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Talk to, or about, CircleCI CFO Chitra Balasubramanian and you\u2019ll hear the word \u201cteam\u201d early and often. The phrase describes her leadership approach and to how her finance group equips colleagues with next-level business and customer insights.

Current and former colleagues will tell you how much value (and fun) she brings to any \u201csolve team.\u201d And Balasubramanian refers to her \u201cinsights team\u201d when discussing her group\u2019s FP&A activities \xa0at CircleCI, a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that helps developers do their work faster while ensuring high-quality code.

The key to delivering actionable business nights, Balasubramanian notes, includes creating clear problem statements and outcomes. When that clarity is wanting, Balasubramanian\u2019s insight team clicks into exploratory mode. Once the financial analysts have gleaned what the business needs to make better decisions, it\u2019s time to distill. \u201cWe don't want to simply relay a party bag full of information,\u201d Balasubramanian asserts. \u201cOur role is to deliver insights that are consumable and that immediately stimulate a productive dialogue among our stakeholders.\u201d

That those financial analyses could influence shareholder value marks a touchstone career moment for Balasubramanian, who previously worked at RetailNext. \u201cFinance teams have a lot of opportunities to lean in and drive the business forward,\u201d she adds. \u201cBy looking at customer data from a finance perspective, we can glean new insights that help other business stakeholders actually improve the end-customer experience.\u201d A focus on delivering beyond-finance insights is fitting given that Balasubramanian is the only CFO currently on the board of trustees team at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.