Monzo’s Nate Langley on the Five Pillars to Discuss During Interviews

I'm Christian Vasile and on this podcast I bring you world class product and design leaders who found ways to shape products, companies and entire industries and who are now sharing what they know with you and me. My hope is that we all get to learn from the experiences, ideas, and stories shared on this podcast and in the process become better designers. Season three is jam packed with design and product leaders who are going to learn a lot from and we're kicking off today with Nate Langley.

Nate is a design manager at Monzo and we chat about the importance of practicing and putting the work in. We're talking about confidence, about constraints on how to reframe them, about how to put your best foot forward in interviews and much more. We're covering a lot of ground in this episode and I hope you'll enjoy listening to it. Nate, welcome to Design Meets Business. I am delighted to have you on today.

For a bit of context, you're managing a team of designers at Monzo, one of the most exciting banks in Europe. And you're also leading design for personal banking. You're working on a very good product. You're managing talented designers. You're mentoring on ADP list. You do a lot and we'll hopefully have time to dive into some of these topics today. But before that. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got here from the beginnings of your career till today.

I really wanted to get into digital art So it's quite savvy with photoshop and then figuring out, how to work within the constraints of the web it was a bit of a wild west back then, what the web world was, and I really just enjoyed it and I learned a lot from people that I worked with. And then about eight years ago I moved up to Manchester and joined a service design agency up here in the community, up in, in Manchester's. Really great.

and I learned a lot about designing customer and user centric experiences and service design was a big part of that. And I joined the co op six, probably seven years ago now. And that was when my design leadership really started to I started to get my teeth into design leadership a bit more. And, yeah, to just nearly 18 months ago, I joined Monzo bank and here I am I'm helping build a new bank for the future and it's a really exciting place to be. And hopefully I can.

give some little tidbits on what that journey looked like for me and how others get to a good stage in their career.

also a great product. I must say I am an avid user of Bonzo. So it's also great to talk to someone who's building products that you're using on a daily basis. It's just very interesting. Also on a personal basis, on a personal note for me, did you study design or how did you end up becoming one?

Like talking about customer journeys is effectively the North Star customer journeys that you're designing and building are effectively stories and movies. Really, you're helping a hero get to the quest, complete their goal, aren't you? I left uni and I was like, I did a few sort of running jobs. I worked for MTV for a little bit and then I worked for my godmother was a producer. So she got me some work and it just wasn't really clicking for me. But I was always good with computers.

And. I thought, Oh, maybe I could do a bit of digital art. And I don't know if you remember DeviantArt. DeviantArt was a big source of info, right?

I was just like knocking out leaflets for them and stuff like that. I was a marketing executive, but they were like, we don't know how to use Quark. We don't know how to use Photoshop. I'd just give it to Nate. He'll do it. He's a young one. So they

just, yeah, I just learned how to use, I think it was Dreamweaver at the time and just crafting a bit of webs and. In the evenings, I was like, actually, and I, when you're like early twenties, I had nothing else to do. I was actually, actually, this is, this is something I'm really enjoying. So in the evenings I was like teaching myself like the principles, web design and stuff like that.

And then yeah one thing led to another, and I was working for an agency in London called LBI they had one of their big clients was Marks and Spencers and I got a job there and they yeah, put me on the Marks and Spencer account and that was great. And that was the first time I encountered like Scrum and Agile and working in that kind of way. So it was kind of like a very uh, windy road to get to my career and it wasn't, it didn't, the windiness didn't stop there.

I left UD, wasn't really sure what to do. And then yeah found my way in the world of web and I was like, wow, I like this. I'm pretty good at it and taught myself principles. I think that was that part of my career really set me up to the rest of the rest of uh, my career, really the confidence angle came later because looking back on it now, like I struggled a lot with my confidence in my career and that I was like I don't have a formal design career.

I don't have a very standard route into the industry. Nobody can take me seriously as a designer it was a big uh, monkey on my back for a while.

It's Oh, can you design this banner? Can you die? Can you just I work on this little bit of a journey as yeah, cool. And I always used to do that. And then obviously there's a critique process and I was like, Oh yeah, I'm really sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Next time I'll get that right. Yeah, I know you apologized quite a lot. And then one morning, no. After one of those crits, James wrote a massive post-it note in big, bold letters, and he said, stop apologizing. And I asked him why.

