We created A LOT of work in this project! We (Product Platform) will continue working on the core app experience (budgeting anyone?) and we also want to improve product interfaces for other teams to use. Ideally any team at Monzo creates an awesome feature, and they can easily communicate it to customers, ship really fast, use generic product abstractions, etc. All of Monzo will move faster.
This is amazing. Thanks so much for both doing this, but also taking the time to talk us through it.
(I don’t want to abuse your goodwill, so a question for another time: with a fundamental redesign like this, what level of approval to you need? Do you need marketing/Board/any other sign off, or if you’re confident in the data can you make that call as a squad?)
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No, lot of work needed. Tech debt, documentation, and alignment with hundreds of people working on Product so that its seamless.
By the way, we have thousands of saved responses used by hundreds of COps, and they’re tweaked everyday. So those need rewriting for the new nav, and the longer the rollout takes the more complex this becomes. Oh and also Help articles in the app, they also need rewriting.
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Yes, we’re looking at this. But good design shouldn’t need tutorials.
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Don’t have an iPhone with me right now. But will be similar to what Android already has.
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Yes Bruno. The new nav is now declared finished. Move onto budgeting. 
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I definitely agree, and certainly for new customers the design should be intuitive enough, I was mostly thinking about the 2.5m users who have to relearn where everything has moved to 
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One more out of curiosity. When you do testing, do you use devices of multiple screen sizes?
The reason for asking is that more and more people are getting frustrated with apps (not just Monzo) that keep regularly used items at the top of the screen. It really impedes navigation, especially on larger devices. One example for me is the help icon (which I’ve never used) being more “reachable” than the regularly used stuff that’s currently at the top of the screen.
I may be more sensitive to it as I only have proper use of my right hand, so hate having to go two handed just to click a single icon. A colleague only has one arm, so for him he ends up putting the phone on the desk, clicking the out of reach icon, and then picking the phone up. Samsung have a “one hand mode” which temporarily shrinks the screen size down, but not all phones have it.
Great question!
We work as an independent team. Direction is set within the team, and we set our weekly priorities. We evaluate the risk of everything we rollout, and we keep a record of the risks we take. So for example if I want to rollout to another 50k people I need to be aware of what that means for Monzo. If I know that customer support is 1% higher in the new nav, I align with the leadership of the COps team and make sure they’re okay with the extra load. There’s a bunch of risks we track (reputation, cost, etc) and we have controls in place to mitigate them. For example tomorrow if needed we could turn the new nav off for everyone within a few seconds.
Explicit product approval processes exist within Monzo (and they’re always evolving). So if the risk of a specific rollout reaches a certain threshold the approval I need is different. Some risks I can self certify as a PM, others need to be approved by the CEO - It’s a spectrum. On this project we have been able to move with fairly simple approval process, because we only gave this to a small number of people. And now we also know what to expect when we give it to more people using previous data, which reduces actual risk.
But its our process that makes sure we’re shipping good product. All product teams at Monzo have a weekly product review with the directors of their Collective (directors from Design, Product, and Engineering). In product review we discuss our strategy and get challenged on our decisions. We then act on it and it informs our next team weekly planning. They’re also very aligned with our team and can talk about what we’re doing in different internal forums.
Given the nature of this project it’s also discussed at different levels. So we might give an update at the Executive Council to make sure we’re aligned with the company. And we also communicate heavily with the company through company all hands, etc.
The threshold to give this to everyone is making sure all core metrics are not worse than in the old nav. That’s why we do everything through formal a/b tests. If we can prove metrics are at least the same, then it’s easy to get it rolled out to everyone.
But I think what you’re asking is whether I could flip the switch and rollout to all customers. The answer is no, for this project at least. If any metric was worse, say number of shared golden tickets, it would be a decision taken at the executive level, beacsue its a trade-off of all the things the new structure allows us to do, vs slower growth. Even with healthy metrics, we’d still need to get the executive team on-board with the rollout.
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Yes we want to have some sort of transition messaging.
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Usually we don’t test with different device sizes. But depends on what we’re testing. Bear in mind you only get so many people in for a testing session in the lab. So using lots of devices makes it more difficult to compare the results across participants!
But for every release we (the QA team) tests the app on multiple devices to make sure it’s usable.
Tomorrow we’re getting 6 existing Monzo users in for lab testing, and they’ll all be using an internal device. The idea was to get them using their phones (for realism) but because the app wasn’t released today we’re using a test device so we can show them the latest version.
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Anything else? 
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Somebody suggested above that some tabs, say external cards, could go to the left of the personal account to reduce swiping
Something you will look at (or have)?
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That would only solve it for those customers with external cards. Why not allow everyone to reorder their cards?
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I know you said you’ve not been involved in this version. But is iOS version 2.56 more than likely going to be released next Monday now we’ve missed the cut off? Sorry I’m just looking forward to spent today coming back and the screenshots shared of it look great!
Thanks for your time answering questions and explaining things Bruno, really interesting!
The expectation is that Testlifght is out tomorrow. The Store release should come quickly after provided nothing show stopping found.
To be clear - I didn’t say spent today comes out tomorrow! Next week earliest!
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Yes, yes and YES!
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To be honest the next few releases will be less exciting as we’re not adding new functionality. It will be more polish, bug fixing. The only things still missing to be on par with old nav is spent today, and accessibility.
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Let me not dissuade you from that!
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At this point we need to continue fixing bugs and polishing the experience while we get data from our experiments. As we add more polish the app performs better and metrics are converging. Once they do, we get everyone ready for rolling out.
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