Early in my career, working as a junior finance person in a tech start-up, I used to hear people rushing past my desk muttering about something called a "roadmap" and how it had to change again, and there weren't enough "sprints." I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. A roadmap? Maybe they were planning a road trip. I genuinely didn't care. It had nothing to do with finance as far as I could tell.
As my career progressed, I learned that this was the product roadmap. A list of new features, which teams were building what, which important customer was driving the prioritisation of a particular piece of work, and what had now been pushed out by another four sprints. I also eventually learned that a sprint was a block of work. Good to know.
It wasn't until I was in senior finance roles that I realised the product roadmap was one of the best sources of information available for financial planning and budgeting. Everything on it explains why costs are going up, and how the business expects to make more money from customers as a result.
When additional resources are needed for a short period, the roadmap tells you why there's suddenly an outsourcing invoice that's never appeared before. It tells you why costs have jumped, or why a customer is now on a higher price point. The numbers make a lot more sense when you understand what's driving them.
Two words come up constantly in tech companies and both deserve your full attention: "legacy" and "replatform."
Legacy usually refers to a customer or a product that's been around for a while and no longer fits the direction the business wants to go. Some kind of transition needs to happen, and it's rarely simple. If people are talking about legacy, it's almost always because those customers are generating significant revenue. Tread carefully.
Replatform is the flip side. It's expensive, time-consuming, genuinely important, and somehow always getting pushed back for something else. Keep an eye on it. It will come up again.
Product knowledge is, in my view, one of the most underrated parts of being an effective CFO. You can't make good resourcing decisions or help allocate budget properly when you don't understand what the business is actually trying to build, at the feature level, not just the strategy slide level.
So here's what I'd suggest. Sit in on product demos. Don't hijack them with finance questions; just listen and learn. Pay attention to how what you're seeing connects to cost increases, new revenue lines, or new partner relationships that will eventually show up as financial transactions. Understand what's on the roadmap, what's changed since last month, and why. Because it will change. Often. That's fine once you stop being surprised by it.
Talk to your CEO regularly about the roadmap and what the financial implications of any shifts might be. And talk to the product people. This is the easy part. Product people, almost universally, love talking about product. You will not struggle to get them to explain things. Point them in the right direction and get out of the way.
Amy Larfield is the CFO at Compono, an Australian people and culture platform that combines hiring, culture, and learning with people insight.