Despite having started the poll, it took me a lot of thinking about what my three priority things would be. And I’m still not sure I’ve got them right.
I think my criteria were broadly “what are the things that would make a significant impact or be transformative?” and “what can I work around or otherwise find a hack for so, while not perfect or delivering joy, I can deprioritise?”.
On that basis I went for big ticket items: future periods, category groups and manual accounts. Each of them would really add so much value for me.
That’s not to say that important stuff like resetting pay periods should be forgotten. In fact, it’s my current hobby horse.
So many of the excellent things that Monzo does (get paid early, left to spend etc) just need to be pushed further to bring joy instead of grit. So many things that Monzo builds don’t play well with each other: get paid early breaks the “days remaining” left to spend or budgeting figures; Monzo payments didn’t/don’t go into committed spend and can’t/couldn’t be paid from bills pots…
Taking that little extra step, making everything work at a coherent whole, finding that little gloss to spark joy is so so so important and will yield dividends (over time, literally). But they can’t be costed so aren’t done.
The accurate payday is an excellent example. A really good, joy inducing, thing would have been to make periods reset automatically (or even on a button press) when your salary is received, even if you haven’t reached the end of the specified pay cycle.
Instead, we’re left with nice, functional, but uninspiring silos of features where we can see the joins between different product teams.