<aside> 💳
| Role | Product Designer |
|---|---|
| Company | Pleo |
| Focus | B2B SaaS, mobile onboarding, employee activation, expense management, authentication, adoption |
| Contribution | Product strategy, user research, product design |
| Team | 1 product manager, 1 product designer, 3 engineers |
| Year | 2021 |
| </aside> |
Pleo was increasingly becoming a mobile-first product for employees. Day-to-day expense behaviour happens in the moment: taking a photo of a receipt, checking a card transaction, submitting a claim, reviewing a per diem or understanding what to do after making a purchase.
But the account creation journey was still primarily web-based. That created a mismatch between where employees were invited into Pleo and where the company wanted them to build their daily habit. Employees could receive an invite, create an account on web, and only later discover that the mobile app was the place where much of the ongoing value lived.
The product was sending mixed messages. If mobile was the primary daily-use channel for employees, onboarding needed to start there too.
My work focused on creating the foundations for employee onboarding in the mobile app: getting invited employees into the app, allowing them to complete account creation in-app, and making the experience secure enough to satisfy authentication requirements without making the first-run journey feel broken or overly procedural.
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Pleo is a B2B product, but many of the behaviours that make it successful happen at the employee level. A company admin can sign up and invite employees, but product value depends on those employees actually adopting the tools that support everyday expense management.
That made employee onboarding a critical activation moment. If employees did not download the app, complete setup, understand the core behaviours, or avoid early confusion, the wider company rollout became harder to sustain.
The team was particularly focused on three early signals:
| Metric | Why it mattered | Design implication |
|---|---|---|
| App downloads within 30 days of account creation | Showed whether employees were moving into the intended daily-use channel | Make the invite-to-app transition obvious, reliable and worth completing |
| Adoption of core expense features | Showed whether employees were reaching the behaviours that drive product value | Create a foundation that could later support guided setup and contextual discovery |
| Customer service tickets in the first 30 days | Showed whether onboarding created avoidable confusion or support load | Reduce ambiguity, recover from edge cases and explain verification clearly |
This was not just a conversion-flow project. It was a product adoption problem sitting between growth, activation, mobile strategy and support cost.
The existing onboarding model assumed web was the safest and most complete place to create an account. That made sense historically because most of Pleo had been built around web-based setup and administration.
But the employee context was different. Employees were not configuring company policy. They were being invited into an existing company account so they could use Pleo in day-to-day expense moments. For them, the mobile app was not an optional add-on. It was the main surface for value.