And now, now I end up speaking to a lot of designers that I mentor and coach, and I think there's a nice balance between being humble. And like being confident it's okay to apologize now. It's absolutely fine. Like you should like when things go wrong or like you, you've missed, you've misstepped somewhere. Sorry. It's a good, isn't it? Good. And arguably a powerful word.

So it's okay to say sorry, but saying sorry a lot, it can put a different spin on that whole, the whole relationship and that whole conversation.

Since then, like that was, over 15 years ago, I've been through a lot of jobs, a lot of very high profile jobs and very high pressure jobs where I could feel that and they in my early mid twenties, coming back, creeping back and confidence has always been something I've really struggled with, especially in my career and, uh, I've had depression and anxiety for most of my life. I've always, always struggled with with my confidence in work and life.

And it came to a head around 10 years ago where I was like, this is getting ridiculous. I can't carry on like this. And it was a little bit of a crossroads in my career as well. It's do I want to stay in design? Do I want to. I don't want to carry on doing this because I was working on some quite high profile, high pressure projects, and And I don't, I never thought I was really cracking the industry. It wasn't really cracking my career. So I was with a therapist.

And obviously I've got a pretty good support network with my wife and my friends, and I've got a lot of good mentors and friends in the industry. It really helped me build my confidence. It's not something you could do overnight. Definitely it's not something that happens overnight. It was a process. It was a process of putting yourself in a position where You can build your confidence as well. When I speak to designers who are looking to get a new job.

I didn't, a lot of them say, like, how do I build my confidence in the first few months? And my number one piece of advice is go after the projects that you are comfortable with. Don't overstretch yourself. Don't overstretch yourself in the first few months and try and trying to do the big meaty project and wow everybody, because you're bound to that cat and you can find success like that. But. You're bound to fail. Believe me, I've done it.

And that kind of set me up in the middle of my career as well. Like I made sure that I wasn't overstretching myself. Cause I think at the time I was taking on some, I was trying to do too much with my design. I was trying to make it too flashy. I was trying to make it, I was trying to stand out and I had a realization that actually let me get the basics right. Let me just nail this UX. Let me just nail this piece of customer insight. So I'm making a good, like baseline good, right?

Don't overstretch it, don't, no flashy animations or anything, that layer can come later, um, so yeah, it was a process of therapy, support network uh, identifying space, so you kind of had this realization that I was probably pushing myself too far, and then working through it At the end of the day, Christian, it's not something that's solved even now, like I'm still facing challenges every week that is outside of my comfort zone Sometimes I'm like, Oh, is that, am I the right person for this

job? But I think that's natural. I think most people have those bubbles every now and then.

And I think it's something that more people should be open about because at the end of the day, I think we're all struggling with something. One, um... You know, Or actually I heard this thing once that stuck with me. Someone said, just be kind to people because you never know what they're battling with.

And I think perhaps in the context of work, that's also important because it's not only what you're battling on a personal basis, but it's also all these balls that everyone else has to juggle that you don't know about. It's the it's the things that your cross functional partners might care about. that you have no clue that is something they care about.

Whether it's a metric that they need to hit, whether it's a performance review problem that they had, and therefore they need to do this thing in a completely different way than you proposed because that will help them there's all these other things that we don't know. And I think that oftentimes we don't perhaps don't have that empathy. Someone said to me this once, or I've read it somewhere, I don't remember. Confidence is nothing else other than repeated demonstrated performance.

And that stuck with me as well, because I'm looking at my career. I think it's natural. And not to be very confident when you're doing something you deep down perhaps know that you're not very good at, because you're early on, that's completely okay. But as you keep doing that thing time and time again, whether it's running interviews, I can, we can all remember running our first interview, I can remember running my first interview, an absolute disaster.

But you do it once, you do it twice, you do it three times, 50 times, and suddenly you think, Oh, quite confident running these interviews now I can run them on my own and I don't need anyone to handhold me. And it's. Because you've done it several times. I think putting the work in is something that we perhaps also forget that it's important and let's use this segue to go into talking a little bit about people starting out There's a lot of information

out there. There are books, there are podcasts, there are courses, there's a lot. If you want to become a designer today, it's so overwhelming. Where do you start from? How do you begin? What do you think is the best way?

