What changed?

Monzo's Developer Velocity squad, a small team of three engineers plus an engineering manager, achieved remarkable results by building an Experimentation Platform that doubled the number of experiments run company-wide and halved the time to decision from 43 to 21 days.

Provider comparison

Unlike traditional platform teams that focus on infrastructure, Monzo's approach treats internal tools as products with real customers—their fellow engineers. This platform-as-a-product mindset contrasts with project-based approaches where teams build solutions without considering long-term adoption or user experience.

Business impact

The team's success demonstrates that investing in developer experience directly impacts business outcomes. By reducing cognitive load, improving productivity, and enabling faster experimentation, companies can achieve better product outcomes and maintain competitive advantage in regulated industries.

---

Achieve Optimal Efficiency for Your Developer Experience Teams

The Power of Small, Focused Teams

At Monzo, a digital bank with 11 million customers and only 400 engineers, the Developer Velocity squad proved that small teams can drive massive impact. Formed in December 2023, this team of three engineers and one engineering manager built an Experimentation Platform that transformed how the company approaches product development.

Platform as a Product Mindset

The key to their success was treating internal tools as products rather than projects. This means thinking about fellow engineers as customers, understanding their pain points, and building solutions that solve real problems. The team replaced an old in-house experimentation platform that was difficult to analyze with a new system that centralized all functionality in one place.

Assembling the Right Team

Success starts with team composition. The ideal Developer Experience team needs:

• Engineers with product acumen: Ability to make quick decisions, understand tradeoffs, and think long-term about irreversible choices
• Engineers with company tenure: Network effects, understanding of organizational pain points, and broader perspective on company-wide issues
• Engineers with strong soft skills: Ability to sell ideas internally, build trust with leadership, and communicate impact effectively

Monzo's team combined these elements successfully, with one engineer embodying all three qualities and others bringing complementary strengths.

Building Impactful Products

Once assembled, the team focused on building products that aligned with company values. Monzo emphasizes "Monzo magic"—making things magically simple. This philosophy translated into features like automated experiment cleanup, where a Slack bot notifies teams when experiments are ready for removal and provides a one-click cleanup guide.

Key principles for building impactful products include:

• Align with company values: Make your tools reflect your organization's culture
• Solve real problems: Don't create yet another tool engineers must learn
• Find champions: Leverage leaders and early adopters to drive adoption
• Use your tech strategy: Follow established patterns like raising abstraction levels
• Meet users where they are: Build integrations into existing workflows (Slack, IDEs, etc.)
• Gather early feedback: Iterate with real users before full rollout
• Iterate aggressively within reason: Balance speed with risk tolerance
• Consider adoption strategies: Use both carrots (great products) and sticks (mandates)
• Measure continuously: Track key metrics from day one

Measuring and Communicating Impact

Developer experience teams often struggle to demonstrate their value. The squad addressed this by measuring three straightforward metrics: number of experiments run, time to decision, and adoption rates. They also tracked more nuanced impacts like productivity gains, cognitive load reduction, and developer happiness.

When communicating impact, focus on:

• Time savings: Quantify minutes saved per engineer per day
• Cost reduction: Show infrastructure or operational savings
• Productivity improvements: Link tools to faster feature delivery
• Adoption rates: Demonstrate organic usage across teams
• Future enablement: Show how current work enables future capabilities
• Risk reduction: Frame security and stability improvements positively
• Cognitive load reduction: Minimize context switching and tool fragmentation
• Developer happiness: Use surveys to measure satisfaction
• Talent retention: Connect good experience to lower turnover

The Broader Context

This approach reflects a growing recognition that developer experience directly impacts business outcomes. Companies like DX have developed frameworks for measuring productivity, and the SPACE framework provides a comprehensive model for understanding developer experience beyond just output metrics.

Conclusion

The Developer Velocity squad's success demonstrates that with the right team, mindset, and approach, small groups can drive significant organizational change. By treating internal tools as products, measuring their impact, and communicating value effectively, Developer Experience teams can secure buy-in, prioritize effectively, and ultimately help their organizations move faster and build better products.

For organizations considering similar initiatives, the key takeaway is to engage with your company's engineering culture. Understand how engineers work, what tools they use, and what frustrates them. Then build solutions that fit seamlessly into their workflows while delivering measurable business value.

The future of platform engineering lies not in building more infrastructure, but in creating delightful experiences that make engineers more productive, happier, and more likely to stay with the company. Monzo's experience shows this is not only possible but achievable with relatively modest resources when approached strategically.