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Ross Tennenbaum remembers that back in 2018, when he was a managing director at Goldman Sachs, he had conversations with a number of senior executives from Slack Technologies, Inc.

At the time, the fast-growing workplace messaging and communication platform was preparing to go public, and the company was making a special effort to educate bankers and analysts alike about the firm\u2019s business.\xa0As his questions became more pointed, Tennenbaum says, he noticed that members of Slack\u2019s senior management team would frequently permit other executives stationed along the conversation\u2019s periphery to supply the answers.

\u201cAt first, I thought that they served sort of a chief-of-staff type of role, but what I realized was that when the executive was pressed with a question, one of the\xa0sidekicks\xa0would always be turned to for the answer,\u201d explains Tennenbaum, who found his conversations with Slack to be highly informative.

Later, Tennenbaum learned that the sidekicks were members of Slack\u2019s business operations team, a cluster of analysts that he describes as being \u201ccousins\u201d to Slack\u2019s finance and FP&A teams.

\u201cThis team was incredible: They were so dialed in to the business, and they were partnered with Slack\u2019s executives, which allowed the latter to quickly make data-driven decisions,\u201d says Tennenbaum, who today, as CFO of software developer Avalara, is seeking to borrow a page from Slack and populate his own business operations and FP&A functions with teams of analysts on the ready to inform and supply answers to questions.

\u201cThis is about creating not just budgets but also operational plans that tie strategy and tactics to key metrics so that we can see when things are trending up or trending down and be able to more quickly take action,\u201d adds Tennenbaum, who believes that many businesses struggle due to a disconnect between what he calls \u201ctop-level metrics\u201d that are being widely shared and reported by the company and decision-making by \u201ceveryday operators\u201d often situated deep inside a company.

\u201cHow do we make these people feel a sense of ownership of the measure and feel more accountable when it comes to driving outcomes?\u201d asks Tennenbaum, who notes that a disconnect can occur even after a company has made an effort to push a metric deeper into the organization.

\u201cWhat happens is that they don\u2019t do a good job of updating the metrics every month, reviewing them and quickly assessing where they\u2019re on and off track, and course-correcting,\u201d comments Tennenbaum.

At Avalara, remedying the metrics disconnect is now a top priority for finance.

Says Tennenbaum: \u201cTo me, that\u2019s the impactful part of the CFO job.\u201d\xa0\u2013Jack Sweeney\xa0 Subscribe to our Newsletter