Hey, I’m Kelly 👋

Back in July, I took the exciting leap into the world of fintech to join Monzo as a Lead Product Designer. I work in a part of Monzo called the ‘Business Banking Collective’, which is the team focused on helping businesses manage their money. More specifically, my role is to help businesses discover Monzo and make signing up for a Business account a truly delightful and effortless experience.

For any product designers (and beyond!) curious to know what it’s like starting at Monzo, this blog pulls back the curtain on my first three months here. I’ll walk you through getting set up in my first few weeks, the specific projects I’ve had the pleasure of working on, and the five biggest learnings I’ve banked so far.

If I had to choose one word to describe my first week at Monzo, it would be impressively organised (okay I cheated, that was two). 

Before I even thought about opening up a Figma file and getting stuck into my first project, myself and a handful of other new Monzonauts (that’s what we call ourselves) were enrolled in Onboarding Week. This is a whole week dedicated to setting up and settling in. I joined lots of different sessions across the week, from learning about Monzo’s values and culture, to what it means to be a bank, and even squeezed in a social at the end of the week with the incredible design team. It was so helpful to have an entire week dedicated to laying the foundations, and even better to do so alongside other new joiners who are now already friendly faces around the office.

Here’s the ‘Team Monzailors’ cruising down the canals of Canary Wharf for our design team social ⛴️

Once onboarding week was wrapped up, week two was all about meeting people and building relationships. This meant lots of 1:1s with my squad, designers, and those in the wider Business Banking Collective.

And if meeting all the lovely people who work at Monzo wasn’t enough to make my week, I received a box full of Monzo merch in the post. The way to my heart is always through a big bar of chocolate, so you can only imagine the look on my face when I opened a Monzo-branded bar of Tony’s Chocolonely. I can confirm this did not last long in my flat.

A good chunk of week three was dedicated to learning all about the world of business banking, as well as getting closer to the strategy and goals of my team. I’d also started rummaging around in Figma files and getting to know Monzo’s incredibly well-crafted design system, spending a lot of my day in awe of the incredible design talent across the team.

At almost a month in, it was time to get going on an actual project or two. I ran my first ideation session with the team on how to improve the very start of the experience on the app, designed a handful of tactical experiments for the web, and even briefly dipped my toes back into the world of print by making tweaks to our direct mail letter.

The next month brought a mix of creativity and strategy as I moved from focusing on tactical experiments into more visionary thinking. I had the pleasure of thinking more deeply about how to improve the sign-up experience for businesses if the sky was the limit, and pulled this together into a longer-term vision that helped to shape our future planning sessions.

And if all of this wasn’t exciting enough, I took a bucket-list trip to Japan right in the middle of it all and came back more energised than ever to pick up where I’d left off.

Over the last month, myself and the team have been thinking about how to break down our bigger vision into smaller, more testable pieces. Creating delightful experiences is something Monzo is known and loved for, so we’re keen to bring more of that Monzo magic into the sign-up journey for businesses. I even tried my hand at “vibe coding”, which is a fancy term for quickly prototyping an idea in code to capture the look and feel of an experience. Huge shout out to @Susan Walsh for getting me set up and @Heldiney Pereira for the helpful tips. This is a small but exciting step in experimenting with how AI can support the design process.

One of the many reasons I joined Monzo (aside from being an unapologetic fangirl since 2016) was the way the company communicates with its customers. The language is always simple, clear and jargon-free. I was thrilled to discover the amount of importance Monzo places on upskilling every new joiner on its playfully named module ‘Writing Slightly Betterly’. It might seem obvious, but in the words of our fantastic writers at Monzo, ‘making your writing clearer and more straightforward isn’t dumbing down, it's smartening up’.

I’ve had many insightful conversations at Monzo, but often the most valuable ones are those without a structure. Taking time to connect, listen and swap ideas without pressure has led to me learning so much more than I thought I would on topics I’ve previously not known a lot about. 

It’s very tempting to try and find a way to immediately add value and prove your worth when you’re new. However, having that breathing room at the start of a new job to learn the ropes and ease yourself in is worth its weight in gold. It gives you the space to build solid foundations to truly get off to the best possible start.

And that is normal, and expected and totally fine. In fact, it’d be strange if you did. Being a fully regulated bank means there are processes set up at Monzo to make sure that what we design and build is fully compliant. Considering this my first role in financial services, compliance and risk management are completely new to me. Rather than be thrown every process to try and juggle at once, my squad has done a great job at introducing me to these important processes one step at a time, and I feel a lot less overwhelmed as a result. 

In the beginning, my brain was soaking up information like a little sponge (and will continue to do so as I learn more about the wonderful world of business banking). However I eventually reached a point where there were only so many more documents I could read before the information on the page wasn’t going in. At this point I knew I was ready to get more hands-on. Breaking off a piece of a project and chipping away at it naturally allowed me to keep learning alongside also starting to add value.

I can’t wait to see what’s next in store, and we’re looking for talented people to help us design and build it.

If this sounds like something you’d love to be a part of then come join us! We currently have a Senior Lead Product Designer role open in our Barcelona office, as well as plenty of other opportunities you can check out on our Careers page.