They weren't just born with this amazing design or they weren't born with this incredible way of visualizing user journeys, but. I put the work in and they crafted their process. So definitely I'm a big advocate for practice design industry is a very different beast now than it was when I started out. It's, there's a lot of formalized education now where there's a lot more support structures out there. However the industry as of November, 2023, isn't it is a very.

Is it is in a bit of a state at the moment, we've had a lot of big name redundancies over the course of the year, companies are starting to hire a bit more now, but they're still not picked up to the crazy hiring we've experienced the past few years. So it's a it's a pretty challenging environment for anybody starting their career, let alone finding a job halfway through their career. I don't speak to many people just starting out on their career.

I give a lot of advice for people who's probably had two or three years or like looking at a career change as in like the IC manager tracking or like how in the middle of their career. But when I do speak to people at the beginning of their career I try to coach them through trying to be very proactive. It's quite easy to leave, and I've been there as well, quite easy to leave formalized education.

I think, great, I've got a degree, I've spent all this money in formalized education, give me a job. And I think it's yeah, I appreciate where that's coming from, the sentiment, because you've put the work in, you've paid for your formalized education. Now you want to see the results of it unfortunately, the work industry is not like that. So you need to go out and put yourself out there a bit more.

thEn you probably think you do and as a somebody starting at the beginning of their career, you really have to set yourself apart from a very competitive landscape. Some of the best junior or people with zero years experience, people that I've hired are the people who have really shown, like showing something different and gone the extra mile.

And I want to caveat that everybody's got their lives, they, it's a very privileged position to be in, to work off the work and to craft on your portfolio. But I want to give a great example of somebody that I hired a few years ago. at the co op. We were running a few portfolio uh, workshops so it was working with people, career changes, but people were just left university or art school or design school that they're struggling to find some work. And the, some of the best people that I was.

Really impressed with in those portfolio workshops where people who had really had fun with that portfolio. And I don't mean like animations or anything flashy out there, but they've gone, okay. So I understand about the design process and I'm going to apply it to my application. So they've user journeyed, they've mapped out there. Their career so far, and they've researched with friends and family and stuff like that.

I was like, that's really cool that you found a different angle to to apply for a job and set yourself apart. And there was this one guy who had no experience whatsoever, but he'd done a bit of research into the design process and he had an idea for an app. And he was like I'm just gonna mock it up in Figma. So he mocked it up and then he learned that he had to go and do some like user testing. He's I don't have access to a lab or anything like that.

So I'm just going to test it with my friends and family. And he documented the whole process. He took pictures of himself going out and speaking to his friends and family. He's put it on Figma mirror, he's put it on the phone. He's got them tapping around and he made a pretty cool little prototype. All the best portfolios that I see have a beginning, a middle, and an end. You're telling a story, aren't you? So he identified the beginning, which was like, here's the problem space.

Here's the problem I've identified. And here's how I'm going to do it. He's the middle is how he's done it. And he took pictures of himself testing with and then iterating on that design with his friends and family. And then the ultimate product and like how he would do it next and his vision for it. And I thought that is wicked. So I just did pushing that out there and just having a bit of fun with it.

And he had three of those examples later on asked him, like, how honestly, how long did that take you? He's obviously put in a few hours, but I just have fun with it. So I guess my advice for people starting off, be proactive, put yourself out there find the connections. Have fun with your portfolio. See what that, what ways you can set yourself apart and yeah, just use the, it doesn't matter that you don't have any sort of real world experience. If you can just.

apply the principles of design to a case study or an idea you have doesn't matter about the idea. No offense to that guy. I can't even remember the idea, but I remember the process and the way he presented it. I

And even if that person might not be the right person for the job, it at least makes you want to bring them in for an interview just because they've done something different, just because they stand out a little bit and they display a little bit of creativity that is so needed these days. And I always appreciate when I see some of those. So I think this is a, another great example, but you said something there around having fun.

And it also relates to something that you said earlier, which is the way you started in design. You picked up all these tools and then you were just having fun, no pressure. You were just doing it because it was fun. We've lost that a little bit. I don't really see a lot of designers do things, learn new tools, pick up new things just for fun. I don't really have a question. I think that's more of a comment than an observation that I made.

