7 Lessons in Leadership, Design, and Growth from 5 years at Monzo
Reflections on building teams, scaling impact, and adapting to change
Five years is a long time at a fast-growing company. Long enough to see what works and what doesn’t, many times over. I learned a lot during my time at Monzo. Some lessons came from big, pivotal moments, but just as many emerged from the everyday challenges—the messy, practical realities of building, leading, and figuring things out as we went. And watching how people and teams evolved along the way.
Now that I’ve had a moment to reflect, I wanted to share a few lessons that stuck with me. The ideas and principles I’ll carry forward. I hope these might be useful to others navigating the ups and downs of scaling products and teams too.
1. Execution creates momentum
I learned many things from Mike. One of the simplest was perhaps the most profound: shipping is your heartbeat. On the surface, this means regularly shipping updates to customers, learning from feedback, and iterating on the product. But on a deeper level, it’s about creating rhythm and momentum—moving forward in ways that align, energise, and build confidence across an entire organisation.
Shipping isn’t just about getting things done; it’s about making progress visible. A humble weekly update can build excitement and alignment. Product reviews can be levers to elevate both quality and pace. And for product designers, the work isn’t finished when something looks great in Figma—it’s finished when it’s live to customers, and we’re learning how it works in the real world.
Building momentum across this loop—from idea to execution to learning—builds a natural bias toward impact on customers and the business. It encourages teams to focus on outcomes, not just outputs—on the change they’re driving, not the meetings they’re in, or the artefacts they’re creating.
And execution isn’t just about shipping products, it’s about shipping clarity. As a leader, sometimes the most important thing you can ship is words: a decision, a reframed question, a narrative that brings focus to a team.
Questions to consider: Where is the friction in decision-making loops in your organisation? Which areas would clarity or prioritisation enable faster-moving teams? Where could leadership model a ’shipping’ mindset by making their decisions more visible?
2. Visualising progress is Design’s superpower
Design’s greatest strength isn’t just imagining the future—it’s making it tangible. Strong design work doesn’t just sit in Figma or live in a polished 3-year vision; it shows up in the everyday artefacts that help teams move forward.
It could be rough ideas from a discovery sprint, a nicely visualised diagram that clarifies a major decision, or a quick UI sketch that aligns two adjacent teams. These small, tangible moments make complex ideas easier to grasp and help connect the dots across disciplines. When design is visible and accessible, it has the power to galvanise teams—bringing people together around shared ideas and driving collective progress.
This doesn’t necessarily mean turning design into an internal roadshow, but finding the right format to share work in progress that non-designers can engage with. Whether it’s the designs themselves or the principles behind them. This not only deepens non-designers’ engagement with design but also strengthens its influence on company direction.
At Monzo, Vuokko is masterful at this, curating and sharing the right design tidbits and insights each week to inspire and align people across the business, regardless of their role. The impact isn’t just in the work, but in how it shapes thinking across the company.
Some of the most complex or technical areas of a product rarely see the light of day—but designers can make them clear, exciting, and meaningful. Financial crime, payments infrastructure, operational workflows, these are just some of the product areas I saw engagement spike once designers were added to teams and set up to flourish.
Questions to consider: Is your team set up to influence or just execute? What’s the last design artefact that unblocked a major decision? What qualities made it effective? How might you and your team distill tactics from these examples and bake them into your ways of working across the team?
3. Customer-centricity is a strategy, not just a value
At Monzo, customer obsession is embedded into everything. From the product teams making improvements, to what’s celebrated at company-wide all hands, to feedback in performance reviews. It’s core to Monzo’s mission of making money for everyone, and has been a big factor in hiring some of the most customer-centred engineers I’ve ever worked with.
But the magic really happened shortly after TS took over as CEO. He led the charge in establishing business metrics that concretely coupled customer success with business success, encouraging a win-win outcome-oriented mindset across the company. We win when customers win.
Customer and business success are often framed as a trade-off. Teams feel pressured to prioritise one over the other. You might have X number of teams working on business initiatives with Y teams working on feature improvements for customers, with a ratio driven by how strong the business’ current trajectory is looking. But this win-win mindset empowers many teams with broader ownership over directly driving improvements for customers and the business.
Of course, not every company has a mission that aligns so cleanly with customer success, or the wide-range of potential business models that would enable this possibility. But this is still a useful gut check: when business metrics and customer experience feel at odds, how does this influence the work culture? And what incentives does this reinforce?
Questions to consider: What metrics does your company internally celebrate success and progress with? If customer-centric measures aren’t prominent, what could a customer-centric version be? If there’s tension between these two, where might you have influence to shift this balance?
4. Use time-horizons to make difficult, intentional trade-offs
During the pandemic I was grappling with a seemingly impossible trade-off. I cared deeply about setting the team up for long-term success, but optimising for this in every decision would’ve led to disruption in the short-term, at a time of peak anxiety across the team and the world. A conversation with Sarah led to the insight that it’s ok to bend your own principles if you’re intentional about the time horizon you’re making them over.
One of the key challenges of leadership at a growing company is constantly needing to scale yourself. Some balls will always need to drop. The challenge is identifying which ones will bounce back and which ones will shatter when they hit the floor. But most importantly, which ones unlock your greatest leverage if you prioritise them?
Identifying which is which isn’t always easy. Especially during turbulent times. It’s important to recognise your default biases too. This can help you figure out which areas are worth leaning into and which are worth letting go of to get around the short-term challenge you’re facing.
Questions to consider: Are you struggling to prioritise between two important areas? Write them down. Then zoom out to one month from now, six months from now, one year from now, writing down where you think each will be if you do/don’t give it the attention right now. Viewed through these future selves, which trade-off starts to feel like the better investment?
