Today on the blog, our Home Ownership Product Manager @EdSB spils the beans on how we launch new products at Monzo.
If you’ve ever wondered about the nuts and bolts and how we rollout a new feature, and why your version of the Monzo app doesn’t always look the same as someone else’s, this has the answers.
Enjoy!
Hey everyone! 
My name’s Ed and I’m a Group Product Manager at Monzo, working across the teams who look after loans, overdrafts and seeing your mortgage in Monzo. You might have seen me around here before, dropping into a few topics about those products where I can help 
A few months ago, a few of you asked us what Monzo’s policy for rolling out new products was. Why do we sometimes use Labs, or staged rollouts, or experiments? I promised to bring you an answer, which turned into a bit of a lengthy blog post. Hopefully it gives you a bit of a look behind the curtain of how we build and launch products.
I’m here to answer any questions you have, on this topic or any other!
Great blog.
Do you purposely hide obvious new upcoming features in the code by naming references to the feature to something entirely different/boring?
Asking for a friend.
Great article, thanks for taking the time to write it.
One additional question, if I may. What methods do you use to generate the hypothesis in the first place. Is it as simple as just generating them or do you use things such as the business model or value proposition cavas?
Going to (a) buy a printer (b) print this (c) put it on my mum’s fridge as my best achievement to date.
I would say the opposite! We probably don’t think enough about feature flags being publicly discoverable and then accidentally reveal things a little earlier than ready…
Cheque scanning cough cough 
In my opinion, there’s no substitute to having proper depth interviews with real customers for understanding user needs. I think most (all?) of our products have started from there. I also love to combine this with quantitative analysis to understand how keenly and widely the need is felt.
When it comes to the hypotheses for how to address those user needs, there’s no one way to come up with these. There are a lot of really smart people working at Monzo, so putting a few of them together in a (virtual) room with a tonne of data and research findings for an ideation workshop is usually a good way to get the creative juices flowing.
We do use different frameworks from time to time to help guide that process, but I’m yet to discover anything more complicated than the above that consistently generates good ideas.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. And I agree, simple conversations and an as lightweight as possible way to capture and further explore them is key
Thanks for the response!
My friend is very happy 