Planning Aces | John McCauley, CFO, Calendly

That can be a very challenging data problem because you have to enrich the data. You need the data to be accurate. You need to be able to track a subscription coming in and out. It is a very complex problem that we’re trying to solve here. I do spend a big chunk of my day on it, and Jack at our organization, I think we have a tremendous data and engineering team that reports up through our CTO, data science sits over there as well. We also have a data and analytics team that reports into me. These are the people who can take that data that’s been engineered and right now, it’s all about having a terrific data warehouse, which we’re using BigQuery over on the GCP, the Google Cloud.

Then, I’ve got my data and analytics people who are very good at writing the code to query that data and get us through where we want. Then, we do have an FP&A layer as well. And the FP&A layer, I use them as kind of translating, it’s speaking the language of the business and speaking the level of the data at a level that allows the data and analytics team to do their work. So, the way I think about it, FP&A really needs to design the questions we’re trying to answer. The data and analytics team needs to be able to write the queries to answer those questions and our data and engineering team has to put the data in a structure that we can query and get value out of it. So, everybody has their role. I can tell you this is an area that we’re evolving here. I’d say we’re mediocre at it right now, and we’re very focused on investing in getting better because those are the insights that allow us to run the company at a more strategic level.