You've mentioned this place in the career where you do mentor quite a few designers, which is mid level. They might be on the verge of becoming managers or at least being considered for a managerial role. And one of the tensions that I often hear about is I am at that level. I'm a senior, I'm a lead, whatever the progression is in a specific company. And I'm at the crossroads now. I can continue doing the work as an individual contributor. But I also have the opportunity of managing a team.

And I have no idea which one is right for me. Now, most of us know how it is to be an individual contributor because that's how we started. And that's what we've been. But very few of us know how it is to be a manager before you are actually a manager. How do you decide which one is right for you?

I want more money because at the end of the day, that's why we work, let's face it. I want more money and I want to climb the ladder a bit more. I want to get more responsibility. And the other one, which is crucial is I want to start influencing And as a designer, that's really important because we want to make sure that we're considering. The user all stages of the business process and you get to this inflection point.

Ah, okay, so I can influence my team and the teams around me, but to really be customer centric or user centric, I need to influence business strategy. So I asked questions around, like probing deep into the subject, like what, what is, what's motivating you to, to think about this split in your journey. And you get to those three core things most of the time. I do believe that if you are on the IC track and you're enjoying design and those things come up, I want more money.

I want more influence over business strategy. Then you could start to say, okay that there's an icy world out there for you. We have it at Monzo and I know that some of the biggest tech companies have it as well, but having an icy at a very like a staff or principal level where you influence business strategy is a very viable track and a lot of people take that route. If you ask those questions at that time and you get actually I'm.

You get the signals that I actually, I really enjoy working with people. I like developing people's careers and like coaching them through things. Then that's a different matter that's the manager track for you. So you might find that people management and work with people is the right thing for you. That's not to say that the IC role doesn't involve any.

Like people management, there is an element that, and equally if you go down the manager track, I've noticed a trend of managers and leadership folks Moving back towards more of the work. A great article by Kat Watkins a blog post a couple months ago now that he put out around like taking more inspiration from the traditional creative director role of like leaning in a bit more and providing guidance on the work itself. And I'm an advocate and a believer of that too.

Asked the questions and I never tell people what to do, but like there you, you get to a point where it's like, Oh actually you signaling to me that you're really into the people stuff and you're really interested in people and like how they work and how they tick and stuff. So maybe management tracks for a few, or I see track is I can have influence on a business strategy level and all that good stuff. I've in my experience, I found it's not so binary. It's not so black and white.

You still get to do a bit of both. Like I'm now leaning much more into the IC work because the work demands it at the moment, like I'm hiring for a designer and that they're steaming ahead on their goals and they need design representation. So I'm leaning in. So I'm now effectively a hybrid design manager and IC at the moment. It's not like I'm going to make this decision and then I'm never going to be an IC again, or I make this decision.

I'm never going to work with people because it's not, that's not totally true. I've known people have gone five years down the management track and they've gone, actually, it's not for me, I'm ready to go back to being an IC and they've done that and I think people get so paralyzed with fear that they're on this crossroads now and it was whatever path they take is the one that they're completely beholden to for the rest of their career and I don't think that's true.

But I think as you said, perhaps one of the most important things you said there is that even if you go down one of these paths, it's not black and white, you're not only going to manage on the managerial track and you're not only going to design on the design track. I was talking to one of my friends who is deep down on the IC track and he said, one thing that I did not realize is that there is a lot of people management on the IC track as well, not necessarily from the perspective of.

I manage a designer or a team of designers. It's more like I manage, I need to manage stake. I still need to manage stakeholders. I still need to manage all my cross functional partners. I don't sit in Figma all day. I sit in Figma much less than I used to do when I was a lead designer or a senior. There is still a lot of people work involved. It's just that's not necessarily the sort of the focus, but you still get to do both.

So I think, Oh, I liked that idea of don't be paralyzed there because. There. First of all, you can always go back. And second of all it's not that binary. So I assume that's something that a lot of people come to you to ask for advice. You do a lot of mentoring. So what are some other things that people come to you that you hear very often? What are some of the patterns there that designers in the industry are struggling with?

