Lead Product Designer

We’re looking for a Lead Product Designer to lead design for Monzo’s US product team. As our team's founding designer, you'll work across all parts of the US customer-facing experience. Your work will shape our entire product and design strategy as we expand into our first international market. 

Monzo is the lead challenger bank in the UK. In the last few years, we’ve built a banking app with extremely high daily engagement and an NPS that’s consistently above 70. More than 5 million people (10% of UK adults) have a Monzo account. We’ve raised over $1 billion from YCombinator, Stripe, Coatue, Eric Schmidt, Mike Moritz and others - most recently at a $4.5bn valuation. Our competitive advantage is that we operate like a tech company in a space where software has not yet eaten the world - for example, we built our own core banking system from scratch!

We care deeply about inclusive working practices and diverse teams. We want to build a bank that works for everyone, so we encourage applications from underrepresented groups.

What you’ll do everyday

• You’ll lead design for the entire US customer experience. This includes driving the design vision for the US product, making sure it compliments a cohesive overall Monzo experience, and delivering on incremental steps to enable the US team to find product market fit and scale. 
• You’ll be a senior team member in the US cross-functional product squad. You’ll be responsible for all design artifacts produced for the US team, from initial discovery and user journey mapping to the execution of final UI design details. You’re scrappy, enterprising, and unafraid to wear multiple hats. You’ll flex your talents to solve various challenges when it helps the team — from creating marketing assets to office swag. 
• You’ll deeply understand the customers you’re designing for. Whether it’s leading user research sessions, learning from previous insights, reading data reports or running your own lightweight research and analysis, you’ll strive to understand the what, why and how of the problems you’re solving for in order to ensure we don’t just ship the thing right, but we ship the right thing.
• You’ll collaborate regularly using strong communication, documentation and facilitation skills. You’ll work closely with all members of the US team,as well as with members of Monzo’s global product, design, user research and data disciplines. 
• You’ll execute (and advocate for) polished, intuitive and accessible user experiences. You’ll need to be pragmatic and able to balance the ideal experience with knowing where and when to make scoping trade-offs based on technical constraints, experimentation strategy or business risk.
• You’ll help raise the bar for design at Monzo. We’re a small but mighty team where every designer plays a critical role in improving our community of practice—whether that’s through improving our craft skills to leading rituals to giving great feedback.
• You’ll regularly work with our global VP of Design and product leadership. This is to help make sure long-term strategy, business goals and experience quality are all in alignment and that there are healthy opportunities for visibility and feedback.

The type of projects you could work on

• Core banking features for Monzo's iPhone and Android apps. Increasing visibility and control of money across multiple accounts: we want Monzo to be the financial hub of your life, and something this ambitious requires a lot of good design.
• Improving the experience customers have when borrowing money and exploring ideas for new lending-related products.
• Internal tooling and improving customer support UI and workflows to help our support team better serve customers and their needs.

You should apply if

• You’ve led the design of world-class product launches in a fast-growing company before.
• You understand that good design is not about trends but is built on top of principles and tradeoffs. You make well-reasoned design decisions and are always advocating for the best possible user experience.
• You’re passionate about inclusive design and accessibility, and you’ll design with all our users in mind.
• You care about the UI design details but are also comfortable zooming out, seeing the broader picture, and connecting the dots to create a cohesive overall experience.
• You’re passionate about sharing your knowledge and raising the bar for design practice at Monzo. Previous experience mentoring designers is a big plus.
• You understand that writing is designing, you're a confident writer, and the copy in your screens is never an afterthought.

This isn’t for you if

• You need top-down direction. We operate extremely autonomously so you’ll be expected to determine the highest impact areas to work on, collaborating with your product squad and manager to ensure there’s alignment.
• You need to work directly alongside another designer or two. While we work closely as a global design disciple and have rituals to encourage collaboration and feedback, you’ll be the only designer in the US team for now.
• You haven't worked in a cross-functional, multi-disciplinary product team shipping work to a large scale customer-base. Our designers are expected to be involved in the delivery details, everything from finessing UI polish with engineers through to roll-out and experimentation strategy.

What to expect from our hiring process

1. Initial call (30 minutes). A video chat with a designer or manager on the design hiring team. This focuses on general suitability and fit for Monzo.
2. Case study (30 minutes+). We'll ask you to pre-record and send us a 20-minute video of you walking through a recent project that demonstrates your end-to-end design process and deliverables. A designer or manager will watch this before joining you for a 30-minute 1:1 call to ask follow up questions, digging deeper into your process and work.
3. Final round (3 hours). This involves three interviews covering craft, impact and teamwork. These typically happen on the same day via three separate video calls. The case study video is used as a reference for these interviews to help set context for us, and save you time repeating yourself.

Location

• We’re building a team in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we want to hire someone based in the area (and we would support you with moving costs if you don’t currently live in SF).
• We have an office in downtown SF, where we meet twice a week for meetings, teamwork and socializing (and optionally for quiet work whenever you want to get out of the house!).

Benefits

• ? Great Health, Dental and Vision Insurance
• ? Competitive salary
• ? Stock Options
• ? Generous 401k with 4% employer contribution
• ? 32 days of vacation and public holidays per year (and we require that you take all of your days each year as we believe that well rested employees are more effective!)
• Maternity / Paternity leave
• We offer flexible working hours and trust you to work enough hours to do your job well, at times that suit you and your team.

Snippets of Monzo Culture

• Our mission of financial inclusion: We want everyone who wants one to have access to a Monzo bank account, along with information to help them make good financial decisions
• Default to transparency: How transparency is key in the ways we work and serve customers
• The Monzo Tone of Voice: How we use our voice to cultivate clarity, positivity, and approachability
• Gambling block: At Monzo, we focus on helping vulnerable customers

Equal Opportunity Statement

At Monzo, embracing diversity in all of its forms and fostering an inclusive environment for all people to do the best work of their lives with us. This is integral to our mission of making money work for everyone.

We're an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, veteran, neurodiversity status or disability status.

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