Recap of 2017: Our key learnings
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The past year has been terrific here at Pleo. We’ve grown our organisation by some 400%, we’ve successfully launched in the UK and we’ve added lots of new functionality. 2017 is now coming to an end, and it’s time to look back and share some insights from our journey.
Dear Pleo customers and friends,
The past year has been terrific here at Pleo. We’ve grown our organisation by some 400%, we’ve successfully launched in the UK and we’ve added lots of new functionality. 2017 is now coming to an end, and it’s time to look back and share some insights from our journey.
Our main focus has always been to listen to you and your needs and transform this into great product experiences. This way, we’ve managed to enhance the experience of Pleo. We hope this has improved your internal workflows just like it has improved ours.
Besides shipping lots of new features, we have had some major learnings that might be interesting for you and your business.
Always listen📝
Our major focus on listening to and observing our customers has enabled us to 1) establish close relations with our customers and 2) help us drive the product in the right direction. Visiting our customers in their office is a high priority, as it gives us insights and relationships, that are hard to achieve through email or phone.
Among a million other things to do, this can be hard to prioritize. But it has proven to be instrumental in our development and growth in Pleo.
We’re no better than our partners 💡
It’s obviously important to have reliable partners. Yet, it’s not trivial.
We have experienced the consequences of having an unstable partner. Our payment processor’s instability has unfortunately affected some of our customers. On those occasions, we failed to deliver the sublime user experience we are striving for every single day. This has led to us changing our setup to avoid this happening going forward. We’ll share more about that in 2018.
Our key learnings from this:
- Fintech is a complex space and as a startup, it’s hard or almost impossible to bring a product to market without partnerships. Going with a partner that is well-known in the industry and widely used by other players, is no guarantee of quality.
- In case your customers are affected by incidents make sure to be transparent and honest. We have been trying to be nothing but transparent and compassionate and it has been highly appreciated by our affected customers despite the incidents.
We have written about our next steps in the blog post back in November .
Always be shipping 🚢
Launching new features in a stable but quick rhythm is key to continue delivering value to our customers. In the past year, we have shipped a lot of new features (visualised in the picture above), yet we know we can do even better.
Having a solid and talented engineering team combined with lots of product iterations has helped us deliver new features that have improved workflows (some would even say lives) of our customers. Still, we’re ongoingly trying to professionalize our processes and maintaining a streamlined overview of user feedback and feature requests at scale.
We’ve recently started using ProductBoard and so far it helps us to a) capture and centralize customer feedback, b) organize and validate ideas and features and c) share roadmaps. We are confident that this will help us prioritize product development and ship features at a higher pace in 2018.
Our wish to you 🎊
We’re excited to enter 2018 with a great pool of learnings, an expanding team and most importantly – you as a valued customer.
Please continue to fuel us with your feedback and ideas and we will make sure to continue to simplify your business spending.
Cheers,
Jeppe, Nicco and the entire Pleo team