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Imagine that says finding your fit with puzzle pieces
Technology
1 June 2023

Finding your fit in a new product team

This is my experience of how I searched for and found my fit as a Product Designer in my first few months at Monzo, but I believe this applies to any role joining a new product team.

 Imagine we have 4 tasks that normally take 1 hour each. In the baseline, team A does all of the work, taking 4 hours. They have an occupancy of 80% meaning that translates to 5 hours of Team A’s scheduled time, costing £128. In the ideal scenario for moving the work, team B do it all with the same handling time and occupancy, but cost £72 leading to a £56 saving. However, what if team B can only complete two of the tasks but have to send the others back to team A (after spending half an hour identifying that they can’t finish them). In this case, if both teams have 80% occupancy, we need 3.75 team B hours but also 2 team A hours, leading to a total cost of £105 - still a saving of £23, but only 41% of the total opportunity. And that’s not the only thing that can affect cost. For example, if team B are twice as slow as team A at doing these tasks, then we will need 10 team B hours costing £144 - a £16 loss vs the baseline. Or if team B have much lower occupancy (e.g. if they are scheduled less efficiently) - if team B have an occupancy of 50% instead of 80%, we need 8 team B hours to do the 4 1-hour tasks, and this costs us £115. We only save £13 vs the baseline, 23% of the amount we save if team B have the same occupancy as team A.
Technology
18 May 2023

Sensitivity analysis

This blog explains sensitivity analysis, which is a useful data science technique for assessing the impact of different variables on an outcome metric.

Technology
10 May 2023

How we manage technology risk at Monzo

In this post, three Monzonauts explain how they work together with each other and other disciplines to manage risk in a fast-moving tech-focused banking environment. 

Shows balance read time since Jan 2020 and how it evolved over time. It increased whilst Monzo’s user base increased over time.
Technology
28 April 2023

Speeding up our balance read time: The planning phase

The ledger is where we keep track of all customer money movements coming in and out of customers’ accounts. We started a project to speed up the ledger balance read time. In this post we’ll cover the planning and experiments we ran.

The new report a fraud flow, which has larger text, less words and clearly articulates what card fraud is
Technology
28 March 2023

What we learned from 43 experiments in 12 months

This blog shares some of the learnings we've had from our experiments in customer help and support over the last year

Sweating the Small Stuff: What do app screens and pedestrian-crossings have in common?
Technology
Data
20 March 2023

Sweating the Small Stuff: What do app screens and pedestrian-crossings have in common?

This blog talks about why app screens are like pedestrian crossings, or more specifically, how some subtle tweaks to a user-interface in Monzo's sign-up process has had a surprisingly large impact!

Moran Index on two features across UK
Data
Technology
2 March 2023

Designing a regional experiment to measure incrementality

This blog post covers the approach for how we designed a regional experiment to measure the incremental impact of our referral scheme on new customer growth.

Technology
22 February 2023

Becoming direct participants of Bacs

In September 2022, Monzo became a Direct Participant of the Bacs scheme. In this post, Tech Lead Ryan explains how we built a new connection to the the Bacs scheme over the SWIFT banking network and managed the risks involved.

A colourful cartoon interpreting Get Paid Early, including a picture of a money note with a brightly coloured watch, with stars around the edge.
Technology
27 January 2023

How we prepare for huge spikes in traffic as millions of our customers get paid early

This blog explains the problems that occur when hundreds of thousands of customers all request to be paid millions of pounds at almost exactly the same time, and what we do to keep things running smoothly while that happens.

Data
Machine Learning
Technology
19 December 2022

Machine Learning at Monzo in 2022

An end-of-year review of how machine learning continues to evolve and grow at Monzo

Growth of models, tests, and committers since August 2019
Technology
15 December 2022

Building an extension framework for dbt

dbt is a fundamental piece of Monzo’s data platform. We made the big decision to build a whole new extension framework that would give us more flexibility.

Image of two hands high fiving
Technology
13 December 2022

Monzo Magic hackathon: 3 days, 120 ideas, 333 Monzonauts

This August, as we were wrapping up the summer, Monzonauts across the business set out to learn from each other, have fun and build things centred around one theme: Monzo Magic. This activity is commonly referred to in the industry as a hackathon.

A picture shows a square with dotted lines - the 'cluster-O'. Outside this square to the top left is a green box that says 'pool(s)' and a blue box on the bottom right that says 'NAT Gateway' . Inside the dotted line box are four green boxes near each corner of the square, between the two top green boxes is a small orange rectangle numbered '1' that these two green boxes have arrows pointing into. The top right green box is numbered '2'. There are arrows connecting the top right corner green box to the bottom right green box, and the bottom left box connecting to the bottom right and top left green boxes. An arrow pointing up from the bottom left to the top right green box says '3'. An arrow pointing from the top green box to the middle orange box is labelled '4'. The top left box green says  'CoreDNS', the top right green box says 'egress-operator', the bottom right box says 'egress-gateway', the bottom left box says 'microservices', the orange box says 'ExternalService api.foo.com'. The bottom green box has an arrow pointing to the blue box next to it that sits outside the dotted line square. There is an arrow pointed to the right from the blue box that says 'Out to the internet'.
Technology
25 November 2022

Reducing our NAT Gateway cost with private networking between AWS and GCP

Sharing knowledge on how we implementing private networking between AWS and GCP

Monzo Flex - pay at checkout
Technology
18 November 2022

How insights shaped building a 0-1 product: Monzo Flex

We wanted to share more about why we launched a new 0-1 product to help people pay for purchases later and how a mixed-method research discovery led to the product that over hundreds of thousands of customers use and love today!

An illustration of a face surrounded by thoughts and objects like a clock, book, lightbulb, and some gears
Technology
10 November 2022

Taking a design system approach to research guidelines

If you’re starting out in a new role in research ops, design ops or any other kind of team operations, this blog will take you through the ins and outs of creating a flexible how-to guide database for scale.