You don't realize it's like peeking behind the curtain a little bit. When you get into that leadership position I've spoken to a few people who have leadership has been pushed onto them because of circumstance, which that's how I got into the, into management as well. It got pushed onto me. And then you're like. And all your like peers at that level go, cool. Now these are all your problems crack on. SO yeah, those are the three things that I get.

People trying to crack into the industry help with like portfolio and interview skills. People just, ICL management and then. I, oh no, I'm a manager and what do I do?

So let's say you have a bit more experience, you're not completely new, you're just out of a job and then you interview and it's pretty cutthroat out there right now. So you're not going to interview against one other person. You might interview against, five, 10 other final candidates or so. How do you stand out and what can you do to put your best foot forward in interviews these days?

Visual design, teamwork and collaboration and leadership and your CV and your portfolio and those first few interactions in the interview really have to give interviewers enough of the signals across those five pillars to really get you in. And then you can go die deep on, on some of them. Cause nobody's gonna index a hundred percent into each of those things. You might be an amazing product thinker but your visual designs probably a little bit scale a little bit back.

And that's going to change throughout your career. But what interviews are looking for is that how. It's to get a really clear picture of that spider diagram. You need to give signal out across all five of those pillars in the first few interactions, across your CV and portfolio, and then probably recruit a call. And then once we go, okay, we've got enough signal that this person knows their onions. You go into the interview loop, you probably do a case study review.

You might have a craft review as well. And then we can really understand where your quote unquote T shape really dives into what's yours what's your specialism, what's your thing.

So perhaps you get to display your teamwork capabilities there, but teamwork and leadership, those are relatively hard to show in interviews. So are there any example of someone you've ever interviewed where you've seen them do that pretty well or any other advice there on how to show those to make sure you also, Cover those two pillars, not just the ones that are a bit more kind of expected and normal to talk about.

I think teamwork's a little bit easier to quantify because you like to think that the person applying is working in a multidisciplinary team they've got to work with engineers, they've got to work probably with other cross functional partners, but also designers across the organization. Boiling it really down like teamwork is, can you articulate your vision? Can you articulate your designs to engineers to product and how you work with your product partners?

How do you work with engineers, that kind of stuff? Leadership is the hardest one to quantify because especially for people in the IC track it, they might bulk at that and go I don't want to be a manager. Why do you, why are you asking me about leadership? And it's okay let's pull it back. So leadership is like how you represent your discipline within the team, but also within like your business area. So how you push for your design principles.

How do you ensure that we're following those design principles right from the moment you put pen to paper in your, on, in your sketch through Figma, and now it's in the hands of a user. That's really about what the leadership qualities that we're looking for. So I interview a lot of senior folks or people who are just moving into that senior role. And one, one example I've had recently is I've been working a lot with this mentee and they've just got a new job in a little startup.

And they were really struggling to crack into really struggling with their head of design and in that they had a particular way of working and the, I think the head of design was pushing back on was really wanting a lot more rigor and thoughtfulness in how we set up Figma files. And my mentee was like, I definitely appreciate that kind of rigor, but it's going to take us away from doing this work over here, which is hitting our metrics and generating value for users.

And he was like no, no, we need to, we need to, we need to focus on this. And that the example of leadership there was like he managed upwards. He was able to see the view of his head of design. And he respected that. But he was like, okay, but here's the case that if we don't do that work, we're going to mix out on hitting these targets and metrics. And he didn't call his head of design now he calmly.

wrote the business case out and he provided some options and ultimately the head of design gone. Okay, cool. Let's park that Figma cleanup project for a while and we'll focus on these. But when we've got some downtime over the Christmas period let's go back. And he was like, yeah, wicked. So that's a great example of leadership, I think.

I'm wondering someone listening today might go into an interview tomorrow and perhaps it's about to make one of these mistakes. What would that be that they should avoid doing?

It's not an iOS or Android app that they're designing for. So you're missing out on the native patterns, but also the whole user context is different and the whole business context is different. If you're designing for a SAS product, it's different to a consumer product. So even just like going, okay, what am I applying for and then customizing your application towards that. It does require a little bit more work.

It does require you to research a bit more into the business that you're applying for, but you should be doing that anyway, I think. So that is the number one thing that I've, I, it keeps on surprising me that I have to push back or have to reject applicants because they've not researched the business or they've not researched the role.

