I may have addressed this before, but whilst I think that is a fair comment from a user perspective, it somewhat lacks nuance and context of what our last 12 months have looked like.
I don’t want to sound defensive, but it’s a little bit hard when I’ve seen first hand how hard everybody has worked.
Last April - only 9 months ago! - We got our banking license. That in itself was the culmination of a huge, huge amount of work but it also kicked off the beginning of our biggest challenge to date. Finalising our in-house systems, launching our current account on our processor, getting people onto our current accounts, and finally, putting together a plan to migrate everyone off our Beta and onto the current account, a project that is still ongoing, and actually will still be ongoing even after we shut down the prepaid scheme on April 4th, as we’ll have final contingency plans in place to help people who weren’t able to upgrade before the cut off date.
It’s a huge project. An absolute mammoth task involving literally everyone in the company, that also took place during a time of huge user growth, and huge company growth.
We realised that we basically needed to devote every single bit of engineering time to this project, even with all the new hires. So we froze feature development - this wasn’t an option.
The end result of that, is that you saw a huge period of time where feature releases shipped thick and fast - primarily on iOS, in 2016. Our Android app actually didn’t even launch until late 2016, and it wasn’t until sometime in 2017 that we even really had enough Android engineers to build out the features everyone wanted. Then you get a huge period of time, for the last 9 months, where feature releases slowed down massively, and we’re only just now getting back to a point where we can focus on product and features, and in the last couple of months have been able to ship more features.
So whilst it is technically correct to say that “One year ago you said X” - it ignores the nuance that 75% of that year was time we largely weren’t able to spend on feature dev.