00:33:43 · Praveer Melwani
[00:33:43] S0: I feel fortunate that, like, you know, as I've grown within the company that, like, that has taken up more and more of my role. And then as I then think about, like, what what is exciting for others, like, I also recognize, like, for me to have... That there's benefit in me creating that same space for other people within the organization. So, yes, there are things that, like, we'll have to do as daily rhythms or weekly rhythms. But in the same breath, like, if I can get... Like, take our take our... We have a finance organization that's split in one of the one of the pillars is go to market. If I can take the team that's focused on our self serve business and immediately get them out of reconciling last last week or last month or whatever it is, and then very much more focused on what are the experiments we're running, what are the trends that we're seeing, where are the dollars that we should... What what are the additional dollars that we should be spending on? Like, that is way more engaging to them. And I think they're actually able to do more of that now. Like, it's it's like such... It's... Some of the little things here matter so much. It's like, how can I go and automate the creation of a set of materials that I know it's gonna look and feel the exact same way and, you know, then focus my time on the annotation, the discovery, the understanding? And we've seen we've seen that start to get a lot a lot faster and the quality of that improve. And, you know, we even had one of, like, the... I was actually the leader of that team get up and talk about, like, how he had gone and created a set of plug ins to go and, you know, in Figma to go and ideate on this stuff really quickly. So, you know, I I I would hope that my team is telling me that they're spending a growing share of their time on that on that bucket of things. But you're always gonna have to chase, you know, the complexity in your business and managing the complexity with, like, how much time you're able to reserve for for the other pieces.
00:35:15 · Seema Amble
[00:35:15] S1: Totally. One of the things that we're seeing in the CFO tools that we've invested in is the product is moving away from, you know, tracking workflow towards providing a result. And then part of the product is the the the audit trail. So, obviously, finance needs to make sure everything's correct. You need to be able to track where... You know, how the the product came to a particular reconciliation, for example. But then it's done for you. So it's that balance of both having the audit trail and the and the results. But we're definitely seeing our team spend more time doing things like running experiments and doing things that used to take like a month long research study. You had to pull in some from data science and like, chased out a bunch of people over email, get everyone in a room. And now you can quickly iterate on this because you can... Yeah. You can... You have agents running the background.
00:36:08 · Praveer Melwani, Seema Amble
[00:36:08] S0: And it could even... And it's even things on, like, the accounting side, like flux analysis. Right? Like, you're you spending time as an accountant going through and trying to reviewing the GL accounts for period over period. If you can leverage a tool, I know there's a whole bunch of tools now out there that give you that initial sort of stab at what has changed, that gives them a set of things that they can go and chase. It gives them an initial set of things, and maybe it's right away, and I'd love for that to be more and more true. And then they focus their time elsewhere. And so I I I fully expect that, like, the spirit of where you're going, like, that that, like, initial draft, that initial sort of set set of expectation, that initial sort of idea of what to go and and pull the thread on can can be surfaced via tools. It's kinda where I was going when I was talking about that T and E piece. Right? Like, it was giving our team sets of threads that they can go and pull and then us enough gut to go and and chase it too. [00:36:54] S1: Right. You have the the data and then now the time to go, you know, address those second order questions and see what... What's behind... What's what's going on.
00:36:54 · Seema Amble, Ivan Makarov
[00:36:54] S1: Right. You have the the data and then now the time to go, you know, address those second order questions and see what... What's behind... What's what's going on. [00:37:02] S2: Yeah. I was thinking, Jah, how when we grow up, the word reconciliation was a very negative word. It was associated with a lot of bad memories and a lot of weeks and months spent on trying to chase something where now it's just something you do, or maybe it's even a positive word because you can can solve it much easier, quicker with the modern tools and with AI, and and find maybe not exactly where the errors are, but just get there so much quicker. Mhmm. And then you still need, obviously, to go talk to people as FP and A will always continue to be the Yeah. The people the people discipline.
00:37:02 · Ivan Makarov, Praveer Melwani
[00:37:02] S2: Yeah. I was thinking, Jah, how when we grow up, the word reconciliation was a very negative word. It was associated with a lot of bad memories and a lot of weeks and months spent on trying to chase something where now it's just something you do, or maybe it's even a positive word because you can can solve it much easier, quicker with the modern tools and with AI, and and find maybe not exactly where the errors are, but just get there so much quicker. Mhmm. And then you still need, obviously, to go talk to people as FP and A will always continue to be the Yeah. The people the people discipline. [00:37:32] S0: Yeah. I I... You know, it's one of those things I think I underplayed or I under... I I didn't realize how important communication, relationship building, your ability to go and influence was to this role. I probably walked in feeling like I could be the smartest person in the room and figure it all out, but then I realized it's a team sport regardless, and you can only go and affect so much change, and you then really do have to go and get other people to to be on the same page with you. And if you can do that effectively, I think you can be a effective leader. But, you know, those are sort of, like, the, I think, the true skills that I can tell... You're you're asking earlier about, like, you know, what am I screening for? If I if I can test and get a sense that you're, like... You you have this ability to build really solid followership, you have this ability to go and build trust with others, like, that's so invaluable.
00:37:32 · Praveer Melwani, Seema Amble
[00:37:32] S0: Yeah. I I... You know, it's one of those things I think I underplayed or I under... I I didn't realize how important communication, relationship building, your ability to go and influence was to this role. I probably walked in feeling like I could be the smartest person in the room and figure it all out, but then I realized it's a team sport regardless, and you can only go and affect so much change, and you then really do have to go and get other people to to be on the same page with you. And if you can do that effectively, I think you can be a effective leader. But, you know, those are sort of, like, the, I think, the true skills that I can tell... You're you're asking earlier about, like, you know, what am I screening for? If I if I can test and get a sense that you're, like... You you have this ability to build really solid followership, you have this ability to go and build trust with others, like, that's so invaluable. [00:38:21] S1: That's a a good segue into what I wanted to chat about next, which is what do we think changes in the next twelve to eighteen months for the team and the role and the function overall? I don't know if you guys have any points of view on on what might change. Maybe let's start off talking about how your team even is organized.