Data as a Product: The Skill Every Future CFO Needs

Technical accounting and financial analysis are table stakes for a finance leader. But when Ashok Manthena asked Caitlin Haberberger what essential CFO skill is missing from university curriculums, she immediately pointed to something different: Data Architecture.

"I think is really understanding how data flows across the entire organization, not just within finance and accounting," Caitlin explained.

Modern finance sits at the nexus of every data stream in the company—sales pipelines, marketing spend, operational efficiency, and payroll. A CFO who only looks at the "Finance" tab of the spreadsheet is missing the full picture.

To truly succeed, Caitlin suggests adopting a product mindset. Finance produces data products (reports, dashboards, models) for internal customers (Sales VPs, Marketing Heads, CEOs).

This means asking critical product questions: Is this report actually useful? Is the data timely? Does the sales team understand what "booking" means in this context?

When data quality becomes a shared business imperative rather than just "finance nagging about receipts," the entire organization moves faster and smarter.

Finance can no longer operate in a vacuum because data originates everywhere. Caitlin emphasized, "Data quality is still an issue... You have to have integrated data across the whole organization."

Ashok added that we are moving away from fragile "point solutions" that require constant maintenance. The future is an AI layer that can integrate disparate systems without the need for brittle ETL pipelines.

"With new AI tools, I think it will become much easier to integrate systems... AI can integrate a lot of point solutions into one platform," Ashok predicted.