One of the attitudes I loved about Monzo in the beginning was the transparency with new features and deliverables. While not everyone is a stakeholder and therefore you could argue not privy to such information, it was, in my opinion, an industry leading attitude that made me look forward to the next patch, a given quarter etc.
However, where has this all gone? The trello boards are dead and there’s no longer quarterly updates I understand the issue of over-promising and then causing friction when you fail to deliver, but will we ever see some sort of roadmap in the future?
They’ve already stated a couple of times that they feel this sort of approach stopped working as the business scaled up in size. I doubt you’ll get a different response now since they’ve only grown further since then.
It feels that such a response from Monzo of that nature is very much a cop-out. As a company, they will definitely have an internal roadmap with most likely quarterly deliverables, therefore this could be distilled down into something customer friendly. Other companies have open roadmaps directly hooked into their Jira Epic boards that update once a week. Without the promise of something, it feels like the excitement of Monzo is over and it’s now just another bank, albeit a smarter one, but definitely has room for improvement.
While I agree that it’s as easy as emailing each department head asking for a rough outline of their tasks - I just don’t think Monzo see value in the community anymore to invest further in it
I agree, they tried to reassure me on Twitter the other day that the community is still incredibly important to them, I don’t buy it. They don’t even link news articles to here for discussion anymore.
To be fair, the Extraordinary Ideas Board that used to be followed is still full of great ideas that goes beyond almost any other bank - significantly more complex pot rules, different types of cards and more complex bill splitting logic: https://trello.com/b/ID7Li0ni/monzo-extraordinary-ideas-board
Working in a company that dwarves Monzo in size, it really should be that easy, otherwise the managers aren’t doing their job correctly. I should be able to go up to any senior manager or director and within 30 seconds hear the titles of the projects they expect to deliver in Q2/Q3.
They will have internal tools to manage tasks and projects like Jira or Confluence. These can easily be exported or automated to be sent to whoever is responsible for updating the roadmap.
Everything is easy if you don’t have to do it yourself. I think there are some seriously large blinkers being worn around this topic just because of ‘the way things used to work’.
This is not a technical discussion about tools and reporting. This is a publicity discussion about over-promising and competition.
The last update I recall was that they were hiring someone to fill this position but I believe it got put on hold.
Like I mentioned, whether they changed their mind for publicity reasons or technical ones - it requires an investment in the community which as track records show, they’re sadly not going to do.
I literally do this as part of my day job for more senior people in my organisation, and people above me do the same etc. Is it easy? Yes, because it should be part of Product Management 101/ BAU.
If a company as small as Monzo can’t quickly summarise their deliverables for a quarter, there are some serious communication issues within their business.
It is pretty easy. Just get the senior managers (who will probably sub it out down the line, but anyway) all to write 100 words on what they are doing and post it straight to Starling to save the hassle of them having to read the forum shall we?
I agree and this conversation comes around every few months.
Monzo could definitely do all of the above and do monthly updates, quarterly updates, trello boards.
The tools and information I have no doubt is there but management has made the decision that they no longer want to go down that route.
Which is disappointing yes because its almost like they’ve forgot how they got to 4 million odd users and personally I think its more than just a contributing factor why plus has failed multiple times before.
You can’t make such a generalising, mildly patronising comment when several people here have literal experience in doing what you’re claiming isn’t easy.
If there’s issues with over-promising, make it clear. Don’t give exact deadlines (they originally didn’t, choosing to use terms such as “almost done”). I doubt there is an issue with competition as any serious business will have teams constantly monitoring the market and competitors. By connecting with investors etc you can find out pretty much anything you want, but Joe Average isn’t going to sit on such a call a read the summary in the FT.
I understand the issue of over-promising and then causing friction when you fail to deliver, but will we ever see some sort of roadmap in the future?
