missed that event, we have a write up here: https://community.monzo.com/t/may-virtual-meetup-recap/117994

Since the last meeting, we’ve been hard at work on delivering against that product vision. We’ve doubled the team, moved into a new office in San Francisco, and shipped some exciting features, with more to come soon. If you weren’t able to attend the event, here’s a recap:

New Joiners + New Office 🌁

One of the biggest things we’ve been working on over the past few months has been hiring. We knew that we would need to significantly expand our team in the US to deliver the amazing products that our customers deserve. 

And our hard work is paying off – in the past three months, we’ve nearly doubled the size of the team 📈 

Monzo USA Team Oct 2021

We’ve added new members in all areas of the team, including product engineering, operations, financial crime, customer support and recruiting. But we are not done expanding yet – we still have a number of open roles – which you can check out here: https://monzo.com/us/careers

And just in time for all these new additions, we also recently opened a new office in the heart of downtown San Francisco 🌉

Even before COVID-19, we’ve always been a remote friendly company. But we also find real value in having our team all together in the same room. It often leads to some of our best ideas, and we wanted an office space that would accommodate that.

For that reason, the same week of our community event, the whole team was in San Francisco for a week-long team summit. We held a number of workshops and whiteboarding sessions and even found time for a few team meals and other social activities (turns out some of the team are quite good at bowling!). 

Scheduled Payments released 📆

Outside of hiring and setting up our new office – we’ve of course been focused on developing and shipping new features. Recently we released features including Linked Accounts, Salary Sorter, P2P improvements, and a whole host of other tweaks and bug fixes. 

USA Recurring payment controls

We also took the opportunity during our event to announce and release our new Scheduled Payments feature (in real time!). It’s available now as long as you are running the latest version of the Monzo app. 

You can read more in our recent blog post here.

Roadmap update 🛣️

Monzo USA Whiteboard

Since Monzo’s US product team has recently grown in size, we’ve been thinking a lot about both what and how we build our product (mandatory post-it notes of course required!).

Nathan, our new Head of Engineering, spoke through five principles that the product team are using to guide their decision making: 

Product Principles

  1. Optimize for a smooth, polished and minimal product surface

  2. Track adoption of new features and iterate

  3. Educate and assist users

  4. Provide a delightful, white glove experience

  5. Always listen to the customer


And Thomas, our Lead Product Manager for the US, spoke through some of the items next on the roadmap, including improvements to sign-up and onboarding, as well as major improvements to the money management and budgeting features we offer. Very exciting!

Definitely keep looking at our roadmap to get an idea of what’s currently in flight - and expect to see movement through the columns at an increasing rate as our team continues to grow. 

Q&A

Just like our last event - we ended with an open round of questions and answers from the audience. While there were too many questions to recap, we’re always open to answering questions at any time – so feel free to reach out over Twitter, email, or the chat in your Monzo app!

Thanks again to everyone who logged in and watched our event live. We truly appreciate our dedicated community and want to make the best product for each of you, so please keep sharing your feedback. You all make Monzo, Monzo ❤️