Or is it a matter of saying somehow adapt? The experience that you have and the portfolio that you have to that role, even if it's not necessarily the exact same type of job that you've done before, what, how would you approach that?

Take that away from people at the beginning of their career. When you've got a few more years experience, it becomes a little bit easier to try and tease out what people who are interviewing are looking for. So going back to those five pillars of like product thinking, UX, visual design, teamwork, and leadership. If you're all of your portfolio is web based and you go, okay, I want to go, I want to crack into the app market.

I think taking a little bit of time to understand the differences between your two worlds of web and app, and then acknowledging that it within your interview process and say I've got mainly web experience, but I believe that I can add value to your organization, I believe through the experience that I've got, that's not always gonna. Yeah. Help, like you, that's at the end of the day, if you're, if we're hiring for a pure IC role there's a lot of context.

There's a lot of things that are a play. Yeah. At least by acknowledging the differences and knowing where you can add the value and then showcasing that as a most effective way as possible that you've probably got a better chance than just going in saying I'm applying for a job and here's my web portfolio. It's more a case of just like understanding that the differences, like. Identifying those gaps that hid, like identifying where you could have filled those gaps differently.

And rather than the surfaces that you're designing for leaning into those five pillars because I have hired web designers or people who have got more web experience than app experience. And it's just, it's a, we take it by a case by case basis.

Have you considered, have you done a post mortem? Have you considered what could have been better? Are you aware? And I think what you're saying there is playing that same tune of, it's important to be aware that even if you don't necessarily have that experience that they're looking for, perhaps figuring out how you can take your experience and mapping it onto what this new role is looking for and then talking it talking about it like that. I liked that.

And I think what you said there that I really liked, and I just want to highlight that is if your experience is just so different if the surfaces you're designing for are so different than the job you're going for, perhaps. when you present your case study, do it more from the perspective of these principles, rather than the perspective of that specific surface.

And then someone who's interviewing, you might look at it and think yeah, he hasn't designed for iOS before, but look, he understands the principles of what we're really looking for here. So I very much like that. And I think it's such a great idea.

Let's talk a little bit of about designing for a bank. When you think about designing for a bank, all that's coming to my head is a million constraints. You can't do this. You can't do that. You have to, in some cases you have regulations. How is it to have a design team that has to work with a lot of constraints?

If you don't have a certain amount of constraints, I've worked in regulated businesses for nearly 10 years I don't think I've ever felt constrained in the design by being in a regulated business. There are obviously things that you have to be compliant about. When you boil down what these compliance laws and regulations are, it's about being consumer centric. It's about being user centric. It's not about having dark patterns to nudge people into doing something.

pre working and regulated businesses, I found a lot of my time was trying to convince stakeholders not to do something bad towards the customer or the person using your things. The FCA regulations so the regulatory body that regulates Bonzo, um, they, their customer outcomes are the foundations of being an ethical business. Yeah, it's doing your job as a designer for you almost because you've got to start from a customer centric point of view in the first place.

I think where the difference is with my experience in Monzo is that we've come from a place where we've disrupted the industry. We've changed the game and now we're looking about how we can change it again which is a great position to be.

We are in a position where a, we've got superb leadership, like the leadership of Bonzo is absolutely second to none best leadership team I've ever had pleasure working under and in that leadership team, we have people from banking experience that like people who work in risk and compliance, who are the most open minded people that you could ever work with.

There's a sense that people, especially in my experience, sense that people that work in risk and compliance are just going to shut down your ideas all the time. But actually, when you start from a consumer centric point of view anyway, then they're not going to shut your ideas down. So it's breeding a really nice, interesting... Creative space for you to work with them. So yeah, it helps that Monzo we've got this culture of really trying to push the buck as much as possible.

Like I said we've changed the game once, but how can we change it again and having a relationship with our regulators so that we are. And some of the regular regulations that have come in and because of the challenger banks influencing and agitating for a more customer centric point of view from the industry. Rather than being beholden to these regulations, it's like within reason, you can, we have a dialogue and like, how can we like push for better customer outcomes that is.

