46: Leading with Clarity (ft. Vuokko Aro)

Transcript

This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited. Some errors may remain.

Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett, 

Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way, 

Peter: Navigating the opportunities 

Jesse: and challenges 

Peter: of design and design leadership, 

Jesse: On today’s show, Vuokko Aro, VP of Design for the UK’s popular digital-only bank Monzo, joins us. We’ll talk about shifting your design approach as your company scales, building a true peer relationship with product leadership, and creating a sense of togetherness for remote and embedded teams.

Peter: Hi Vuokko, thank you so much for joining us.

Vuokko: Hi guys. Thanks for inviting me.

Peter: We’re going to start where we always start which is to learn a little bit more about you. So, who are you? What do you do? What’s your role? Give us a little background.

Vuokko: Absolutely. So I’m Vuokko VP design at Monzo, which is a digital-only bank. It’s a scale-up based in London. And I’ve been on this startup scale-up journey since the early days and have scaled myself with the company.

And before this, I was at other startups in London, New York. I have a kind of a strange background, where I have a master’s in design, but before that I actually studied economics. I have an MBA, which used to be a fun fact about me. No one would ever know, but actually as I’ve progressed in my career, especially the startup that took off being a bank, it has become pretty useful.

I would say that I can, I can help lead the company without adult supervision.

Peter: You, got your MBA before your design degree.

Vuokko: I did. Yes.

Peter: That’s the reverse of many of the design leaders we talked to.

Vuokko: Yes.

Why design?

Jesse: I’m curious about the pivot for you. What drew you to design?

Vuokko: Mm, yes. It’s a good question. Well, I’m one of those people who’ve always done creative things since like a young age, just drawing and designing things and, I don’t know, high school, someone needed a hoodie, I would design it. At my school of economics, if we needed to make a magazine, I would do the layout in InDesign.

So I guess it was just always a calling. But earlier on at the time when I was starting to choose a career, it didn’t seem like a real one yet, at least if you ask my parents. I think I chose something more traditional and then ended up drifting to it anyways. I worked as a journalist, a copywriter, concept designer, drifted into full time design when the, actually when the iPhone was released and touch devices became a thing and that was very exciting that you could touch these things and actually people would feel things through those.

So that’s how I made the leap.

Peter: Interesting. I hadn’t realized just how much of your journey was also Monzo’s journey, and I think kind of charting that path could be interesting. But to set a little bit more context, you mentioned Monzo’s a digital-only bank. How many people use it, and in what parts of the world is it used?

Vuokko: Yes. We’re mainly UK-only now. We’re starting to work on our US product as well, but it’s very early days. But in the UK we are a household brand. People are very passionate about it. It’s the kind of thing, it’s funny. Outside the UK, people have not heard of Monzo, and in the UK, you can’t tell anyone you work at Monzo without hearing so much love and excitement about it, and we have this, like, iconic, hot coral, we call the color hot coral, debit card, and everyone knows it, so we’ve got a big consumer brand. 

We’re also a social network, in my opinion, because every Monzo customer has 37 contacts on Monzo to send payments to and so forth. When I joined, we were a prepaid card. That’s how we got going just to build the product out in the open.

The original team, which I’m not part of the original team. I just joined early. The original team started applying for a banking license, but already started building the product to learn from customers and to like start finding product-market fit early on. And then we got the banking license and then built the bank app on top of that.

So the earliest version of the product was kind of like a Venmo. But for the past five, six years, more than six now, we’ve built loans and overdrafts and investments now. The goal is not just a bank, but, the interface to all your money, basically, which is a lot of complexity for us to handle and make simple for our customers.

Design’s journey at Monzo

Jesse: So you mentioned you were not part of the founding team. Where were they on their journey when you joined the company? Did design already exist as a function or were you the first designer or like how did that go when you were stepping into this?

Vuokko: Mm hmm. Design already existed and, the first few designers were amazing, so they had set a really strong foundation already. There were three designers when I joined, and I came from other startups, I had designed other consumer apps, so came in to build a delightful consumer experience and looked across the whole app and things have scaled from there, so started managing every other designer who came after me, and introducing design critiques and design culture and all that good stuff. 

So taken from there, we were less than a hundred people in the company when I joined. Maybe a hundred thousand users. There had been hockey stick growth just before I joined, and a nice funding round so they could hire me and some other people.

Jesse: Did they bring you in in a leadership role?

Vuokko: No, I joined as a lead product designer, I think. Although the company was very flat at the time, there were no leadership roles other than the founders, really.

Jesse: Yeah, so they needed to create a leadership role for you at some point. How did that come about?

Vuokko: Yep.

So we had our original head of design, Hugo, who’s amazing. And he was the first designer. And then I joined and did my thing and have been on a journey from that time when we didn’t really have any titles or no one cared, to, as we scaled up, created a director level and that became me and then VP.

Jesse: Mm.

That’s been, six, seven years. 

Peter: When you were director level, was that the senior most role? As things have scaled, have you been scaling kind of on top with that?

Vuokko: No, Hugo, the original designer, was VP design for a while, maybe a year, two. But before he left, I became VP and then that’s been the last however many years.

Peter: Couple of years according to LinkedIn.

