Hej Davina!

I'm Frederick Andersen, a designer who writes code. I run EDL, a design engineering studio ten minutes from Pleo's Copenhagen HQ. Let's build Telescope into the foundation for Pleo's next 40,000 companies.

I read that you taught yourself to code because the tools in front of you weren't enough. Different decade, same itch. That itch is why EDL exists. We're a studio where the people who design and the people who build sit in the same chair.

Below is what we see. A system every team at Pleo builds on, a staff search that will take months, and the work we'd start while you look. It won't take much from you or your team.

The Facts

All of Pleo, resting on one system

Telescope holds 100+ components across web and mobile, plus the tokens, patterns and docs that keep 850+ people building one coherent product. It's the quiet kind of critical infrastructure. When it works, nobody notices. When it drifts, 40,000 companies notice before you do.

100+
components in Telescope, across web and mobile, from one source of truth
40,000+
businesses sit in front of Telescope every working day
€164M
of yearly revenue crosses screens built on it. The system is the storefront

The neighbourhood got crowded.

Payhawk markets loudly. Ramp and Brex are pointed at Europe with American war chests behind them. A buyer comparing spend platforms can't benchmark your ledger, so they benchmark your interface. Coherence is the cheapest trust Pleo can buy, and Telescope is where coherence comes from.

And the product is changing shape.

Pleo is rebuilding around agentic AI. Every AI feature is new interface, and the patterns for it are still being invented across the industry. The teams shipping those features will lean on Telescope harder than they ever have. A system that only knows buttons and forms is about to get questions it has never heard.

Hiring Staff Engineer, Design Systems Pleo · Design Systems team

We read the Staff Engineer posting. Closely.

Most staff postings ask for a person. Yours asks for outcomes. Evolve the contribution model. Own how requests flow into the team. Automate visual testing. Measure adoption and system health. Rebuild the docs pipeline. And still write code a meaningful part of the time.

That's not a job description. That's a roadmap with a salary band.

Keep the search running. You should absolutely hire that person. But the people who can do all five are rare, and searches at this level take months. Meanwhile Pleo ships every week, and every week the queue your staff engineer will inherit gets a little longer.

The best welcome gift you can give them is momentum. A contribution model already humming, and adoption already on a dashboard. They arrive and lead, instead of arriving and digging.

Strengthen the foundation once and 40,000 companies feel it. Forever.

The Claim

Telescope, measured

Your posting asks for adoption metrics, visual testing and a healthier request flow. So we started building the measuring tool, in your own UI. This is me walking through it.

A walkthrough of the real tool · video

No mock UI in this letter. The video shows the real tool, built in code against Telescope's public documentation. It's maybe 10% of the way there. The other 90% needs your repos and your team.

10%
built, on our time
90%
needs your team and your repos
Proof

We've been here before

Propbinder

A property platform drowning in dense tables and document flows. We rebuilt it on a design system that hit 86% adoption. Nobody policed it. It was simply faster to use than to work around.

AXON Maestro, an AI assistant answering a network engineer with a QoE score gauge

AXON Networks

A design system for an AI networking product. Patterns for when the machine explains itself and when a human takes over. It won an innovation award. The same patterns matter when an agent starts spending your customers' money.

[ AUTOBUDGETS
product imagery ]

Autobudgets

B2B budgeting software, so your corner of the world. Three weeks from kickoff to production. We work in sprints that end in shipped software, because working prototypes beat presentations.

Next step

Let's build this together.
I've kept Wednesday, August 19 open for a chat.

fa@edl.dk Frederick Andersen

P.S. We're at Gothersgade 10C, ten minutes from your Copenhagen office. The first coffee is on us. We'll file it under customer research.