Contributions
Product strategy
User research
Product design
Team
1 product designer
1 product manager
3 front-end engineers
Overview
Back in 2018, ordering Pleo cards was a manual process handled outside the product. Account Managers and Customer Success would manage the process with customers on their behalf. It was costly and something customers should have been able to do themselves.
The need for cards surfaced in many different situations back then: an admin testing Pleo for the first time, rolling it out across the whole company, a new hire joining and needing access, or an employee replacing a lost or broken card. Each scenario comes with its own pain points around cost, timing, rollout, and confidence that everything is set up correctly.
The goal was to bring this into the product itself, designing an experience that made card orders feel like a natural, self-serve part of getting started with Pleo for admins and employees alike.
Approach
The first version productised what had previously been a manual handoff, enabling admins to order physical cards directly from within Pleo. That alone reduced setup time meaningfully and removed a dependency on internal teams for something customers should be able to do themselves.
The second iteration introduced individual names on cards as a security measure required by MasterCard, updating the card order flow to collect and display names while keeping the experience straightforward for admins configuring cards for their team.
A third iteration gave admins explicit control over who within the company could access a Pleo card at all, a strategic decision to appeal to a wider market and raise broader questions about the role of physical cards in the product. Throughout, we measured adoption, time to get companies fully set up, and commercial fit, all of which improved.
Outcome
Each iteration tightened the loop between deciding to use Pleo and actually being ready to use it. Admins felt more confident getting their teams set up, and employees had a clearer, more independent path to getting a card in their hands. The time-to-setup metric was the clearest signal, making the rollout process simpler and faster for companies getting started with Pleo. The solution also proved its value commercially, unblocking larger deals with bigger company profiles and multi-entity setups that had previously been harder to close.
What happened next
Card orders became a key part of the broader Admin experience team's mandate, particularly as Pleo continued to move upmarket and the complexity of onboarding larger organisations became its own design challenge.
