FP&A Today

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.

43:18

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Episode guests

Parth Kalunari

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Episode notes

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Quick takeaways

Product-led growth can reimagine financial planning and support business by optimizing different parts of the customer journey.

FP&A underpinned by product-led growth takes a bottoms up approach, focusing on critical upstream metrics to build forecasts and projections.

Establishing processes and standardization in FP&A can save time, enable ad hoc analysis, and drive efficient decision-making.

Deep dives

The Power of Processes and Standardization

The speaker shares an aha moment when working in e-commerce, emphasizing the importance of establishing processes and standardization. By creating a standardized framework for reporting and automating certain tasks, the team was able to save time, focus on ad hoc analysis, and make effective and fast decisions. This experience led the speaker to value processes and standardization in driving efficient decision-making.

Introduction

4min

Transitioning from Engineering to FP&A

14min

Challenges in FP&A Processes and the Evolving Role of FP&A Professionals

4min

Owning the Outcome: The Role of FP&A

8min

Deriving Insights from Data

7min

Driving Standardization and Efficiency

6min

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