It’s easy to confuse shipping features with momentum. It usually happens when you celebrate each new launch, but take your eye off the progress of metrics like engagement and retention. In February 2025, this was a trap we risked falling into at Monzo with our Homeownership product. So we did something that seemed counter-intuitive: we paused engineering work on this product for two months, temporarily moving the engineers to another team.

Surprisingly, this didn’t slow us down. Instead, it created the space to diagnose where we were underwhelming customers, reset our strategy, and come back with a much clearer view of what “great” looks like.

In this blog post, I’ll talk about how we slowed down to speed up in the Homeownership team. And I’ll give you a framework for how you can identify and execute the same opportunity for your product team, without falling into a slow-motion deprioritisation, through three key insights:

Our mortgage management product has quickly become one of the most loved parts of the Monzo app. Well over half a million Monzo customers have connected their mortgage in the Monzo app. They can see how much they could save by overpaying, understand the potential impact of changing interest rates and get reminders when their deal needs to be renewed. (If you want to read more about how we built this product, Harry and Yulia wrote a fantastic blog on “Making mortgages more Monzo”.)

At Monzo, we’ve always focused on addressing our customers’ needs around buying and owning a home, not just the financial product of a mortgage as a lender ourselves. A year on from launching our mortgage management product, we were confident we were helping to simplify some parts of homeownership, and we were ready to take the product a step further.  So in summer 2024, we partnered with a mortgage broker to help customers find their next mortgage deal from the Monzo app. It was a logical product extension: it solved a clear customer need and helped Monzo to commercialise the connected mortgage features we’d built, at no extra cost to the customer. Once we’d launched this partnership, we shifted our focus to growth: helping more customers benefit from it.

Eventually, the positive momentum that had carried our mortgage product forward from its inception began to run out. We realised it was time for a reset when:

A diagnosis like this rarely presents itself immediately and obviously. There are always more ideas for what to do next, and it can often feel like a step-change unlock is just round the corner. After all, not every growth bet pays off, so non-linear progress is often just part of the journey. How do you know whether to stay the course or take a step back?

In our case, this conviction came from a return to good old-fashioned qualitative research: hearing from our customers directly. In particular, early signal from in-app surveys made it clear that there were fundamental reasons why our customers were happy to manage their mortgage in the Monzo app, but less inclined to find their next mortgage through the Monzo app.

We had some early insight, but it was clear that we were only scratching the surface. It was time to invest in a deep research exercise to fully understand the gaps in our product and where we needed to focus. But this wasn’t possible while we had to keep feeding the “feature machine” that is a well-operating product squad. In particular, our design, research and product headspace was too consumed in defining the next experiment or quick win for the team to execute on to focus on a more strategic re-evaluation.

At the same time, Monzo in 2024 was a company with no shortage of opportunities: across the core product, savings & investments, our EU expansion, and many more. But temporary people moves can all too often creep into permanent moves. So we focused on identifying time-bound needs for extra engineers, and found these in a couple of projects in our Financial Health and Payments domains.

This ensured we didn’t sleepwalk into an accidental deprioritisation. At the same time, we spent time with leadership to confirm they were bought in on the long-term opportunity for Monzo to build products in the Homeownership space. To do this, we came back to the Monzo mission: to make money work for everyone. It’s impossible to imagine us succeeding in this vision without supporting people with the biggest financial decision of their lives - owning their own home. It was simply a question of how to best do that.

Finally, we clearly defined the goals of the research phase. We wanted to answer a small set of key questions and use these to design a vision of an exciting future. This was also when we made a high-level plan for the work we wanted to do with owners for each workstream.

It can be nerve-wracking for a team to hear about changes like these, which is why it was important to cover all these points up-front. With all this resolved, we had a clear message for the team:

“We’re slowing down in Homeownership for 2 months to give us the space to run a research sprint. We’ll start this 3 weeks from now. While we run this sprint, our engineers are going to support high-priority initiatives in FinHealth and Payments. When they come back, we’ll have a diagnosis of the most important things for us to improve on our product and a vision for where we’re going.”

With the pressure to ship features temporarily removed, we had the space we needed to kick off our discovery sprint. We started by assembling the team and putting in place some clear ways of working:

Among all of these, the research workstream was most critical. Monzo’s secret sauce for building products is not really that secret: we take the time to deeply understand our customers and their unmet needs through qualitative research. We’ve been talking about this for years!

In this case, led by our user researcher Layla, we held 1:1 interviews with two groups of customers:

Then, we looked for common themes in what we heard. While some insights are unanimous, others divide customers into groups. So Layla developed clear personas to bring out these different preferences and priorities, and even created “comic strips” to bring them to life. With this, our designer Laura had everything she needed to start creating a new product vision anchored in customer needs.

