Slowing down to speed up: how a 2 month engineering pause rebooted our mortgage strategy

UK Making Monzo
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Hey Community :wave:

I’m Ed, a Product Director in the Borrowing part of Monzo. You might have seen me around here before, especially talking about our credit insights product. This time, I’m sharing another blog post with you about how we went back to basics on our Homeownership product last year. We (especially @Layla and @LauraSampedro ) took a break from shipping new features and redoubled our efforts to understand what Monzo users like you expected from us when it came to finding a new mortgage.

The answer that came back was clear: “don’t throw us over the fence to another website!” In other words, we should focus on bringing everything into the Monzo app, with all the possibilities that could unlock (no more long forms! Automatic uploads of your bank statements! An easy overview of the mortgage process!).

This post is partly about that, but is especially aimed at people working in product teams who have felt the pressure to keep shipping new features while losing sight of the problem they’re trying to solve. If that’s you, my aim is to give you a framework for slowing down to speed up.

I’d love to answer any questions you have about Homeownership or how we research and build products :blush:

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So… was this the process that ended up in the Habito acquisition?

(speaking of which I’d love for a series of blog posts on how that worked - from target acquisition to wooing (technical term) through to the deal and finally integration).

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To some extent, yes! I’d say the insights and conviction that came out of last year’s research strengthened the case for becoming a broker ourselves and being able to control the end-to-end user experience. (Of course, there are plenty of factors that feed into M&A other than user research!)

We’re very early in the Habito by Monzo journey, but noted that you’d like to hear more :slight_smile:

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