Jesse: Was that previous VP one of the founders?

Vuokko: No, but he was there from day one. 

Jesse: What was it like to step in as the, kind of, the second leader? You know, like you’re inheriting something, but it’s not yet what it needs to be? What was that like?

Vuokko: Yeah. I didn’t think about it too much at the time, to be honest. It was one of those times in a startup where everyone’s doing everything from, like, jumping on customer support if there’s a problem, or packing cards in the office if a lot of signups happened the previous day, so we were just doing things together, but I think I also had the privilege of learning with him and he was out there on the frontier and I could watch what he did and learn very quickly as well. I think I was at the right point in my career where I had enough maturity to watch and learn quickly and then do whatever was needed.

That’s the thing in scale-ups. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for anyone to take a lot of responsibility, but it’s not always the right time for different people. It’s a high level of discomfort when you don’t know what you’re doing and you have to figure out the next step and the next step.

So I guess you have to be ready for it to put in the work.

No victim mentality

Peter: You mentioned Hugo kind of being out in front, what were some of the things that you learned that you saw that maybe were, eye-opening for you as he was operating, and maybe that you’ve adopted in your leadership? 

Vuokko: Great question. I think one thing that I always respected about Hugo was he didn’t have any kind of victim mentality about design is not respected, or design needs to sit at the table. He was very grown up about it and just showed people what the impact of design had been to the success of a feature or a phase in our story, and kind of took it apart and explained like this is how it works. It’s not just magic that happened. We put in this effort and then this was the outcome of it. So I think I’ve learned that a lot, now that I represent design in rooms where I’m the only designer and other people don’t have my background, is to not be preachy about it or complain-y, but just… people love learning about this stuff anyway, it’s fascinating. 

I think I learned that kind of open mindedness about just being excited, about teaching, about design and you kind of can’t overdo it. There’s always more for all of us to understand and learn.

Jesse: Mm hmm. So you’ve referred a couple of times to this business as a scale-up opposed to a startup. So implying that it’s gotten to a phase in its evolution where growth really, really matters. And I’m curious about what you see as the difference between design’s role in the startup phase versus design’s role in the scale-up phase of a new business.

Vuokko: Yes. A lot of differences, a lot of similarities. I suppose early on it’s much more about creating new things and not everything’s going to be good. And now we’re getting to a phase where the brand is very valuable and we can’t risk just destroying it overnight. For example, where in the past we would do a lot of things and just see what works, and now we’re in a phase where we’re really defining what it is, who we are, and maturing a lot of things. Which is different, but still we’re clearly not at a phase where we’ve stagnated. We’re still creating new things just with a more careful approach, but still need to move fast and be bold about it.

I think we used to take massive leaps and now we still take leaps, but I think that’s my biggest fear as well, that one day we slow down to a crawl and stop innovating, but that’s not. I can’t believe I used the word innovate, but you know what I mean. Yeah, so still creating, but with like knowing that all of this is actually very valuable.

Product *and* brand design

Vuokko: Now one thing about my role that I forgot to say is I look after product design, user research and brand design. So I think about the customer experience in a very wide sense. So thinking about the app, if… when we redesign it…I’ve done that a few times now… obviously breaking metrics and taking a leap into the unknown, those are huge things, but also changing the brand and the visual brand, for example, like refreshing it, and how will this change the sentiment of people who interact with all of these things. I’ve been on many startups before, but I’ve never gotten to this phase before where we have to be this careful. Which is, I’m not saying that as a bad thing, it’s actually, it’s what a privilege.

Jesse: Yeah.

Peter: Had you done brand design, marketing design before, or is this new for you in this role?

Vuokko: I’ve done it before. I think I’ve actually gravitated towards startups where brand and product are very intertwined. So, just before this I was at Citymapper, which is another London startup which is huge here. Less so… It exists in the US, so maybe some people will know it. But also very much a strong brand and charismatic product, kind of intertwined.

And I suppose I’m old enough to have worked in design when there wasn’t that much of a separation yet between brand and product, as there is now with younger people coming into the industry only having, for example, studied product design and worked in very tightly developed and matured roles, I think. At some point I was quite drawn to early stage work where you do everything.

Peter: What I see that’s unfortunately common is, as companies scale, design, which had product and brand together, ends up getting separated because some new marketing leader comes in and that marketing leader wants the design team to report to them. Have there been any of those kinds of conversations or has it been recognized that design is more powerful when it’s all together?

How have you navigated those discussions?

Vuokko: We have had that discussion. It was a few years ago, actually, that that did come up and I… it was the first time I very forcefully put my foot down in what I believe we should do. And it was a discussion for a while, but ultimately I think we have enough proof points at Monzo, just the power of, I would say design is our moat, or at least one of the strong moats we have as a business, where it’s kind of not disputable that design is what draws people to use the product, to work at our company, all of these things.

And it’s not just how easy the product is to use, or the card and the visual brand, but all of it, how it works together. I just look towards examples of where that worked and where the risks would be to separate it. I do very strongly believe that the way we build the product and the way we market it should feel like one fluid experience, and should feel like it’s made by one hand, even though we’re a large team now. But, it’s not been discussed since. 

