FP&A and product-led growth at Adobe

Nov 14, 2023

Parth Kalunari, Head of FP&A at Adobe Express, discusses the FP&A team's approach to product-led growth, adopting a bottoms-up modeling approach, understanding the customer journey, and building financial planning around it. He also shares his transition from engineering to FP&A and the importance of data analytics in his role.

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ANECDOTE

Forecasting In A Complex Shipping Business

Parth managed the P&L for a shipping labels business facing marketplace dynamics, supplier complexity, and geopolitical risk.
He balanced vendor contracts, supply-chain disruptions, and volatile e-commerce demand in forecasting.

ANECDOTE

From Engineering To FP&A

Parth Kolkarni leveraged engineering problem-solving to move into analytics and finance.
He discovered FP&A organically in early roles and pursued analytics education to transition.

ADVICE

Five Pillars For FP&A Success

Do build business acumen, data intuition, storytelling, finance/tech skills, and strong business partnering.
Apply these five pillars to move from operational reporting to strategic FP&A roles.

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Product led growth is a business strategy and philosophy that puts the product at the center and the key driver for customer acquisition, activation, adoption, and retention. Parth Kulkarni, Head of FP&A, Adobe Express, recounts his chance to reimagine FP&A using product-led growth. He explains the process leading the FP&A team powering Adobe Express – a major new AI-driven product at the software giant (Adobe is competing with companies such as Canva and Microsoft Designer).

Kulkarni says: “We optimized different parts of the customer journey by adopting product led growth. From an FP&A perspective it was a fantastic opportunity for me and my team to reimagine the way that we approached financial planning and, and supported the business.”

Describing the approach of FP&A underpinned by product-led growth, he says: “We tend to forecast based on historicals. But here we took a much more bottoms up approach in our modeling, starting with building forecasts and projections around every single critical upstream metric – whether it’s acquisitions, how customers are really engaging with the product, or what kind of conversion rates are we seeing in the product, or what kind of retention we are seeing. I got the opportunity to actually understand the customer journey, translate that into a financial model, and then build my financial planning around that.

Kulkarni, with training and a background in engineering, recounts his path to FP&A and why a background in data analytics is a perfect route to a top job.

In this episode:

Kulkarni’s path from Data analytics to FP&A as Senior Manager of FP&A at eBay – business partnering with the Merchandising / Shipping & Logistics Business and Product Teams. Followed by his career at Adobe.
Moving from analytics to FP&A and why it is a perfect route
Four proven pillars to become a successful FP&A professional
The tested formula to get a seat at the table in finance
My framework for analyzing data to get the juiciest insights – SCQA framework explained
My aha moment in FP&A automating ecommerce/holiday space reports
Tabla playing and love of Indian classical music
Steve Jobs and what we can learn about his relentless desire to understand the consumer

The SCQA framework explained by Parth

Follow Parth Kulkarni on LinkedIn

Catch the full episode on YouTube