Lead Product Designer

📍San Francisco - Hybrid | 💰 $120,000 - $187,000 + Equity | What’s so unique about design and research at Monzo

About us: 

Monzo is a leading financial technology company, with over 8 million customers, committed to providing modern banking solutions. Monzo launched in the US in February 2022 and is one of the top fintechs in Europe. In the last few years, we’ve built a banking app that our customers love – with extremely high daily engagement, an industry leading net promoter score, and award-winning customer support. We’ve raised over $1 billion from YCombinator, Stripe, Coatue, Eric Schmidt, Mike Moritz, and others – most recently at a $4.5 billion valuation.lead 

We’re just getting started in the US: we’re an agile full stack team operating like an early stage startup but with the financial, operational, and engineering platform muscle of a larger company. We’re focused on building an amazing US product, shipping and iterating quickly, and deepening our product market fit. We’re looking for highly driven, enterprising people to help us achieve our mission to make money work for everyone.

About the US team

We were founded to make money work for everyone! With that in mind, Monzo is investing to accelerate our US expansion! You will help build US-specific products that will shape the future of banking here.

About the role

As Lead Product Designer, you'll play a pivotal role in transforming the way people experience financial services. This is more than just a design position; it's an opportunity to be a driving force behind our product's evolution, working collaboratively with cross-functional teams in Product and Engineering. As the creative visionary for our user experiences, you'll be involved from the ground up, from the inception of groundbreaking concepts to scaling them into remarkable solutions. We need someone who can cultivate ideas from seed to fruition. Your design leadership will be the cornerstone of our product, as you navigate the exciting journey from zero to one and beyond. At Monzo, we're committed to a profound understanding of our users and addressing meaningful challenges in unconventional ways. If you're passionate about pioneering design, deep user empathy, and pushing the boundaries of what's possible, we invite you to be an integral part of our mission to revolutionize the financial landscape.

What you'll be working on: 

• Setting design visions that guide the way towards transforming existing fintech products and defining completely new ones. 
• Working with your squad to break your vision down into well defined pieces they can deliver against.
• Communicating ideas clearly with your team, design and local leadership, remaining humble and open to feedback while not shying away from expressing your own opinion.
• Understanding complex problem spaces, and collaborating across multiple disciplines to deliver simple, informative, and delightful experiences customers love.
• Holding a high bar for design in our products, expanding the problem space to include all inputs that affect the final experience.

Your day-to-day:

• You’ll be leading the design for your development group. This includes driving the future vision of this area, making sure it compliments a cohesive overall Monzo experience, and delivering on incremental steps to help the team head in this direction.
• You’ll be embedded in a dedicated cross-functional team. You’ll be responsible for all design artefacts produced; from initial discovery and user journey mapping through to the execution of final UI design details.
• You’ll deeply understand the customers you’re designing for. Whether it’s joining 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 to ensure we don’t just ship the thing right, but we ship the right thing.
• You'll have a good sense of how to prioritize, working in an ambiguous space where you are constantly experimenting to find the best solution. 
• You’ll collaborate regularly using strong communication, documentation and facilitation skills. 
• You’ll work closely with PMs, Engineers, Data scientists, User researchers and writers to make sure your team isn’t just shipping great designs, but they are deeply involved throughout the design process.
• You’ll execute (and advocate for) polished, intuitive and accessible user experiences.
• You’re 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, leading rituals or giving great feedback.

Our interview process involves 3 main stages: 

1. Initial call (30 minutes). A video chat with Rob who is part of our hiring team.  This focuses on general suitability and fit for Monzo.
2. Craft (1 hour). You'll meet a Lead Product Designer. You'll present a recent case study to a Lead Product Designer on our team and walk them through some working files. 
3. Final round (1 hour 30 mins). This involves 2 interviews covering impact and teamwork. These typically happen on the same day. 

Our average process takes around 2-3 weeks but we will always work around your availability. You will have the chance to speak to our recruitment team at various points during your process but if you do have any specific questions ahead of this please contact us at [email protected]

What’s in it for you:

💰 $120,000 - $187,000 (depending on experience) 

⏰ 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.

📚Learning budget of $1,500 a year for books, training courses and conferences

➕ Diversity and inclusion is a priority for us — if we want to solve problems for people around the world, our team has to represent our customers. So we need to attract the best talent and create an environment that supports and includes them. You can read more about diversity and inclusion on our blog.

Equal Opportunity Statement

We are actively creating an equitable environment for every Monzonaut to thrive.

Diversity and inclusion are a priority for us and we are making sure we have lots of support for all of our people to grow at Monzo. 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. You can read more in our blog, 2022 Diversity and Inclusion Report and 2022 Gender Pay Gap Report.

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

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