So the last few years we’ve settled into this model and I actually proactively brought this up because we hired a new CPO a year and a bit ago. And when we were interviewing candidates, I made it very clear to everyone involved that It’s absolutely not personal towards anyone, but before we even get started, I don’t want to report into a CPO either, because I believe that design is wider than just product. I look after the product experience, but also the brand and the way we talk to customers in our app, our cards or the carrier letters, everything.

So to me, design being a part of product is more narrowly focused than how I see it. So that’s been the way, and I think, obviously, it always comes down to personal relationships, but I work closely with all our execs and it’s gone well. I’m very collaborative and everything, but this is the way I prefer the team to be set up.

Peter: So where is design situated in the organization?

Vuokko: So I report into our COO. Which I thought was like a once in a lifetime setup for design, but I listened to an older episode of yours and you had someone else on from Instacart, I think, who had the same model. And that’s been really, very fruitful relationship for me, I have to say. But it’s, I suppose, it comes down to individuals as well.

Our COO is a amazing business leader who I learn a lot from. And also I’ve gotten to teach non-design execs and non-product execs about the power of design and customer centricity in ways that they might not have heard about before, so. I prefer just reporting to a business leader. Who’s also an amazing person.

Jesse: So you mentioned that there are a lot of people in the industry now who have spent their entire careers solely in the realm of product design and have never been exposed to kind of this broader field of brand and graphic and identity and all of these other forms of design that come into play for you.

What do you think those folks are missing? What advice or direction would you give to somebody who has a lot of depth in product, but no experience with brand, like how can they level themselves up here?

Vuokko: I love that question. I think when you work in just one medium, let’s call it, you do end up solving a lot of problems over and over, a similar framing and similar problems, and it can limit your thinking. I think of what are we even doing here as a designer, or what are we solving for? So I think, thinking widely about the brand, it’s more about storytelling and really simplifying a message so that it resonates with the customer so that they notice it in like the busy life that they’re leading and they don’t really have more than two seconds for us. 

And I think it’s also different kind of constraints. I think, now that I think about it, for example, when we design debit cards, it’s a tiny surface with about 100 different kinds of constraints because it’s a physical product that’s regulated and has to fit into an ATM, and when I think about being young and designing book jackets, that was a different kind of constraint and people need to notice it in a busy store.

So I think just there’s a richness in thinking about different kinds of products, I suppose.

Peter: At some point I had to deepen my understanding of brand, and designers, when designers think of brand, they tend to think of brand identity. But you have an MBA and there’s a whole world of brand management within the land of MBAs. And I’m wondering how you’re bringing a richer business-savvy mindset of brand into your conversation and, do you own the brand or, how is brand ownership or stewardship considered at Monzo, particularly considering how important it is?

Vuokko: Yeah, I would say our brand’s owned by our COO, who has that background and is very good at it. Or marketing as well, perhaps. It’s not me. I don’t actually, I don’t own a line on the P&L. It’s a gift and a curse. Again, I think it comes from also me being one of the most tenured employees and being the one person left who’s created the product and the brand kind of from scratch and been here the whole journey that I have this outside voice as well, defining when we work on brand pillars or a brand proposition that I have a big voice there just because I have this track record of having created it and understood what works.

Made some mistakes, too. But yeah, the MBA background I think definitely helps. I, I don’t think about it enough sometimes, but it is very much, I suppose, part of my internal vocabulary that I take for granted.

Influence without accountability

Peter: I’m assuming you have points of view and perspectives that you’re trying to advocate for. And so how do you justify or rationalize or advocate for positions when you’re not seen necessarily as accountable?

Vuokko: Mm hmm. Yeah. I think if I had to kind of distill it down to one, I care about quality of experience in different ways. And obviously there’s, I think this has been a hot topic on a lot of podcasts recently, about things that you can measure and things that you can’t. But I think that’s kind of the role that I want to bring and having a tenured design leader, I feel like there’s that trust that I don’t feel held back by the lack of metrics. And obviously I’m very privileged to work in a company where design has clearly been the driving factor in our success. So much so, you know, our investors and board and everyone knows it.

Jesse: Has everyone always known it or was it a journey to help people understand the value that design was delivering for the organization?

Vuokko: I wouldn’t say everyone’s always known it, I’m sure. And, I want to be clear that design is not the only reason for success. We have an amazing tech stack that we built from the ground up and amazing team. There’s a lot of things, but design is clearly one of these major factors. 

No, it doesn’t come free, that’s for sure. For example, I’ve been lucky to have been invited to talk at a board meeting about how we do design at Monzo and what our role is and how it differs from other companies and give examples of what we’re working on. We had defined our long term company strategy, I got to be involved and bring my point of view.

Which at the end of the day, it’s absolutely not at odds with someone with a long term career in banking either. It’s we all want to build amazing things for our customers that they will use and love. But I think it’s introducing new people to that vocabulary and obviously, like, our exec team, for example, everyone joined in the last three years, board members change ,we have new investors every now and then, so it’s not like it’s a set group either.

Educating others about design

Vuokko: Sometimes I kid myself and think everyone at Monzo understands design, but then next week someone will join who’s never worked with a design team like ours, that’s so empowered and opinionated. So I think it’s not like the job’s ever done either.

