You might have heard already: We’re on a mission to be the go-to spending solution for forward-thinking teams everywhere. You can find us in Denmark (where we’re headquartered!), Sweden, Germany, Spain, UK and Ireland. And we’ve just added a new country to the list… Finland! (Also known as the world's happiest country).
Despite being the world’s happiest country, there are still companies in Finland manually dealing with company spending. But we can fix that.
We caught up with Miia, our very own Product Manager to find out what designing a spending solution for forward-thinking teams is all about, and how Finns can benefit from Pleo.
Tell us a little bit about yourself…
I’m Miia! I’m a Product Manager for the Bookkeeping Experience at Pleo. And I’m Finnish.
I’ve been at Pleo for over two and half years now. I mainly work from the London office, even though my team is always trying to get me to Copenhagen, I’m sticking with London. The city and the office really suit my life. There’s a lot of flexibility at Pleo, which means I can live in London and actually enjoy London.
What’s life like being a Product Manager for the Bookkeeping Experience?
Our team functions like its own company, which is super fun. We own a certain area of Pleo, which is the bookkeeping experience. The first thing we need to understand as a team is: what are the problems that bookkeepers and accountants face? And what do these people do on a daily basis? Everything starts from there.
Then we need to understand: what are the big problems? What are the need-to-haves? And what are the nice-to-haves?
We do iterations, interviews in these problem spaces, validation, prototype discovery with our designers and technical discovery with our engineers. It’s a really fulfilling process.
And this isn’t your first role at Pleo, right?
Correct! When I first joined Pleo, I was part of the Customer Success team. I’ve got a lot of customer support and success experience from over the years. But I’ve always been in the ‘product mindset’ and have always wanted to work with start-ups and innovate – and maybe even one day build my own company.
Early on, when I was part of the Customer Success team, I had the freedom to collaborate with a lot of other teams and learn things along the way, and eventually grow professionally. And at Pleo, that’s possible. If you’re great at what you do and you have the ability to help in other places and other teams, the sky's the limit and you feel super entrepreneurial.
What does the typical company spending culture look like in Finland?
It’s very normal to have one person take care of a corporate credit card and then others in the team borrow that card whenever they need something. And that comes with a whole chain of annoyances: from collecting every receipt to then bringing them all back to then being dumped on someone’s desk, and then there are the inevitable lost receipts.
It's also very common in Finland to pay for things you need for work out of your own pocket. So, if you go on a work trip, you take your car and you pay for gas, then you have dinner — that’s all coming out of your bank account. In Finland, it’s called ‘per diem’, and it can get super complex, quickly.
Why does Finland need Pleo?
Finland respects structure and easiness. Why go through a lot of hassle and paperwork when it could all be digitalised. We’ve seen digitalisation in Finland with how we deal with government and citizen admin. In fact, Finland is the seventh most innovative country in the world, according to Bloomberg’s Innovation Index.
Despite advances in how we deal with taxes and other admin in Finland, so many companies are still dealing with company expenses using spreadsheets, collecting every crinkled paper receipt and borrowing cards.
Finland has such a technology-driven culture, Pleo would fit in seamlessly. It’s a no-brainer.
Flipping this around… Why should anyone in Finland come to work at Pleo?
Lockdown opened up a lot of people’s minds in Finland. Suddenly we realised, you can work in a company that’s international, but you can still live in Finland and work remotely, and learn so much at the same time.
The Pleo culture is very similar to what you’d find at many other companies in Finland — you work hard, but your work-life balance is still a priority. It’s the Nordic way of life.
There are three things that really matter:
- The learnings that you’ll get at Pleo are so exciting, there are so many opportunities to go in any direction (just like how I shifted roles!).
- Pleo cares about people. In fact, it’s our company's vision: to make everyone feel valued at work. Put simply, without people, there’s no Pleo.
- Finland is going to grow and I’m confident it’s going to be one of our strongest markets. So, if you want to be part of that growth and learn what we’ve done along the way, it’s a really exciting opportunity.
Whether you're keen on representing the market as our Commercial Market Launcher for Finland or looking at broader opportunities, Miia wants more Finns at Pleo.
Let's make Miia happy. Run, don’t walk to our careers page.
