JOE: Hi Max, thank you for joining us today. You’re a tech writer, so tell me: were you a writer first, and then got into tech, or vice versa?

MAX: Am I a tech writer? I guess so. I’m definitely a writer working for a tech company; I don’t know whether those two things are exactly the same or not, but right now, yes I head up part of the writing team at Monzo, having originally joined about eight years ago.

When I started at Monzo I was only the second writer to join the company, and we operated as generalists; [on a normal day] we might have been spending half our time on product language, and then working with the legal team on terms and conditions the rest of the time.

Now, the way we’ve set up the team has changed, but the same principle that held eight years ago is still at the core of everything we do, which is that every piece of writing at Monzo is of equal importance.

JOE: How big was Monzo when it was decided that a writing team was needed? Did something significant break that focused people’s minds?

MAX: Our first writer was Harry Ashbridge, who emailed Monzo saying essentially that the company had a great mission and was doing some really good writing, but that he thought Monzo would benefit from having someone on the team who had writing as their sole responsibility. 

So Harry was hired as Monzo’s first writer. Monzo was definitely doing some great writing already, but Harry put in place more structure like establishing writing training for every new joiner. Today, that training is still there for every employee, whether that’s an engineer, a data analyst or someone joining the C-suite.

Where writing lives in the organisation

JOE: So who owns writing today at Monzo? Where do you report into, and who sets the focus for the function? It feels like you’re quite deliberate about writing being more than just a marketing tool.

MAX: We do aim for writing to be bigger than just marketing, yes. We do work on lots of marketing stuff, of course, like emails, press releases and so on, but we want writing to be influencing the Monzo brand, wherever people might come across it. 

That being said, the writing team does sit within our marketing collective, as we call it, and it ultimately ladders up to AJ, our CMO. 

When I joined, the whole marketing team would be able to sit round the same table to have lunch together. Now, you’d need a whole restaurant – which is definitely a cool thing. But as we’ve grown, our writers have also specialised. We’ve got writers who focus on helping product, there are writers who focus on brand and comms, etc.

Working with the rest of the business

JOE: Where do your writers tend to step in? I’m a writer myself but I can certainly imagine an engineer preparing to launch something thinking ‘well, we’ve done the writing training, we have a really clear style guide and tone of voice, so why is this additional stakeholder coming in?’ 

MAX: This is a question I think about multiple times throughout the day, every day. Any writer in tech would tell you that in an ideal world, they’d be there right from the very beginning, the discovery phase stuff, designing wireframes alongside product and seeing projects through from beginning to end.

JOE: And how often do you get to do that pairing?

MAX: This is why I say “in an ideal world”. That’s how we’d want it to work, but more often than not, because of the sheer amount of stuff we’re working on, we keep an eye on stuff at an early stage and then get a bit more hands on downstream.

Measuring writing's impact

JOE: Different people have asked me how you actually measure the success of good writing and the outcomes for the business. You can tie it back to quite woolly things like ‘trust in the brand’ (and maybe there’s no silver bullet to perfectly measure trust), but how do you guys measure success?

MAX: It’ll differ from one channel to the next. If your email open rates are high, you can pretty well assume that the subject line is doing a lot of hard work. There are certain strings of writing, like buttons and other entry points in the app, where you can test different variants and see what’s outperforming. That’s the easier stuff to measure, but what we care about most is, like, how many people stay with a particular product? There are various scores out there that gauge how likely you’d be to recommend a product to a friend or family member, for example. 

We continue to win awards for customer service, and what’s nice about customer support – particularly because we’re a bank without branches – is that it’s almost entirely won and lost on good writing. When there’s something you need to speak to Monzo about, you’ll do that through our chat function. Our customer support team do an amazing job handling customers without those body language cues or verbal cues, and the fact that we seem to do it well, and that writing helps us do that well, is a really cool thing.

AI and writing

JOE: Which brings me neatly on to AI, because it’s been observed that customer support is ground zero for where AI is embedding into enterprises, and where people are most likely to come across AI responses, when you’re triaging enquiries and things like that. It seems like there are productivity benefits; whether that potentially comes at the cost of a human feel and a human voice is kind of a separate question.

I think most customers would probably get a bit jaded if they were hearing the same sort of language coming from every company, if, say, [those companies] were using the same few models to synthesise their responses. Where are the vectors for AI writing coming into Monzo now, and what do the writing team do to make chatbot touchpoints feel like you? 

