Voice of the CFO: CFOs Take On Role as Efficiency Advisers, Help Connect Remote Teams, Stakeholders

As the chief financial officer (CFO) at Stack Overflow, Matthew Gallatin oversees financial operations for the knowledge-sharing platform. He’s also committed to communicating and exchanging information with others inside and outside the organization.

“The thing I try to spend the most time on is understanding the issue, providing context to my stakeholders, providing context to my team, so that they can do their job more effectively and I can be a resource to them in doing that,” Gallatin told PYMNTS.

Stack Overflow is visited by more than 100 million people each month — making it one of the 50 most visited websites worldwide. It also offers a collaboration platform called Stack Overflow for Teams.

Gallatin joined the company in September 2021 with nearly 30 years of leadership experience in finance, having served as CFO at Reltio, Drawbridge, OneLogin and ShareThis.

Finding Effective Ways to Communicate

Speaking with PYMNTS as part of its “Day in the Life of a Digital-First CFO” series, Gallatin said Stack Overflow had been a remote-first company for a long time, with the finance team distributed on the East Coast and the senior leadership team spread around the country.

So, with the stakeholders, Gallatin has figured out the most effective way to communicate with everyone, whether via Slack, a phone call or a Zoom meeting, so that he can provide the best service and build the best relationship.

With his team, Gallatin makes sure he engages with and remains accessible to his direct reports. Here, he aims to give them context around the organization’s objectives so they can do their job most effectively and independently.

Regarding customers, Stack Overflow has some who run advertising on the website and others who subscribe to the Teams product.

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Stack Overflow uses technology and automation to do a growing share of the invoicing and following up on collections so that the team can focus on the real pain points and the most challenging customers that are late with paying.

On the advertising side, the collections processes and invoicing processes are standard for that industry. On the subscriptions side, there are more bespoke types of payment processes, timelines and payment terms.

“Each side has their own position and, again, I’ve found if I provide context to the procurement person or the businessperson on the other side, or do that through my sales team, we can reach consensus on what’s mutually beneficial for both,” Gallatin said.

Delivering the Right Information

Another form of information sharing has to do with different data stacks that sit across the organization. Marketing, sales and finance each have their own tech stack that holds different pieces of information, so the company is working to extract that data and put it into a data warehouse or a Google spreadsheet so it can be used to inform forecasts, pipeline and visibility.

“That’s our biggest pain point, I would say, because a lot of that is manual right now,” Gallatin said. “So, we’re finding ways to leverage technology — whether it’s data lake or data warehouse — and pumping all that data into a central repository that anyone in the organization can use.”

The current macroeconomic conditions and wage inflation have also created a need for information. Stack Overflow aims to be competitive in any market where it’s hiring, so the team researches the bands of compensation for different roles in different markets.

Because the company wants to move aggressively in the hiring process to get great employees and get them onboarded quickly, it uses those bands and has internal discussions only when they need to go outside those bands.

“It just helps us operate a bit more effectively,” Gallatin said. “We partner pretty closely with our [human resources] team to constantly refine those so that we as service providers can deliver to our hiring managers the right information.”

See also: To Drive Modernization, CFOs Embrace Role Of Chief Collaborator