Paul Barnhurst argues FP&A teams need to teach and learn from the rest of the business. When a unit lost 30% of customers and missed product deadlines, FP&A showed engineers and product staff how their decisions hit the bottom line. Many didn't realize the connection.
~30%
Paul Barnhurst
October 30, 2025
FP and A often teaches but if we don't learn we're going to fail. Bottom line it's not a one way street here working for a company. And we had one of the businesses that the numbers were awful. We'd lost like 30% of our customers, you know just not a good situation. It was continuing. We had a product that we couldn't get to market. We tried failed, tried failed. And I go to the product team, the product manager was like could you come in and talk about kind of give them an idea of where we're at financially, what's going on in the business. And these were just an engineer, developer, product manager, whatever, not leaders. There might have been some directors in there but managers, junior analysts, whatever and they got done. A lot of came to me. I had no idea, didn't realize how much my decisions are impacting the business and how difficult of a situation we're in.
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