Like you can be in a place where things are just about as good as they can be, but still you have to keep educating people. That sounds condescending though, I don’t mean it that way. But kind of explaining the craft and, why it’s different here.

Peter: What are some of those talking points of difference? You mentioned both, to the board, you’ve given presentations on how design at Monzo is different, and now to people joining, maybe as kind of part of onboarding, how the role of design at Monzo is different than whatever you assume their expectations are.

So what is that delta? How do you frame that?

Vuokko: Yeah. That’s a good question. I guess you never also know what other people’s, where they’re actually coming from and what their actual expectation is. But I suppose, like, a stereotype, that’s out there that I remember myself, someone could have is that design is just something that comes in at the end and decorates the thing.

Or that it’s somehow detached or part of marketing, or that it’s not actually as embedded as it is. So I talk about how we work, just the process of how we structure cross discipline tech squads and the role of a designer working closely together with the other disciplines, and well, I think we’ve also invested a lot when it comes to being different.

We’ve invested in user research a lot in Monzo over the years, over the last year or two more than before, and we’ve always been very customer centric. But in the early days we had no user researchers, we hosted events and we’re very, like, community-centric product. 

So in the early days we had events. It was hard to get out of the office without a slice of pizza because we had people over every night to test the product, to hear about how we build it, the thing. It was like a very Shoreditch, the kind of tech neighborhood of London, Shoreditch thing in the early days that I remember well.

Since then, well, like our customer centricity has obviously taken new directions. Like that group was a very specific group. A lot of engineers who then later on joined us, customer, like, community forum. But since then, like, we obviously developed a user research discipline, but we’re really invested in it now, to get back to answering your question.

I feel like research at Monzo has really reached levels that I certainly haven’t seen in my career before, and like we have an amazing research director who’s built a team and has been able to connect them to our strategy in ways that they impress me all the time. For example, we’ll set out to build one thing, but research just comes up with this insight that will actually build a completely different thing that then blows everyone’s socks off.

So I think when it comes to like first principles thinking and, and all of that, those are the things that make us special, even within tech. 

Jesse: I talk to design leaders all the time, both within my coaching practice and just generally out in the world who I feel like would kill for the opportunity to get in front of their board of directors and make the case for the value of design. And they can’t get there and they can’t do it because they don’t have anybody to invite them in.

They don’t have anybody who feels like that conversation merits that level of attention. So I’m curious about how you got into the room, the executive level alliances that you’ve been able to build, to maintain what you’ve built, because I’ve seen so many design leaders who’ve been able to, to gather a certain amount of power and influence for themselves, and then had it all kind of like dissipate, drain away over time.

Vuokko: Yes. Yeah. I am in a great position. it didn’t happen overnight. I think I’ve learned to do different things. Some of them, not to keep banging on about the MBA, but I think just speaking their language as well and well, speaking the language of execs, and bringing my own flavor. 

No one wants to hear more of the same. I think the reason you get invited to a room, you make sure that you’re actually providing new perspective and value and then if that happens, you’ll be invited again and again, and you build piece by piece. 

I think of myself as a really good writer and I write a lot internally, I write weekly updates and I write about this and that, so I think that was one of my ways in was to write vision papers and papers about how we design magic customer experiences, and those kind of things click with people about this is the, like, behind why… our success or why we’re growing or why people continue opening the app every day and all of these things.

So I think, yeah, it’s a mix of fitting in, but also bringing that unique perspective. I suppose it’s another kind of cross disciplinary team. I always love being in a product squad and working with engineers and other people. So I have a kind of a new cross disciplinary squad now. So just to remember my unique perspective and always bring it.

I don’t ever want to be in a room and just nodding. I feel like then that’s probably the best way to never get invited again. It’s to really focus on, like, what is the unique thing that you can bring, with your experience and skills. And we have amazing customer centric execs, but obviously having a design background helps you articulate things and, make connections maybe that aren’t there for everyone.

Maximizing the impact of design

Jesse: So you’re working with this amazing team that really understands what you bring, the value of it. I can’t imagine that you see eye to eye all the time. And I get curious about the challenges that you face, still, in, maximizing the impact of design, maximizing the value delivery of design.

Vuokko: Yes. Yeah, it’s, we wouldn’t have jobs if it was easy and automatic. So it is definitely, there are definitely decisions to be made. And I think it often comes down to everyone wants high quality. Everyone wants consistency and everyone also wants to move fast. So I think it’s often a case of, what’s good enough?

How far do we reach? Or do we just go with what we can have in two months, or now? And then what kind of commitment do we make to getting back to that? 

Jesse: Lot of those kinds of decisions come back to, in the simplest terms, the roadmap, what’s getting built on what timeline. And I’m curious about how design influences the roadmap for Monzo. 

Vuokko: Yeah, great question. Different ways. For example, we have user researchers obviously working on product, embedded in squads on more delivery projects, but also going ahead, investigating different topics, or often we might pair a user researcher and then, like, a business analyst, for example, to go and get clarity on what kind of opportunities there are.

And then I’m part of our product senior leadership. So just a voice in the room, along with my directors, kind of on a regular basis. But in, in addition to that, I think the biggest part of my job is to open up big conversations about the ways that we’ll win as a company and how we structure the app and what are the new spaces we need to build and how do we support our business goals through the product.

