Among today’s career building finance pros who view the CFO office as their ultimate destination, Howard Wilson might be labeled an off-road commuter.
Whereas most finance leaders have shared a common view as accounting and finance milestones fell away in their rearview mirror, Wilson entered the finance realm from the merge lane – where his rearview revealed a roster of operational milestones and sales experiences. Having spent most of his early career altogether removed from the accounting cubicles, Wilson’s operational experiences began supplying added luster to his CFO credentials.
Read MoreIt’s no secret that as the CFO role has broadened, our CFO guests have been eager to highlight their operations experience, but as Howard Wilson’s career perhaps reveals, operations experience is no longer just a pit stop along the motorway of CFO career journeys. –Jack Sweeney
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CFOTL: Tell us about PagerDuty … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Wilson: At PagerDuty, our whole mission is to help our customers to manage most effectively their time-critical work that impacts their digital services. If you are any company that has an online environment or an app, it’s important for you to deliver the best experience to your end user. We help customers to do this by taking all of the machine data that’s coming from over 600 integrations in our ecosystem, as well as behavioral data around how people solve problems, and using this information to look for potential issues in your environment. If maybe your application is slowing down, we can get the right people onto the right problem in the right time frame. Basically, we orchestrate the right people around being able to ensure that customers can deliver the right experience. We do this by using a combination of a strong platform based on modern cloud technology plus also machine learning. This then allows us to harness both human capabilities and automation to be able to give the best result to the customer.
Read MoreCompared to many enterprises, we can deliver an astonishing ROI that can be along the lines of 800% with a 2-month payback. We often save millions of dollars for companies because these digital services have become so critical to how companies generate revenue. I have a set of priorities that are really about us continuing to grow sustainably.
But if I think about this particularly as a CFO, there are probably two areas of focus for me. One is really the growth of our team. How do I actually help our team to grow and to scale at the same pace as the business? This is important to me.
The second is really about finding ways to drive connection. We are not out of this pandemic environment, and it could be with us for some period of time. We are developing new ways of working, not just in our companies, but with our customers, with our investors, with our partners. I’ve set for myself as a personal priority the mission of trying to ensure that I develop new ways of connecting with all of the stakeholders in my community in order to make sure that I’m creating a really strong platform for working effectively. This is how we’re going to drive value. If you don’t have these connections, you’re not going to be able to drive value in the relationships. jb
PagerDuty | www.pagerduty.com | San Francisco, CA