What is a business systems lead or revenue product manager?
One of the most promising emerging roles for many fast-growing digital company finance teams is the role of a technically-savvy business systems lead or revenue product manager. They are responsible for owning the company’s end-to-end revenue systems infrastructure, owning the process that starts with orders, billing, and payment service providers like Stripe, Adyen, and Paypal and ends with general ledger entries in the ERP.
Finance teams have used Excel, the lingua franca of finance, to analyze the business for generations. But the transaction scale of modern digital companies and the need to marry data from custom billing engines with multiple payment processors makes Excel clunky and slow at best, and often impossible to use altogether. Instead, some teams turn to custom-built solutions using data warehouses, or trying to stuff all the data into their GL system, which isn’t designed to handle it.
Consequently, business systems teams have emerged — at companies like SeatGeek, Canva, Reddit, and many others — to bridge the gap with a combination of finance domain expertise and technical savvy to build, scale, and maintain an ecosystem of modern finance applications: the modern finance stack.
Should you hire a revenue product manager?
If your company is approaching 50,000 transactions a month or more, it’s very likely Excel is becoming almost impossible to use as the connective tissue between orders, payments, and the general ledger.
If you have multiple payment providers, the challenges only get magnified.
And if you’re finding that the demands of finance to understand the business in a GAAP-compliant way are starting to outrun your ability to provide the relevant data at the right level of detail, you’re definitely overdue to rethink your revenue management approach.
What should you look for when hiring a business systems lead or revenue product manager?
If the challenges above sound familiar and you’re considering hiring your first person in this role, what should you look for? Here are some key points to consider in your job posting.
Description:
- Act as the product manager to design, build, maintain, and scale best of breed finance applications
- Provide support for day-to-day operations
- Work closely with Finance, IT, and Product/engineering teams
- Configure dashboards, reports, and saved searches that will enable us to craft timely and accurate financial reporting
- Serve as a primary resource for functional and technical ERP, AP, Treasury, and data platform support
- Execute quarterly SOX compliance
- Build and manage integrations between finance stack and other systems
Profile
- Experience supporting finance systems at a high growth, global tech company
- Deep NetSuite expertise in advanced modules such as Multi-Book Accounting, Advanced Billing, or Fixed Asset Management modules
- Experience working hands-on with a finance team, ideally in both B2B and B2C accounting experiences (you understand transaction flows and processes)
- Experience operating in and building an auditable and compliant software ecosystem