So if I explain that a little, so we did a kind of a app redesign. That rolled out this summer, but it was actually like more than a year of work for me starting to map out the problems with the top three business goals we have as a company, and what’s stopping us from reaching those, then mapping it back to the product and its structure and how people navigate through it and the feedback we’ve gotten and, obviously, a lot of work went into that and then writing a vision paper about it. Where we should take the app and its structure next. 

So we’ve built a new home screen and we have some ideas, but, for example, currently, this autumn, I wrote a follow up about, well, what’s next because I think that’s the power of design as well. We can imagine the future and, like, create the direction for where we should go. Because I think there are a lot of smart people in a lot of different roles and disciplines, but a lot of them are about combining what exists already and I think what I’ve been able to bring is not just how do we optimize the space we have already, or how do we cram more things into it, or how can we do this or that, but it’s actually, you know what, we’re missing another space and this one is no longer serving us and we need to create these other things.

So I always try to get ahead of it. We do, like, ahead of quarterly, or half year planning or anything like that like, way ahead, to build the excitement, alignment, understanding of where we need to go. Kind of the bigger leaps. And so far I’ve had a, good track record of seeing where the company and the business need to go.

But it’s not like a lot of it’s like rocket science either. There are big patterns that other big apps have, and you combine from there, but I think, yeah, a combination of user research, being in the room regularly, and then these bigger vision pieces. But it, that’s not, just you write it and everyone is excited, of course there’s work off the back of that, but it’s now a way that we’ve done things and it’s worked. So that’s obviously each time it gets easier.

Jesse: So what I’m hearing in what you’re saying is that there is a tremendous amount of influence that design has over product strategy. But you don’t report into a product organization. And you are, in some ways, kind of a peer to the product organization.

And I’m curious about how you manage that tension of authority and control and decision making power in the structure that you have in place here.

Vuokko: Yeah, it’s a good question. Yeah, I work closely with our CPO, who I have tremendous respect for, and he has a lot of experience from different tech companies around the world. So he definitely has a lot of experience that I don’t have. And I have experience that he doesn’t have either. We have a one to one every week, and talk a lot and, align amongst ourselves.

And I think we really bring different parts to the leadership of our product. So he’s very commercial. He has an engineering background. He’s an amazing product leader, but obviously I have this like experience leading our experience. So, I think he trusts me a lot on that side and it all works out.

Always comes down to individual relationships, but in the end he’s more senior than I am. So that’s fine with me.

Upholding quality standards

Peter: You mentioned earlier the concept of quality of experience, and I’m wondering if that is a explicit bar that you have set, if there is a framework for quality that you’ve established, and if so, what does that look like? And how does that then support your conversations with your CPO, right? In terms of, I’m assuming there’s a go/no go, right? Like this doesn’t meet our level of quality, so we shouldn’t ship it. Like, how do you handle those kinds of conversations?

Vuokko: Yes, great question. This is something that a few of the execs have actually asked me to define. And I haven’t done it yet. One thing I am in the process of doing is writing some product principles together with our CPO and his team. So I think that should help also defining the brand a little more.

But it’s a tricky thing to pin down as well. I often try to, depending on the thing, I, try to inspire the team to aim high in ways that feel tangible. Like one designer on my team worked really hard for a half a year on a thing that’s like UI-wise, one card with an icon, but it’s just so meaningful to our customers. It’s too complex. I won’t go into what it is now, but it’s cool. But it was so industry-defining that we got a lot of press from it and how we’re keeping customers safe and this and that. So I think that was a great bar for quality of design, is the press wants to write about it, but that’s obviously very high, but then how many pieces of feedback do we get where people are just so happy they wanna post about it, or tell their friends, or whatever it is. So I think it all comes down to these things. Our growth is heavily, like, product led growth as we have organic growth. And that’s part of our big story as a company. So to keep that going, obviously we also need to have features that people want to show their friends and tell their friends about. And to keep that bar high in that sense as well. 

But yeah, it’s hard. To answer your question, I don’t have a clear definition for it, other than obviously there’s a bar of like, it works as you would expect, and isn’t flaky, and the affordances are in place, and all of those. The way I’ve tried to define it is to go beyond what a customer would expect a bank to do or this feature to do so it doesn’t just work and we definitely never want to just design a slightly better version of where it’s already out there, but just go beyond, ideally. Not that it needs to be different, but to kind of be a surprisingly good. 

Peter: You mentioned earlier that that Monzo is digital only. I do a lot of work with financial services and banks. And even when you’re focused on just the digital, there can be a significant complexity. I have here, I’ve written down things like service design and omni channel.

And I’m wondering what your relationship is, even if you don’t have branches, are there customer service representatives, and what your relationship is to that true end-to-end experience the customers are having, so that it’s not really just what’s on a mobile app screen, but what all are you trying to orchestrate with the experience, and what is your team given, kind of, access to or responsibility for in that orchestration?

Vuokko: We’re lucky to be transparent company. So designers have access to data, to customer feedback, the different channels that we use, and we have some speaking of, like, how great our user research team, they have some like always-on research channels and feedback through the product outside of it. And I think that’s one of the upsides of me reporting to our CEO is I get to be part of our Ops VP’s group.

