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| Role | Product Designer |
|---|---|
| Company | Miroma Group Agency - Pleo |
| Focus | B2B SaaS, expense management, per diems, localisation, regulated workflows, mobile product design |
| Contribution | Product strategy, user research, product design |
| Team | 1 product manager, 1 product designer, 2 engineers |
| Year | 2021 |
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A per diem is a lump sum that covers employee costs while travelling for work, most commonly meals, travel and accommodation. In Pleo, per diems were already supported for the German market, where they are commonly used, but the lack of support in Sweden had become a blocker for companies adopting or expanding their use of Pleo.
The challenge was that per diems are not a single universal feature. Each country can have different rules, rates, deductions, eligibility requirements and reporting expectations. Some rules are not just different between markets; they can be almost opposite in how they shape the user journey.
The product goal was to rethink the existing German-focused experience so it could support Sweden and create a scalable foundation for future markets, without requiring a bespoke redesign every time a new country introduced a new rule.
My role was to help turn a market-specific feature into a flexible system: evaluate what broke in the current flow, understand where regulation shaped the experience, and design a mobile workflow that could handle complexity while still feeling simple to employees submitting expenses.
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Pleo operated across multiple European markets, and expense workflows needed to reflect local compliance expectations. If a core expense behaviour worked in one country but not another, the product risked becoming harder to sell, harder to roll out and harder for finance teams to trust.
Per diem support in Sweden was a common blocker because it affected real operational workflows for companies. Finance teams needed confidence that employees could submit travel expenses correctly, and employees needed the flow to make sense without understanding every local policy detail.
| Business risk | Product symptom | Design opportunity |
|---|---|---|
| Market expansion blocked | Per diems worked for Germany but not Sweden | Create a flexible framework that could support multiple local rule sets |
| Compliance confidence reduced | Finance teams could not rely on one consistent workflow across countries | Make rules visible where needed and encoded where possible |
| Product scalability limited | Each new market risked becoming a bespoke design and engineering project | Separate the reusable journey from market-specific requirements |
| Employee confusion | Rules, deductions and eligibility could feel opaque in mobile flows | Guide employees through only the information needed for their trip context |
The strategic shift was to stop treating per diem as a single feature for a single market and start treating it as a configurable product system for regulated expense behaviour.
The existing experience had been designed around the German market. That gave the team a useful starting point, but it also meant parts of the flow reflected assumptions that might not hold elsewhere.
Expanding to Sweden forced the team to stress-test the underlying model. Which parts of the journey were genuinely universal? Which parts were German-specific? Where did the interface need to adapt? Where should rules be handled by the system rather than explained to the employee?
| Product tension | What made it difficult | Design response |
|---|---|---|
| Rules vary by country | The same trip details can produce different requirements and outcomes depending on market | Design a flexible flow that can adapt to local rule sets |
| Employees need simplicity | Most users do not want to understand tax or policy complexity | Ask for clear trip information and let the product handle as much logic as possible |
| Finance teams need accuracy | Incorrect per diem handling creates operational and compliance risk | Make key inputs, deductions and review states explicit enough to trust |
| Future markets were likely | A Sweden-only fix would create more rework later | Design reusable patterns instead of hard-coded country-specific screens |
