00:20:41 · Praveer Melwani
[00:20:41] S0: Yeah. I 100% agree with you. I also think, like, how you share it, how you get other people to understand what other people are building, and then you end up in these scenarios where where, you know, our internal audit team is like, I... They spend a ton of time going and, like, following up with individuals to make sure that they're adding information, you know, on the tickets that they needed so it could be trackable for our SOC... Our SOX audit. And then you're like, well, you know, that internal audit team is not the only team that does that. You know, our GRCs team is doing the same thing as they go through, like, all of our ISO and SOC two audits as well. You know, you have a bunch of this back and forth on the AP side when they're going and writing accruals. Like, you you wanted to go and build this motion of going and triaging, pulling information in, reconciling it, and why not go and build a singular platform that does that? This is actually where I think, like, you know, a systems team is really, really interesting to come in and then harmonize some of the things that you see are happening, really productize it so that you don't have all these individuals going and building similar things. That, I think, is like the evolution of what a CIO function should or could be. It's like how do you go and you take a lot of these bottoms up things that people have crafted and you have it you have it be rebuilt and repurposed in a way that can live on beyond the creator and the and the initial builder. So I I I, you know, I think that that that cross org sharing, we're doing some of it at our at our, you know, at our all... Company all hands, but we're also doing a lot of it internally across our teams.
00:21:55 · Seema Amble
[00:21:55] S1: I was also talking to another one of our growth stage companies. The head of customer success was saying every one of his reps had a different dashboard that they had vibe coded and they had different numbers. Yeah. And so I think to your point, there has to be some reconciling function, which was a great segue to hear from you guys around what are people doing in terms of the teams that should be building this? And who's taking the agency? Is it, you know, someone initially builds an agent from your team and then you're taking it to an engineering team sent... Live test centrally. And we talked a lot about this idea of the finance engineer, which we can unpack further, but we'd love to hear a little bit about.
00:22:38 · Praveer Melwani, Ivan Makarov
[00:22:38] S0: Yeah. I I think, like, you know, I think we've always had... I think having specialists come up with the ideas and iterate, they know what good looks like. They know what they want. They know the process that they're that they're trying to make look right. Like, they're fantastic in going... At going about building these initial prototypes. But do I want that same individual to be the individual that has to go and make sure that they're checking for all upstream dependencies and making sure that, like, you know, if they were ever to leave that, like, this thing is hosted in the right way. And, hey, does anyone else across the organization have the same need? Probably not. This is where I think, like, you know, a world class CIO org can can come in and really show some magic here. Yeah. I'm really excited. We just had a new CIO join yesterday, a guy named Casper Sorensen who joined over from Coinbase. And a lot of what we talked about a lot in the interview process is how do you create these centralized PM type functions within the CIO organization that can partner with the rest of the business teams, find the things that are really working, and then build these foundations that others can build on top of, which is not too dissimilar from how a systems organization would have functioned otherwise, but the pace that you can iterate on, and then how you can empower others to build on top is what is changing right now. Is it centralized right now within the company? [00:23:55] S2: Do you see that changing? Would eventually Yeah.
00:23:55 · Ivan Makarov, Praveer Melwani, Seema Amble
[00:23:55] S2: Do you see that changing? Would eventually Yeah. [00:23:58] S0: So as is all things at Figma, I think we've grown faster than we've built, you know, the tools to support it. And, you know, it's on me to always empower the organization to build, and then I'll... I don't want to slow people down by creating the infrastructure on top of it, and so I think we're chasing a little bit of that right now. I think with some teams, we've done a better job centralizing that. And with other teams, I think, you know, they've they've built far far quicker, and I think we're now having the process of saying, okay. Well, how can we go and help? So I think we're in the messy middle right now. [00:24:27] S1: Mhmm. I think that resonates with a lot of what we're hearing from our companies, whether it's a go to market engineer, a talent engineer, this concept of the finance engineer. It's a decentralized set of builders across teams. It could have different profiles. Sometimes it's someone who has an engineering background on finance who's good at kind of thinking about what workflows need to be automated. Other times, it's... We borrowed someone from us, a product engineer from another team to go build. But, you know, I think I think everyone's in this messy middle right now in terms of of what what that profile of person looks like.
00:25:04 · Praveer Melwani
[00:25:04] S0: A lot of it reminds me of data science teams and how they partner with other parts of the organization as well. And you as a data science partner are like, you know, the deeper you get into understanding the context of the team that you're working with, like, the better I think you you operate as a as a... As an individual. So, you know, we've got data science individuals that are partnering with our product team. They build as much, if not more product intuition than our than our product managers and engineers, and they're viewed as part of that core team that can go and help ideate and push change, and they're just leveraging a different tool in order to enable that. Similarly, we've got folks on, you know, the data science side that are supporting our finance organization. It's actually really interesting. Like, the folks that I think have been devoted there actually come from accounting backgrounds, a couple of them. And they understand that, like, hey. This stuff has gotta be, like, really, really hard and can't... And always correct. They understand the nuances that we're describing on, like, checks and balances. What is a refund? What is it, you know, uncollectible? All that all that kind of all all that kind of nomenclature, and so it actually enables them to be better builders. And, similarly, I could see that translate to, like, you know, the the, you know, the finance engineer that you're describing. You have some shared understanding of what is necessary. You could build that context over time, but at least, like, you... It's important to at least, like, build that major so that you can also go and push other people's frame of thinking as well.
00:26:20 · Ivan Makarov
[00:26:20] S2: Who owns the definitions? Like, the reason why I'm asking this question, especially we see it in an early stage, where it could be a team of 20 people, just founders, and no finance or business people, and then eventually they bring in them on. But they're building definitions of key metrics that serve reporting, that serve investors, and really business decisions. And eventually finance gets hired. Where the definitions, how often would you... It feels like in the past, we used to revisit them maybe every couple of years, where now, because you can access the code or you can access the Stripe logic much easier with AI, has that changed much? How often do you visit it? I mean Yeah.