So I get exposure to, like, our VP of operations and financial crime and compliance and people who I might otherwise not spend as much time with. But obviously that’s a huge part of how we serve our customers and what, people deal with, whether the product’s working well or not.

But, as for my team, we’ve embedded designers in our customer operations team. So they’re designing tooling for our customer operations, but also helping people like self-serve and do things more easily in the app. And then also in like financial crime, helping deal with things like fraud and other things that might affect our customers.

We look at this pretty widely from not just the website and signing up and using the product, but also, what happens when something goes wrong. And what if people can’t find what they’re looking for in the app? What channels are they going to use to figure that out? Are they going to search in the app? Are they going to Google it, call us? So, we don’t have branches, we are digital only, so we have an in-app chat that’s always open and we have a phone number you can call.

Peter: So you mentioned the Ops VPs and things like compliance and control. So again, I work with banks and usually what you would call Ops VPs, designers would see as stakeholders, right? There are people that you have to get buy in for or you have to run things by to get their sign off on, but it’s often not seen as a partnership where it sounds like you have an opportunity for a partnership.

And I’m wondering how you think about the relationship with, and I don’t know enough about the UK regulatory environment, but kind of the relationship between design and regulatory controls, right? In the United States, there’s certain experiences that banks cannot offer because of federal regulations, but there’s also an opportunity for those banks to possibly work with the federal government to try to make change if it was seen as in the interest of consumers.

And so I’m wondering, do you end up operating in that space of trying to change some really like fundamental aspects of banking so that it is more customer or experience centered?

Vuokko: Yes yeah, we have several regulators in the UK, and they’re doing a great job, and we work with them. Earlier we were talking about, how things have changed. I feel like we were really learning to work with regulators and, and pushing back a lot, I think.

But ultimately obviously, we’ve grown and matured a lot and, it’s not a direct part of my job, but I think it’s an extremely valuable context that I get about everything I wouldn’t be exposed to if I was just sitting in product, all of that is so valuable to doing my job well and giving context to my team on, for example, what the trends are that our customers might be dealing with and the cost that comes with that and all of that to the human cost to our customers, what they have to deal with and the cost to our business and all of that.

I think it’s the other side of the coin almost and it’s, I’m really privileged to see it. It’s a partnership, but it’s more also just visibility, and I think it helps solve some of those problems through design. I think ultimately like having all that context soaking in my brain helps design a product that helps us serve customers better and keep them safe.

Scaling UX Research

Jesse: I’m curious about this investment in research specifically that you’ve been able to drive for the organization in the last few years because it sounds like something that in most cases would be basically incompatible with the thinking of a scale-up, you know, an organization that is invested in growth, invested in speed.

The last thing that they want to do is take a bunch of time and do a bunch of research studies. So I get curious about how you made the case. Did you need to make the case? How did this shift toward investing in deeper customer understanding come about for the organization? And what was your role in making that happen?

Vuokko: Sure. I’m not going to take too much credit for this. I mentioned earlier, we have an amazing director of user research and it’s really her understanding of the business and how her discipline can help it grow. That’s been the main factor here. What she’s done is been very pragmatic, to be honest, to start small and show the impact and grow from there piece by piece.

So I think I mentioned earlier that sometimes we investigate the opportunity in a new area we might not already be in. So I’ll pair a user researcher, maybe a designer and a business analyst, for example, to just go and investigate the space and customer needs, business opportunity for a while and then come back with a recommendation.

So that kind of thing obviously is very cheap compared to sending a whole squad to build a thing that might or might not meet an actual customer need. So that’s been a real valuable part of how we work and especially how we expand to doing new things. And then, good examples of where a researcher was able to really change direction and for that direction to have been the right one for us.

And then suddenly you get a few of those and everyone wants some of it.

Jesse: Hmm. So it seems like, tactically, this is about packaging research findings in a way that people inside the organization can consume them and getting your researchers in front of your stakeholders.

Vuokko: Yeah, I think that’s definitely part of it. Then I think the research team has also done a great job of empowering everyone in squads, building product to do their own usability testing and kind of the simpler research work, which then frees up their time to do higher level things that no one else is skilled in doing.

And then that then leads to breakthroughs in ways that wouldn’t have been possible if they were busy doing usability testing. Which is also valuable, but just there’s different flavors.

Jesse: Yeah. 

Peter: I’m wondering if you also have a content practice or how content is handled with relationship to design.

Vuokko: Yeah, I think brand design being under design is surprising to many, but then another surprise is actually, I don’t have content or writing in my org at all. We have a writing discipline that sits within marketing. And I would say that’s probably for historical reasons, where we hired the first writer and then they built their team.

But, like I said, we’re very collaborative, so it’s not been an issue, because of our strong consumer brand that we built, also have one of our superpowers, I think, is our social media and content team, but that’s kind of outside the product. But I’d be curious always to, like, how we can reflect all of that more within the product as well.

Peter: Do those people in marketing do, like, the UX writing, are they part of that conversation? Or are your designers, some of them, doing the UX writing?

