Engineering Culture: The Secret Behind Monzo’s Developer Magnet

Slack is one of the pillars

Slack is an important tool from a cultural point of view as well. One of our senior engineers built the Guys bot, which pings up on Slack if anybody uses the word “guys.” It’s not an inclusive phrase.

We've built these things into our wider culture by using our engineering skills to create tools. I love how these gently nudge people to live out the key company values.

Share experiences

It’s great when senior engineers share their knowledge, experience, and make everyone feel safe along with them. A great example is when one of the senior engineers gave a talk about everything they broke at production at our very first lightning talk session. The ultimate message was how it can happen to anyone, and we fix the root causes, rather than make people feel guilty about it.

The people around me every day are the best part of our engineering culture at Monzo.

How do you make sure new developers fit into your engineering culture?

Cultural fit is intangible

The problem is that cultural fit is intangible. People often talk about cultural fit without being able to define how somebody could fit into it. You can easily end up with a homogenous group of people who all have similar strengths and weaknesses.

We check for value alignment

We think of cultural fit in terms of alignment with values. We put out our values and our personality on social media and on other channels. Most people who come to work for us have a good sense of what we stand for and what we expect.

In the interview phase, we check if our values are aligned, and we try to understand what a candidate could bring to our culture that may challenge us in a positive way. Obviously, we’re looking out for dangerous misalignments, and naturally, we look at technical qualifications too. We have different types of interviews.

Cultural fit goes both ways

Cultural fit is not a one-way process; it has to work for both parties. You need to make sure your candidate has an opportunity to buy into your engineering culture and to make sure it's right both for them and for you.

How do you measure if you have a good engineering culture?

It’s a subject of constant change. As the company has grown, we’ve had to formalize this, because having 20 engineers is different from having 200.

Regular surveys

We use a tool to survey everybody in the company every month. We ask questions like how they feel about the office, the level of management spot they’re getting, happiness with the type of work or their pay. It gives us a picture of how happy everybody is, so we can drill down into certain areas to see if we need to fix them.

Squad meetings

We started doing squad health checks recently. We get the people who work together in a room, and we go through a set of questions to see what aspects of their work they consider healthy or unhealthy. It’s interesting to work out how different factors play a part in people's happiness and in the culture.

Regular feedback of every type

We have a strong feedback culture. Some of the information we get is anonymous and it's aggregated; we encourage people to give direct feedback, and we have tools for that. Plus, we’re trying to build great manager relationships, so if people have concerns, they have channels to go through.

Make sure it feels right

We try to measure it, and as managers, we have a general awareness on the state of our engineering culture. We frequently discuss this on our weekly all hands with executive level managers. We’re vocal about the cultural aspects of working at Monzo and how we can improve it.

So, everybody is bought into it.

What can tech leads do at Monzo to build your engineering culture?

For context, our tech leads are individual contributors, not managers. They work to foster collaboration between our product managers, our designers, and our engineers. We don't always have one in every squad.

In our model, we have squads, teams, and even larger units called collectives. We have leads at a collective level; they are responsible for all the squads within their collective. Managing system design, architecture and results on a technical side is their job.

They lead by example

They also drive forward goals, for the squad’s delivery and everything else. They work closely with engineering managers to find opportunities for their reports. They play an important role in culture. They can promote the values, and they can put forward learning opportunities for others.

Engineering managers handle engineers’ progression, performance, well-being and growth. Tech leads can lead by example; they can come at these conversations from another angle.

So, tech leaders have an important part to play in creating a positive engineering culture.

Empowering all

We’ve been working to empower everybody to realize they can be a leader when it comes to culture, even if they don't consider themselves leaders.

How do squads and collectives work at Monzo?

We introduced this system in 2019, because we needed to refine the engineering structure as we grew. We loosely based collectives on the Spotify model, they're similar to their tribes, but we gave it a new name.

Squads work one issue

Squads are smaller groups of people working on specific problems. Their sizes vary, but we stick to small squads and use the pizza rule as a baseline. Squads are cross functional as well, so they might have a product manager, back-end engineers, web UI people, or mobile engineers with a mixture of designers, user researchers, etc.

The point is that they're formed to solve a problem via cross-functional collaboration.

Squads with similar tasks are a collective

They work alongside others within a similar problem space; it’s what we call a collective. Within the ops collective, the main domain is customer support. We build our customer support software in-house.

We have several squads working on that, and we’re building systems that can facilitate all of them getting the help they need. We have other squads working on things like scheduling or machine learning, and so on.

How do you define a bad software engineering culture?

For me, it’s what we discussed as the positive aspects of engineering culture but flipped on its head.

Lack of diversity

Off the top of my head I’d say having a homogeneous team, as I consider the lack of diversity dangerous. Diversity can help you make better product decisions and make better decisions for everybody.

Lack of psychological safety

If people don't feel safe, they start pointing fingers and throwing blame over things going wrong. It may be about making mistakes, not finishing on time, or anything else. It leads to people trying to cover their backs, and you end up having a culture that doesn’t facilitate great work.

Pushing people to work all the time

We've seen many different viewpoints, especially on social media, about what it means to work hard, to be successful and how much of yourself you should give. We don’t stop anybody if they want to put in long hours, but we’re careful not to make anybody feel like they have to work every minute of the day. Nobody should feel like work is more important than their life.

In a bad culture, you end up dictating how people should operate. In a great culture, people have the autonomy to do a good job and to stop whenever they need to.

What behaviors should managers look out for to preserve a good engineering culture?

Watch out for brilliant jerks

Engineering managers should be careful with the brilliant jerk behavior. They’re developers who are fantastic at their job but completely unable to work with others. They may bring a lot of negativity and have a negative impact on the culture.

On one hand, they’re fantastic engineers; on the other hand, they are a cultural drain. If you're not careful with managing this situation, that becomes the norm. You can’t just let it go because they deliver great code.

It’s a tough one to manage. The important thing is to work out your company values. If your view as a manager isn’t in line with the company values, you have a wider problem to solve. But if you’re addressing this with a person, you need to have conversations about what's important to them.

• Do they see themselves as an individual or as part of a team?
• Do they care about the people they work with?
• Do they understand the impact of their actions?

These conversations should be the starting point, because often people don’t consider this. Don’t just jump to the conclusion that they’re bad people.

What steps would you take to improve an engineering culture?

An engineering culture can always evolve, even if you feel like you've got a great one. It’s easy to get complacent and recruit new engineers, and things change. You need to mindfully keep building your culture, or it’ll fall apart.

Culture can be influenced from different dimensions.

The impact you have one on one, talking to others directly, whether they are your peers or reports, has a big role in that. You can also influence it on a group level, and you can look on an even wider scale, like disciplines across the company. At Monzo, engineering is a discipline and design is another.

Assess your situation

The first thing is to see where you stand, and how people feel. You may be at a good place, moving in the right direction, or there may be challenges. Then you should look at the practical things you can do and prioritize which aspects have the most impact.

Communicate clearly

It’s a key point to communicate what you're doing. Make sure people understand the reason behind your suggestions, ask for their opinion, and change your tactics if they feel strongly against them.

You should clear your expectations towards people about what they should do. You may want to communicate the company values, the engineering standards and all the principles you expect people to follow.