The best insights often feel obvious in hindsight, and this was no exception. We heard one feedback theme from practically everyone we spoke to: “don’t throw me over the fence!” 

Monzo customers loved the experience of being able to manage their mortgage in the Monzo app. Understandably, they expected that experience to extend to finding their next mortgage, and were disappointed that instead they’d be sent to their web browser to input their details for our partner. There was a clear opportunity to deliver a more joined up experience inside the Monzo app.

“I assumed that it would be entirely through Monzo until I then got further into the process. And I think I probably would have liked it to be through Monzo rather than a third party, just for ease and quickness ... of Monzo already having all of those details.”

“[Using Monzo] was the point. And when I saw, oh, it was just redirecting to the partner’s website. ... it's not like Monzo. Yes, definitely I was expecting something more integrated.”

Bringing more of the journey into the Monzo app would also allow us to bring more delight and magic into a process traditionally known for long forms and endless requests for documents.

“I thought for me it would be much easier because I didn't have to enter too much information, because I assumed they already knew.”

“If I could just send bank statements via the app to the lender, that would be great. I think that would really win me over.”

“The way that Monzo has created everything, because of that, we are expecting more.”

Other insights were more surprising. Personally, I’d assumed that all Monzo customers loved doing everything digitally, but the reality was more nuanced. For a big transaction like a new mortgage deal, some people took comfort in speaking to a human over the phone. Others had been through this process before and were confident in serving themselves - as long as they knew there was a person they could speak to if they did need help. A one-size-fits-all approach would be too simplistic.

“I think I got to the bit where you maybe book a call with someone. But I was like, I don't need to book a call, I just want to know if the rate that they've got is the same as the rate that I'm looking at.”

“I prefer a phone call (…) you don’t want to send personal information before talking to someone (…) it provides reassurance”

Armed with this deeper customer understanding, our designer Laura led the team in setting a design vision of what the ideal remortgaging experience might look like for Monzo customers. This was a North Star to aim towards, rather than a set of commitments to deliver. It included bringing more of the mortgage application process directly into the Monzo app, offering radical flexibility for a customer to contact their advisor how they chose, and bringing Monzo magic to painful parts of the journey like digging out documents.

Alongside this vision, we also had to change how we thought about measuring success. Rather than tracking metrics that ended when we handed a customer over to our partner, we switched to measuring conversion further down the funnel, since this was the ultimate indication of whether we were solving customer problems. With that, we also took a stronger role in advocating for the customer experience in our partner’s journey.

We also didn’t want to leave this as a pie-in-the-sky vision for the future. One of the deliverables from our discovery sprint was a phased execution plan for the following couple of months, to ensure we could immediately begin making progress.

This immediate execution plan was a mixture of two types of work:

We deliberately didn’t plan too far ahead. The things we learned from these first tests would inevitably affect where we focused next.

To welcome the engineers back to the team, we held a workshop to share this new vision and build excitement in what we were looking to achieve. It wasn’t a “grand reveal” by any means - we had run the discovery sprint openly and shared work-in-progress with the full team - but it marked the end of the pivot that had started a few months earlier. These returning engineers came back into the Homeownership team with new skills and landed impact from their temporary moves, and with a new energy to get back to making real progress against our Homeownership vision.

Last year’s discovery sprint has proved essential so far. We frequently refer back to the insights and frame product decisions a year later in terms of the themes and personas we created. And now, as we welcome Habito to Monzo, it feels more relevant than ever. This acquisition allows us to accelerate our path to the vision we set out, through integrating the much-loved mortgage experience of the UK’s largest digital mortgage broker into the exact journeys we researched.

More broadly, though, I promised you a framework to apply this to your own team. Here it is in more detail:

1. Look for signs that you’ve outrun your understanding

When your growth starts to tail off, for reasons you no longer understand, it’s a sign that it may be time to slow down to speed up. If you’re shipping more experiments than ever but failing to move the dial, take a fresh look at your strategy. Qualitative feedback can sometimes unlock this realisation better than quantitative data.

2. Create space to think by pausing the feature machine

When everything feels urgent and you’re struggling to hit your goals, taking engineers out of the team might seem like the last thing you need. But rare is the organisation that’s long on engineers and short on initiatives. Look for time-bound homes that can create win-win-wins for the org: new experience for your people, important impact for the business, and time to strategise for your team.

3. Get executive sponsorship with clear goals and a deadline

Temporary moves have a habit of becoming permanent ones. To prevent this, do three things before the pause starts: 

Communicating all of this to the team up front is essential, so that they don’t fear a slow-motion deprioritisation.

Working with world-class researchers, designers, data scientists and more, product managers at Monzo make hard decisions like this every day. Our product strategy is driven from customer insights, bottoms-up, not handed to teams from top-down. If this sounds like the kind of product work you’re excited by, we’re hiring!