Just to add to this. Copying competitors features, just to maintain parity with them, can actually be detrimental, as well as distracting. Monzo can see what others have built but not why so creating these features can create technical debt (stuff that has to be undone before more changes can be made), as they might not anticipate what change is going to be made to the feature next or how that feature will link to others.
To use an easy example, Pots are pretty basic at the moment but the team has hinted that they could be used to enable:
- Users to give other people access to a pool of money that they don’t 100% trust (e.g. flatmates contributing to bills)
- Users to give people access to a pool of money that they do 100% trust (e.g. something that works in a similar way to joint accounts)
- Children’s accounts (a parent funds a Pot which the child can spend from)
- Carers for people with mental health conditions (to give them visibility & control of a Pot)
- Third parties to pay into / withdraw money from Pots, for integrations
Unless you anticipate all of those use cases & make sure that the design doesn’t hinder any of them, you can end up with a difficult problem to unwind, which could cost you far more than you gained by copying the competitor’s feature 