Vuokko: Early on, we were pretty dogmatic about only hiring designers who were also good writers. And when we were interviewing, like, that was part of it and only hired people who care about, like, all the aspects of putting together an experience. As we scaled it was very difficult to hang on to that.

So now we have designers who would probably tell you themselves they’re not strong writers, but they’re amazing at other things. And we have writers embedded in different business areas. Not maybe on a squad level, but in like we call them collectives, kind of the Spotify tribes. At least like on that level to be close to the work.

It depends I suppose on the project. Sometimes there is a writer assigned to a project and making sure every thing there is up to standard and, sometimes it’s more a designer and a writer might then come in later, but it depends on the project. 

I think we probably do have a lot of maturing to do there. But at least the way I talk to my team is that they are responsible for the experience in the end, so we never use lorem ipsum, for example, even if English isn’t your native language, or you don’t feel comfortable you should do your very best to convey the message and the feeling, dare I say, of what we want the customer to know and what this screen is all about. And then obviously, writers are amazing at then, like, maybe bringing that more to life and making sure it’s grammatically correct, but ultimately the designer can’t shy away from the responsibility of what like, a screening question conveys.

Jesse: What’s challenging you right now?

Vuokko: It’s the scale of, like, of everything getting bigger and more complex and fast around me. So I think we’re doing more things at once than we’ve ever done before. And I feel like, I guess I’ve said that every year or every few months, but it definitely feels like that now, where we built such a strong business over the pandemic.

And then that’s thanks to our strong exec team who’s come in and helped us really, like, on top of this product and brand that people love, also built, like, a really strong business and we’re now profitable and we have kind of this, like, right to win and go big towards everything we’ve always wanted to do. So I think it’s obviously challenging and I think, not the flip side, but with great power comes great responsibility. It’s like we’ve been trusted as a design team to really help lead the direction and to make sure that goes well.

And we help move things in the right direction. So definitely to be humble and listen to customers and make sure that we’re taking the right steps, but yeah, doing it at a scale and on many, many different fronts at once is a new experience.

Peter: When you’re thinking of those scaling challenges, I’m wondering which is primary. There’s a lot of things that are kind of interwoven, but is it for you, at least, is the primary challenge one that’s more internal, just kind of building and managing and maintaining an organization that could continue to work at the level of quality and, dare I say, velocity that you’ve maintained, or is it more external, where it’s the offerings that are going out there and maintaining coherence and cohesion in a product suite that’s evolving. I’m sure they’re both problematic, but I’m curious, for you right now, where do you have to focus your energy?

Vuokko: Yeah, that’s a great question. Yeah, it’s a bit of both for sure. Maybe the former more so. So we’ve grown our team pretty quickly, and some parts of the organization have way more tenured designers than others and I’m sure you’ve heard this a million times and experienced it, but as you grow a team, all your rituals break every now and then regularly. You just have to be prepared for them to stop working and then you reinvent them.

So I think we’re at another one of those points where, how do we do critiques again at this size, and how do we make sure things are consistent, and everyone shares the same view of what quality is, and all of these things. So, been there, been here multiple times before, so we’ll figure it out again. 

Peter: I’m wondering what your experience is, because I know that before Monzo, you were a practicing designer. You were an IC. You know, a senior. But now within Monzo, you’ve become this organizational leader. And I’m wondering, I have a soft spot for the world of design operations, and I’m wondering how you’ve engaged that as you’ve scaled, and if you’ve embedded in design operations, how that has helped you or, what you’ve learned along the way working with design operations.

Vuokko: Yes. We have an amazing research ops, person, who honestly, it could be a team of five, she’s so, smart and efficient, but we don’t have a dedicated design ops team or even person. I think early on I was influenced by, someone once said something about if you have design ops, you’ll end up rolling all your problems to them and like managers not handling enough on their own plate, which I’m also butchering that now, but I heard that a long time ago. And it stuck with me for a while, but I definitely don’t believe in it anymore, but… 

Peter: I was about to say, you’re at a scale where…

Vuokko: No, that’s, those days are long gone. So our research ops person used to run both research and design ops. And actually has been a huge, huge help to us, how we structure things over in product design and brand design as well.

So I would say. definitely see and appreciate the value. But we are still a pretty scrappy team where we get a lot done ourselves. I do have a executive assistant support which is also like helps day to day.

Jesse: We’ve talked so much about your relationships with the executives and your relationship with the founders and the leadership.

We haven’t talked very much about your relationship with your team. And I’m curious about your philosophy, the leadership structures that you’ve built underneath yourself to help yourself scale as the organization has scaled.

Vuokko: Yes, great question. So I have a team of about 60 people and that’s about 10 in brand design, a bit less, and then the rest split evenly across the other two disciplines. And we have three or four directors across design and research, and then a few senior managers and a few IC/manager hybrids who are doing a wonderful job early on in their careers as leaders, and then I have a principal, or staff, we just changed our naming structure, so I’m forgetting myself, but one director-level IC who’s been also very transformative for the business to have that level of experience to go in as an IC to help create clarity on what we want to do. 

Jesse: You mentioned that early on, it was an environment in which everybody was participating in everything, to some extent. As an organization scales, that obviously is no longer sustainable. And for design organizations, what that often means is a shift from generalist roles early on to more specialist roles.

