Head of Strategic Insights
Intro
At Pleo, we’re on a mission to revolutionise the way businesses manage company spending. No more outdated processes, clunky spreadsheets, or frustrating delays - we believe spend management should be seamless, empowering, and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike. We’re creating tools that promote autonomy, foster trust, and let businesses focus on what truly matters.
Our culture is built on transparency, collaboration, innovation, and a deep commitment to outstanding customer experiences which is reflected in our spending solution. At Pleo, you’ll join a passionate team that shapes the future of work, all while having fun along the way.
About the role
We're looking for a Head of Strategic Insights to lead our centralised Strategic Insights team at Pleo.
In this role, you'll form and lead the brand new customer, market and competitor insights team and be part of central strategy function that guides brand, product and customer experience, and lays the strategic foundations for Pleo’s long-term success.
If you're excited about insights-driven innovation and passionate about turning deep human understanding into business impact in B2B fintech, then this is the opportunity for you!
A quick heads-up: this role will close on October 24th. We're keeping the application window short to ensure we can give every candidate the attention they deserve. So if you're even slightly tempted after reading about the opportunity below, don't overthink it, apply today!
What you’ll be doing
As a Head of Strategic Insights, you will:
- Form, manage and develop the Strategic Insights team responsible for market, competitor and customer insight that help our colleagues pre-validate potential bets with robust evidence.
- Strengthen the insights-to-innovation process by synthesising and packaging existing data in a centralised knowledge infrastructure.
- Deliver market and customer foresight that informs company strategy, anticipating shifts in needs, behaviours, and competitive dynamics and being opinionated about which ones the business should respond to.
- Act as a thought leader by embedding customer centricity into the culture and decision-making processes across the organisation.
What you bring
You’ll thrive in this role if you have:
- 10+ years of experience in strategy, insights and innovation, with a background in anthropology, psychology, sociology or similar. Product strategy, service design and/or management consulting will be a big plus.
- Proven ability to turn qualitative and quantitative insights into strategic foresight that influences executive decision-making.
- Demonstrated track record of driving customer-centric transformation in complex B2B environments.
- Strong leadership skills with experience managing small, high-impact teams.
- Excellent communicator and storyteller, able to evangelise insights across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- The ability to comfortably balance deep research with pragmatic, time-sensitive decision support.
Who you’ll be working with and reporting to
Our cross-functional Strategic Insights team of 3 is highly collaborative and dedicated to ensuring that customer, market and competitor context informs every strategic decision made at Pleo. But you’ll not be alone on this mission! You’ll be partnering with teams across the company such as Data & Analytics, User Research & Design, Marketing and Product.
You will report to our Senior Director of Brand & Innovation within the CPO led org and be part of the leadership of the Brand & Innovation function, which also includes the teams Product Value, Brand Strategy and Localisation. You will interact with senior leaders across Go-To-Market and Product areas to ensure the entire business works off the same market and customer insights and makes it part of the company tissue.
How you’ll develop in this role
In your first 6 months at Pleo, you will:
- Form a fully-fledged Strategic Insights team and set it up for success in a fast-moving organisation.
- Lead an ambitious and highly-awaited initiative to refresh Pleo’s Ideal Customer Profile, segmentation and unify and sharpen our strategic customer understanding.
- Collaborate with Strategy, Product Leadership and User & Product Research to identify key industry or market opportunities to support future direction.
Please note: We are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role in any of the listed locations you find in the job info.
Show me the benefits!
- Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending!)
- Lunch is on us for your work days - enjoy catered meals or receive a lunch allowance based on your local office 🍜
- Comprehensive private healthcare - depending on your location, coverage options include Vitality, Alan or Médis
- We offer 25 days of holiday + your public holidays
- For our Team, we offer both hybrid and fully remote working options
- Option to purchase 5 additional days of holiday through a salary sacrifice
- We use MyndUp to give our employees access to free mental health and well-being support with great success so far ❤️🩹
- Paid parental leave - we want to make sure that we're supportive of families and help you feel that you don't have to compromise your family due to work 👶
Why join us?
Working at Pleo means you're working on something very exciting: the future of work. Our mission is to help every company go beyond the books. Pleo itself means ‘more than you’d expect’, and it’s been the secret to our success over the last 8 years. So it’s only fitting that we’d pass this philosophy onto our customers to help them make the most of their finances.
We think company spending should be delegated to all employees and teams, that it should be as automated as possible, and that it should drive a culture of responsible spending. Finance teams shouldn’t be siloed from the rest of the organisation – they should work in unity with marketing, sales, IT and everyone else.
Speaking of working in unity, our values tell the story of how we work at Pleo. We have four core values, the first of which is ‘champion the customer’, which means we address real pain points that businesses face. Next up is ‘succeed as a team’, which highlights how our strength lies in our diversity and trust in each other. We also ‘make it happen’ by taking bold decisions and following through to deliver results. Last but not least, we ‘build to scale’, creating lasting solutions that address today’s challenges and anticipate tomorrow’s needs.
So, in a nutshell, that's Pleo. Today we are a 850+ team, from over 100 nations, sitting in our Copenhagen HQ, London, Stockholm, Berlin, Madrid, Montreal and Lisbon offices —and quite a few full-time remotes in 35 other countries! Being HQ'd out of Copenhagen means we're inspired by things like a good work-life balance. If you don't work in the office with us, we'll help you set up the best remote setup possible and make sure you still have time to connect with your team.
About your application
- Please submit your application in English; it’s our company language so you’ll be speaking lots of it if you join 💕
- We treat all candidates equally: If you are interested please apply through our application system - any correspondence should come from there! Our lovely support isn't able to pass on any calls/ emails our way - and this makes sure that the candidate experience is smooth and fair to everyone 😊
- We’re on a mission to make everyone feel valued at work. That’s only achievable if our team reflects the diversity of the world around us - and that starts with you, hitting apply, even if you are worried you might not tick all the boxes! We embrace and encourage people from all backgrounds to apply - regardless of race/ethnicity, colour, religion, nationality, gender, sex, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, neurodiversity, socio-economic status, culture or beliefs.
- When you submit an application we process your personal data as a data processor. Find out more about how your data is used in the FAQs section at the bottom of our jobs page.
Got any questions?
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How Pleo hires
1
The first call(s)
Let’s get to know each other. We want to find out more about you, your motivations, and give you more information about the role.
2
The challenge
The task is deliberately open-ended and based on something you'll actually work on. There are no right or wrong answers here.
3
The team interview
Expect to share a (virtual) meeting room with two to three people you'll work with regularly if you get the job.
4
The final interview
A call with someone in leadership who’ll walk you through the big picture and chat about how your role will figure into that.
FAQ
This is a big decision for both of us. If you join us, we’ll spend a lot of time together working on some pretty cool things. That's why we've designed a hiring process that allows everyone to make the right choice. Read more about how we hire here.