From product agency to fintech startup: My journey of wanderlust

Monese is a mobile banking application serving over a million customers who live, work, travel, retire, study in another country, or have financial connections abroad.

Having followed Monese for a year or two since their launch, I began to see the design of the product unfold. I was working at an agency in Estonia at the time, and I began to wonder what I could be working on with such a product. I made the move and reached out to them, to later find out they had an open position in the London office. Working as a designer in a product agency at the time, I knew it would be a bold move from me to change countries. But the thought of this made sense to me, since it would give me a front row seat to the exact needs of the people Monese serves.

I was thrilled to join Monese in May 2018. My transition from agency to product has been quite a journey, and a real learning experience for me — so I wanted to write an article to share my advice for other designers considering making a similar shift.

I’ve found that agency life gives you breadth of knowledge, whilst working on a single product gives you depth of knowledge. In an agency, I was able to work on a range of different projects, most usually lasting between 3 and 6 months. This was a great way to get a lot of experience under my belt, but due to the tight timelines, I felt some important steps in the design process were often skipped. Curious to explore these missing steps, and willing to take my skills to the next level, I wanted the opportunity to focus on a single product. I thought that would give me more time to think deeply about one problem at a time, design a solution for it and then see how well it actually performed. Here’s a collection of some of the most important things I’ve learned while working at Monese, and how it differs to agency life.

Talk to everyone

From marketing to the janitor, from customer support to accounting, from backend to frontend and most importantly, the end user. This is true for when you’re designing a new feature or just having a random chat. You never know where the next big idea, or small incremental improvement, might come from. We’re all in the same rocket ship and want to build the best experience. Not to mention everyone around you is an expert in their field and probably knows more about it than you do. If you take the time to really listen to those around you, you might just learn something new and maybe also make a couple of friends along the way. Talking to the users and customer support is definitely something I missed in the agency. There I felt more like a design mercenary that comes in, does his job and then moves on to the next project, never really knowing if what they did was successful. Working in-house on a single product gives you the ability to test, measure and iterate on your designs to improve them. Often times in the agency, the research side was scarce or completely skipped over, so I found myself leaning on best practices, past experience and assumptions, which were hard to justify and learn from.

Glue yourself to researchers

This one is fairly straightforward. The closer you are to researchers, the closer you are to the users. The closer you are to the user, the better your designs will be. Besides the fact that researchers are a nice bunch of people, they will give you everything you need to take your relationship with the users to the next level. If you don’t, you’ll end up designing based on whims of stakeholders and anecdotal stories. Having solid data by your side is invaluable next time you’re trying to figure out if this thing you’re trying to build is really useful or it’s just a nice-to-have feature.

Ask for help/feedback

It’s easy to lose objectivity when working on a single problem for too long. You won’t be able to see the forest for the trees. Whether you’re stuck with a particularly juicy problem, or would just like a second opinion, showing your work early and often will result in fewer changes down the road. It’s especially important to get your team involved as early as you can. This circles back to point number 1 — everyone has great ideas.

Ask for feedback from other designers if you can. The only way to improve your craft is to know what you’re doing wrong, and then stop doing it. Seek out designers and thinkers you admire within the company and try to soak up all the knowledge they have. I feel lucky being surrounded with skilled and talented designers at Monese, who I can learn from every day.

Ask for feedback about your performance. Don’t wait until your 6-month review to find out you could be doing something differently. Request feedback from your immediate team, your chapter lead, and your chapter lead’s lead (if they exist). Find out what you can do more of, what you can do less of and how you can maximize your impact within your team.

Intentionality

If this feels obvious, it’s because it is. When presenting your work, be sure you can explain even the most miniscule decision you’ve made. Imagine the screen as an invite-only private club where every pixel has to be vouched for by you. Does that line need to be there? Should this element be bigger? How does this fit within the entire customer experience? Designing with intentionality means you’re always mindful and critical of your work. It shows you’ve thought through all the possibilities, weighed the pros and cons, and landed on the optimal solution. Apart from just being standard practice, it will save a lot of time during design reviews. This is something I recommend doing a lot of, both in-house and in an agency. But at Monese, being surrounded by more designers than in a typical agency, this has really taken my attention to detail to the next level.

Keeping a bird’s-eye view

In my previous life at the agency, it was common to have one designer working on a project at any given time. When you’re in charge of the whole project, it’s much easier to have a good overview of how one part relates to the other. You know the sign-up flow and you know the check-out flow since you designed all of it. At Monese, we currently have 13 product designers, all working within their own product team, touching a particular part of the whole experience. We have to ensure that everything we design works across the entire product, and avoid only focusing on our own specific domains.

We start the week with a design team stand-up, where designers share with each other what they’ve been working on, and what they are planning to do over the coming week.

Then, mid-week, we run design critique sessions to give and receive valuable feedback on the work. This also allows us to share our knowledge with each other and get more of an in-depth view of everything that’s currently being designed. As the team grew too large for a single meeting, we chose to split up into several smaller groups of 3–4 designers, to give each designer enough time to present and get in-depth feedback. Since there’s more than one group, we’re experimenting with recording the meetings, which lets us look back on another group’s work and reach out to offer feedback later.

We end the week with a design system meeting to make sure our design language across the product stays consistent. Monese is always evolving and growing, and our design has to match that. If we think there’s a design pattern we should retire, or a new element we should start using, this is the place to bring it up.

It sounds like a lot of meetings, but we’ve found they’re all essential to make sure design is aligned across all the teams.

Collaboration

One of the things I’ve found to be very similar both at the agency and at Monese, is the collaboration. I’ve heard many horror stories where an agency is hired for design, and when the design phase is finished, it’s sent straight over to external developers. If communication isn’t kept tight after shipping the designs, it’s most likely going to result in the final product looking quite different from the original plan. I was fortunate enough to always work with in-house developers, both at Monese and in agencies, which meant everyone is involved with the project from the early stages. This ensures everyone’s ideas and concerns are heard from the start. For me, it has helped to understand technical constraints and design accordingly.

That’s it folks! As Monese continues to grow, we’re bound to face new challenges and growing pains, which will undoubtedly teach me new lessons. Stay tuned for the next ones…