We started with a hackathon concept to make mortgage data visible in the Monzo app, then scaled the experience to hundreds of thousands of customers and expanded it to help people prepare for their next deal.
At Monzo, our mission is to make money work for everyone. For most people, their mortgage is the biggest financial commitment they'll ever make. So we could hardly succeed at our mission without helping people to manage their mortgages better.
We knew there were problems to solve in the mortgage world, but we didn't know where to start. So we spent time speaking 1-on-1 with Monzo customers on different steps of their journey: planning to buy, in the process of buying, recently bought and even second-time buyers. Then we scored how important and underserved each of their jobs-to-be-done were.
What emerged was an unexpected cluster of pain points around managing your mortgage. Things like knowing how much was left on your mortgage, understanding whether to put extra cash into savings or overpaying your mortgage, or getting help with when to start the remortgage process.
In a 2022 hackathon, we built a proof of concept to surface mortgage data from a customer's credit file (Open Banking doesn't cover mortgages, yet). We won the hackathon and got buy-in to build this for real.
We launched in Monzo Labs in 2023 and scaled the experience throughout 2023-24, covering use cases like the Overpayment Calculator and Deal Expiry Reminders. Customer feedback was exceptional and our 30 day retention sat above 97%!
In 2024 and 2025, we partnered with the mortgage broker Better.co.uk to go a step further: helping customers to get set up with their next mortgage deal.
And excitingly, in late 2025, we announced that we would acquire the mortgage broker Habito, subject to regulatory approval.
I led a genuinely first-of-its-kind product from 0, to 1, to 500,000 (and beyond!). I scaled my personal impact from individual contributor (first PM on the product) to product leader, building a world-class product team along the way.
The product became one of Monzo's most loved and made a massive contribution to furthering Monzo's mission.
So much!
A few things come to mind:
Well-run depth research can change the entire trajectory of your product. It would have been tempting to jump straight into the mortgage origination journey when we turned our attention to this market, but that would have overlooked bigger existing pain points that we could solve sooner.
Contextual feedback collection, piped to where your team lives, is a huge moat. We iterated towards a magical experience because we were receiving real-time feedback on what wasn't working for our customers, and consuming it instantly in Slack.
Build it and they'll come is not a strategy. It wasn't enough to simply partner with a mortgage broker, add an entry point to the management experience and expect a wave of customers. We had to make sure the experience we gave customers is meaningfully better than the broker they've used before.