And I’m curious about your philosophy of that shift and how you manage that shift, and when you know it’s the right time to pivot towards specialists for a design team.

Vuokko: Yeah, definitely started with generalist, even there were no product or brand designers separate. Whereas, that’s now happened. I think it’s where we first felt a need for a specialist was actually within brand design, to really bring in. We’ve invested in motion design as a practice, felt like that’s something that a modern consumer app should live and breathe.

So that’s a specialist skill we’ve invested in. Also being a bank, there are some things that are very unique to us, like fighting financial crime and fraud and things like this. So we hired a, for example, a specialist who’s experienced and excited about the field and it’s obviously a very specific thing to design for.

But I would say mostly we still aim to hire generalist product designers who could work in any team across the company. And I think it’s also a richness to see multiple parts of it and understand how our personal banking customers use the product and also our small business customers on business banking side, for example.

Ideally I’d love to continue hiring generalists. And I think it, even though we’re a bank, we’re a consumer app. So I think there’s no one set of skills that’s needed to build that. It kind of depends on what different teams are working on,

I think obviously every individual has their own strengths and weaknesses. So that’s a thing that then defines how we staff different teams and what phase a certain feature or product might be in at that point, but I think definitely trying to build a diverse team of generalists, if that makes sense, where everyone brings their own background. We have some people who have studied industrial design or architecture or have no formal design education, or they might have worked in this kind of startup or company before.

And we’re a pretty tight team, considering product designers are embedded in different, like, dozens of teams across the company. We do get together for rituals and have built this, like, trust, and a lot of different social and other kind of rituals, because I think it’s really important when you do creative work, it’s so important to have that team to come back to, even though you have your first team in the cross-disciplinary space, but to have people you know who share your practice and also like to give honest feedback and have that group of peers who can openly challenge decisions. And I try to be part of that team as much as I can, make myself vulnerable and not seem like a separate part of the team. 

But I mentioned I write weekly updates. I talk about what’s on my mind. I try to be in the office and talk with people informally. I think it’s important for us to break down any barriers of who’s new or what anyone’s level is. We’re all designers and creating this experience together. 

Maintaining connections within the team

Peter: One of the challenges I see when you have designers embedded in cross-functional teams is that they start losing touch with the other designers. And you need to be very intentional about design team rituals that bring them together. And I’m wondering what are some of those intentional rituals that you’ve had to establish to kind of, counterbalance the lone designer who spends most of their time with people who aren’t designers.

Vuokko: Yes. I don’t think we have any business area with just one designer now. There might be obviously a squad with one designer, but some squads even have two designers, so. But definitely it can get lonely out there. Currently we have one weekly ritual where everyone comes together and it’s a, kind of a case study and a context share that one designer or pair of designers or researchers are working on.

Early on, obviously when you’re a small team, it’s easy to have million different rituals and we’ve had some very fun ones that didn’t scale. And during the pandemic, when everyone was remote, I mean, that was like a very big and intentional investment in talking with each other and having these remote things together, especially as we were hiring remotely with people who we’d never met in real life before, so that was a huge moment of investment in team rituals and culture. But since returning, I would say we’re due a reset and we’re actually working on, while we speak, there’s a meeting about resetting our design reviews, critiques and jams and how we start redoing them in a new way for a new size.

Because we’re such a large team, there are starting to be different pockets of… not cultures, but ways of doing critiques more locally, but I really care about bringing everyone together. And now with the pandemic, we’ve also hired outside of London, where in the past we used to be an office space, London based team.

So now one of the things we do together is a quarterly team day where I do more of a business update and I have other kind of collaborative workshops or things. So rather than before we used to do a monthly thing together, it’s too frequent when people have to travel in. So we do a quarterly thing and try to do celebrations and all kinds of things like that.

Jesse: It sounds like there’s a lot to be excited about. Where all of this is going. What are you most excited about?

Vuokko: I think I’m most excited about just building some new things and maturing the things we have and kind of, having been on this journey so long and there are things that we’ve talked about for years of, “later, when we can afford it” or “when we have enough customers, we can do this and that.” and now, now it’s kind of the time. So I think just, it feels really exciting to have been patient to like stay on the journey and now get to kind of also reap the benefits of all the hard work. 

I’m definitely a builder and creating new things and going after new types of customers new markets all this is very exciting.

Peter: Excellent. Well, thank you for joining us.

Vuokko: Yeah, thanks for having me it’s really fun.

Jesse: Vuokko, thank you so much. 

Peter: Where can people find you on the internet?

Vuokko: I’m on LinkedIn. I don’t check it too often, but I’m on there. Vuokko Aro my full name, and on most social media, my first name only. So Vuokko, V U O K K O. You can find me on Twitter, which is what I call it, and other places.

Peter: Excellent. Thank you so much.

Vuokko: Thanks. 

Jesse: For more Finding Our Way visit FindingOurWay.design for past episodes and transcripts. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, PeterMerholz.com and JesseJamesGarrett.com If you like what we do here, give us a shout out on social media, like and subscribe on your favorite podcast services, or drop us a comment at FindingOurWay.design Thanks for everything you do for others. And thanks so much for listening.