Good for the customer, but also create sustainable businesses. So yeah, the long and short of it is if you've got a great leadership, you've got that culture of disruption anyway, and you've got a dialogue with your regulators. Then I think that's a very powerful position to be in.

And whether that's a business being regulated or whether that's simply a constraint that you have at work in a non regulated, completely typical business, The constraint that an engineer puts on your work or the constraint that the business puts on how much time you can spend on this or that feature, or the constraint of the geography or the internet speed of our users, whatever it may be. I think constraints breed creativity, like you said earlier.

And I, I just can't stress that enough, that constraint is actually not a bad thing. And oftentimes. Getting a constraint pushes your work to be better than when you didn't have the constraint. It's just so counter intuitive to me, but I've had so many examples of this happening where suddenly there's a new constraint popping in and you think, Oh no, the world's over. And two weeks later, working with that constraint, you've made the work better.

So I like to push for people to think of constraints as something that makes their work better rather than worse.

Yeah.

It was a much more collaborative effort, service design, and a much more in the marketing world, you call it omni channel or multi channel experience. But what that is effectively is service design. It's like thinking about like the context that the customer or the users in. And then understanding like their whole experience rather than just the touch points and services that you're designing for.

So that was a real turning point for me is I breaking out the silo of your, of the Figma file on screens that you're designing for and just getting out and mapping it out and mapping it. It on a whiteboard and getting out there and speaking to customers and changing that mapper and having that more holistic view of design was a real turning point for me. And even though I don't work in a service design these days, like that mentality.

Still sticks with me, like I, even the other day I was having a conversation with a team that I work with and they're like, Oh, how do we get a signal about where this customer has come from? As I let's map it out. Let's speak to marketing and get their view. And they're like, Oh yeah, we can speak to our data partners in marketing and understand like where the customers come from. And then tweak our experience further down the funnel, further down the journey.

So to represent the customer view a bit better so it's really about breaking out of the design that you're working with right now and looking at the whole experience uh, rather than rather than just the screens that you're looking at now.

So it's so easy to get wrapped up as a designer to just think about the screens that we're designing in Figma today, but and this is one of the ops designers at Monzo he says that we are all designing for Ops. So he works with our customer operations team. So we design our own back office system for them to log or complaints or like tickets with customers and whatnot.

But his view, which is absolutely right, is that whatever you're designing right now, whether that's like payments experience or adding a category to a payment or split in a bill or transfer of money. All of that is going to have an Ops cost that's going to have an operations cost down the line.

And so if your payments experience breaks for a customer, the customer is going to get on the chat or go on the phone and speak to a customer operations person to interact with the Ops designers interface. And that's the brand experience. So I don't think designers are talking much about that brand experience, that whole holistic view. And that's hard, right?

Cause then you could be here forever talking about how your brand experience maps across the whole organization and the whole, their whole experience. So it's nothing that like, I think.

It could designer should action right away, but it's something I think we should start having conversations more in businesses is that go and speak to your designer, go and speak to your, like your peer in another part of the organization, and then agitate for more brand experience, thinking up into the business as well. If you're saying that we're not crossing silos to weave better experiences for customers, then.

Further down the line, you're going to end up in a situation where you've got a lot of design that you've got a lot of brand that effectively experienced that because you've knew you're not tying these experiences up and that's multifaceted that's not only the user's experience, the customer's experience, but how your tone of voice comes across as well, like how your brand comes across. So it's really easy just to slap on a chat bot. Onto your interface and it looks completely different.

And then when you've got a problem, you go into their chat service and it looks really different and it's really jarring and the experience isn't great. The, you're not carrying that brand experience on through that sort of customer operations channels. And that's a trust breaking experience that if you're not, if you're carrying that across.

So what I'm proud of working at Monzo is that we do have that, that, that's that same ease of use, that same brand experience when things are going wrong, because that's really when the customer really needs you. And it's going to really, your brand is going to be put under the spotlight. So throwing them into an experience that is trust breaking or like it looks completely different or the tone of voice is off. It's very clear that you're speaking to a robot or something like that.

If you're not, if you're not set that brand expectation already. Is just going to erode your trust and relationship with that customer. So yeah, so the, I don't think we're talking about. The practicalities of a truly integrated brand experience in business at the moment.