MAX: Well, the first thing to say is that there’s a real respect for the craft of writing in the company. Whatever we end up doing, it’ll be something that we can be proud of and that represents the kind of writing that we’ve become known for and that people will expect from us. I don’t expect writing quality to drop, and I don’t expect the quality of customer support to drop either. 

JOE: The other phenomenon that’s increasingly prevalent is internal documentation, where people reach for one model or another to help with that process. ‘Help’ tends to mean doing it faster; it doesn’t necessarily mean doing it any clearer. Most models do tend to lack that finely-tuned sense of judgment about what matters to each organisation, and then each team within that organisation. Are you thinking about how to make those docs best work for the team?

MAX: It feels good, and to be completely honest, it’s not presenting challenges for us at the moment as a writing team. I’m comfortable with how AI is being used around the company right now. From a writing perspective, we’re being brought in at the right time. When it comes to written output, we still find that people are favouring doing it themselves or taking a very active hand in the creation of any document. 

That’s credit to how good people are at writing at Monzo. The quality of written work from our product designers, engineers, data scientists, continues to blow my mind – which is even more impressive eight years in, because there are way more of us. 

JOE: It must be all that great onboarding training…

MAX: Mostly it’s just that people recognise how important it is to our brand. So wherever Monzo goes with AI, I’m feeling very confident about how we’ll work with it in a way that doesn’t sacrifice our writing principles. So yeah, feeling good at the moment.

Why writing, and writers, matter

JOE: Are you surprised that more teams don’t develop writing teams and writing functions? You probably have a better insight than I do into how widespread [writing teams are] within the tech and financial services industries, but it does feel to me that Monzo is still a bit of an outlier in the ecosystem. There are definitely other companies that have a similar dedication to writing as a craft – I can think of Stripe, for instance – but they seem to manage that skill in a slightly different way internally. Why do you think more companies aren’t going your way?

MAX: The honest answer is that I don’t know, but I can have a guess!

JOE: Does it have to be top-down: someone senior really believing in it and then seeding it through the business?

MAX: Probably; if one of the senior leaders in a growing company has worked with a team of writers in previous places, they’ll hopefully be more likely to see the benefit. But I also think that just as a writing discipline, we could maybe do a better job of educating the world on the kinds of things that we do.

The reason I believe that more small or growing companies would do well to hire a writer or start a writing team is because the thing you get for your money is not just written words, right; it’s the problem-solving and connecting of dots that you get with someone who solves problems with words. 

Most of the work that the people on my team do probably isn’t actually writing sentences at all: so often, it’s about being that sparring partner [sitting] between product marketers, product designers and product managers, helping figure out a product proposition and helping it make sense. The benefit of being that step back from the weeds of product sprints is that we can see a little bit more and help connect things. 

I think that Harry joining Monzo when he did and building out the writing team was a huge benefit for Monzo. There are probably certain people you have to hire in before you consider a writer, but having a writer on your team is hugely overlooked for most companies.

JOE: Any other startups that you know of that are focusing on [writing] as a craft?

MAX: Every company will feel differently about it, but if you can get a half-decent writer into your company at an early stage, the benefit isn’t that your marketing emails will get a good open rate; it’s not just that your press releases will come together nicely [...] not just writing a blog about a technical problem that you’ve solved; it’s right through to the way we communicate with each other internally, too. So therefore those efficiencies, and through to the quality of employee wellbeing, all those different things go up when you’re writing well with one another. 

I look around Monzo’s Slack now and I see so many examples of the way that we’re all talking to one another and following great writing principles. It’s really hard to overstate what that can mean for a company over a number of years, like the time I’ve been here – almost eight years. 

I don’t think it’s dramatic to say that the way we communicate internally, and the way we follow writing principles, has helped us get to where we’ve got to, not just [in terms of] customer growth but down to, for instance, the decks we put together when we’re talking to people outside the company or talking with each other; or, the way that people write about each other when it comes to performance review season. 

Good quality writing is still a hugely undervalued asset for a company. I’m sure we’ll see AI help with lots of these kinds of things, but at least in my experience it’s a long way off being able to make the kinds of differences I’ve just mentioned.

JOE: Max, it was great talking to you. Wishing you all the best with the writing function at Monzo.

MAX: It was great talking to you Joe. Thanks very much.