5. The imperfect art of staffing while scaling—always be learning
“We need another designer. Can they start next week?”
Hiring in a fast-growing company is rarely straightforward. Between recruiting lead times, budget approvals, and shifting priorities, getting the right people at the right time is a constant challenge. And then you actually need to find them.
While having a clear strategy helps increase your chances of getting lucky, the best approach I’ve found is to treat the whole process as a learning opportunity. Key strategies to improve long-term hiring outcomes include:
Build trust with key stakeholders – Whether it’s a GM or product director, involving them early, setting clear expectations, and delivering consistently helps avoid last-minute surprises.
Onboard teams together by aligning across functions – Where possible, sync hiring priorities with engineering and product partners to onboard full teams together rather than individuals in isolation. This smooths out overall ramp up time and avoids the more acute pain of “everyone else is ready to go, but we’re blocked without a designer”
Experiment with flexible staffing – Test models where designers support multiple teams with scoped delivery needs, rather than embedding exclusively within a full-stack squad. It won’t be perfect, but collecting evidence on what works builds long-term adaptability.
If you happen to have the ideal team in place at the perfect time, it’s typically more down to luck—and it won’t last long. Instead of chasing perfection, embrace the discomfort. Capacity constraints force clarity—lean into them, learn from them, and use them to build a more resilient, adaptable team.
Questions to consider: Think back to your top three staffing headaches. Do they share common patterns? Those pain points often signal areas worth tackling to improve your hiring approach.
6. Apply systems thinking to hiring—but keep empathy at the core
Recruiting is hard—not just because great candidates are difficult to find, but because, as a hiring manager, it can consume as much time as you allow.
During my years hiring product designers at Monzo, I learned to approach recruiting as a system. I had the rare opportunity to redesign product design’s hiring process from the ground up before a major hiring spree. Alongside an incredible recruiting partner, Natalie, this foundation allowed us to systematically refine and accelerate hiring, while continuously raising the bar for quality and our candidate experience.
At first, I was involved in nearly every portfolio walkthrough, our first interview step post-screening. But as we strengthened our quality bar and onboarded more interviewers, I moved later in the funnel. Eventually, I was only in hiring debriefs, helping managers challenge assumptions, refine decision-making, and ensure every hire strengthened the team. By that stage, the question wasn’t whether a candidate was strong—I trusted they were. Instead, it was about making hiring decisions with open eyes: How will this candidate shape the team around them?
Strong hiring isn’t just about finding great candidates—it’s about learning as you go. A high-functioning process gathers both qualitative and quantitative data from interviewers and candidates, iterating toward a faster, fairer, and more consistent approach to hiring with conviction. But my true measure of success was the candidates who didn’t end up joining us—could we make their experience strong enough that they’d tell a friend or come back to interview again in the future?
And then there’s performance management and progression frameworks—but that’s a topic for another post.
Questions to consider: Rate your current hiring process from 1–5 (1 = slow, painful for candidates; 5 = fast, fair, and enjoyable). Which interview step adds the least signal to the hiring decision you ultimately make? What impact would removing or improving that step have on your score?
7. Fit is a moving target
Companies evolve. Teams change. What made someone a great fit at one stage might not hold true forever—and that’s totally ok.
Spend long enough in a growing business, and you’ll notice different waves of people joining and leaving; early scrappy builders, growth-oriented scalers, big-tech operators. Each suits a different phase but each brings trade-offs. There’s no perfect team structure—only what works well right now.
The same applies to individuals. The role you loved two years ago might not energise you today. The processes that worked six months ago might feel stale. Some things naturally need periodic resets (design critiques, for instance, often benefit from a fresh approach every 6–12 months). But some shifts run deeper. Recognising when you—or your team—need to adapt is a core leadership skill.
The best role model I had for this was Flora, who resisted the urge to follow the default career ladder for the sake of climbing, instead narrowing her focus and doing what she does best, but better. A reminder that progression isn’t just about moving up—it’s about aligning your energy with what adds most value to the world, and following your instincts.
Above all, this requires self-reflection, kindness and humanity. I don’t see designers as objectively ‘good’ or ‘bad’—only how well they fit (or don’t) the needs of the team at this moment. And when those needs shift, the best leaders help people navigate any transitions with empathy and humility.
Questions to consider: What parts of your role energise you? What drains you? If you stepped back and looked at your team objectively, where do you see misalignment? What conversations could help clarify the best next step for you or your team?
To recap
Execution creates momentum – The best teams focus on outcomes, not outputs, and use shipping to drive clarity and alignment.
Visualising progress is Design’s superpower – Making work tangible helps teams connect the dots, galvanise momentum, and shape strategy.
Customer-centricity is a strategy, not just a value – The strongest businesses align customer success with business success to positively impact both.
Use time horizons to make difficult, intentional trade-offs – Know where your leverage lies, and use it to balance quick wins with long-term investments.
The imperfect art of staffing while scaling—always be learning – Hiring at scale is never perfect, but embracing constraints can help build stronger teams.
Apply systems thinking to hiring—but keep empathy at the core – Great hiring processes evolve over time, balancing efficiency with a strong candidate experience.
Fit is a moving target – Companies evolve, teams change, and the best leaders help people adapt with clarity and empathy.
These lessons aren’t definitive answers—just reflections from five years of figuring things out alongside an inspiring group of people. Every team and company evolves differently, but the core challenge remains the same: how to build momentum, make better decisions, and help people thrive as things scale.
What do you think? I’d love to hear from others—what lessons have stuck with you as you’ve navigated leadership in fast-growing teams?