Director, Product & Platform Central Finance

Director, Product & Platform Central Finance

Location: San Francisco, CA preferred given business partner location. Any US/Canada location willing to work West Coast hours considered

Work Arrangement: Hybrid

Position Overview

Reporting to the Head of Corporate and Product Finance, the Director of Product & Platform Central Finance will be responsible for shaping strategy and facilitating the continuous advancement of our product strategic finance function. This Director will partner with the business for key deliverables and projects and will collaborate with our other five product and platform finance teams.

This leader will achieve this through (a) developing a strategy & roadmap for product strategic finance, (b) creating consistent approaches for new/existing deliverables, and (c) create efficiencies by centralizing, standardizing and automating processes that are common across the product and platform finance teams.

The right candidate will demonstrate the ability to partner with C-Level executives and with peer finance leaders supporting the Autodesk product and platform teams. This Director also collaborates deeply with other finance leaders in FP&A, accounting, tax, IR and treasury. This leader attracts, develops and retains world-class corporate finance talent.

Responsibilities

• Industry/Product topline and unit economics reporting and analytics: Drive consistent industry and product level topline reporting, forecasting, root cause analytics to support timely performance insights and decision making. Drive product and platform financials and insights for QBRs.
• Industry/product portfolio management: Design and maintain a consistent portfolio approach to optimize our allocation of product investments. Develop and provide consistent unit economics reporting and insights by industry and product. Develop and align on allocation principles and methodologies. Work with peer and technology teams to evolve data availability and reporting.
• Product pricing and packaging financial analytics: Establish and evolve pricing and packaging analysis playbooks to support pricing and promotion decisions. Ensure access to relevant cost and topline data. Share findings with executives and influence decision making, including at regular pricing committee meetings.
• Industry/Product strategic and annual planning: Develop process and templates supporting Autodesk's financial long-range and annual planning by industry and product. Manage the product and platform finance calendar. Program-manage and review to ensure world-class quality in planning outputs. Consolidate across the product and platform teams.
• Industry/Product hierarchy management: Evolve the product hierarchy for internal and external reporting addressing both internal needs and investor expectations.
• Automation and AI Adoption: Drive automation of all repeatable product and platform finance processes. Represent product and platform finance for finance or cross-company automation initiatives. Drive adoption of company AI tools to increase insights and efficiencies in supporting our business partners.
• Industry/Product Board and CEO-Staff communication: Contribute to the Board and CEO-Staff materials for the key milestones of our strategic and annual planning process. There is also opportunity to read out key product and platform finance projects (e.g. unit economics) to the engineering CEO-Staff members during their regular meetings.
• M&A: Develop playbooks for the product and platform finance teams to conduct financial modeling and evaluation of potential deals, including due diligence and integration. For certain deals, leader may need to step in and support the deal directly.
• Spend management: Centralize, standardize and automate headcount and spend processes, such as forecasting, closing, and spend analytics. Simplify and delete steps and processes wherever feasible.
• Lead team: Design organizational structure, capacity and capabilities needed. Attract, retain and develop a team of top performing finance professionals.

Minimum Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in strategic finance roles, especially in financial planning & analysis, ideally at a large public software company
• Proven experience in product and go-to-market/corporate FP&A
• Proven experience in partnering with C-Level executives at large public companies
• Experience in finance support of M&A deals
• Experience in both SaaS and Consumption business planning, operating, reporting and pricing & packaging
• Strong accounting and financial planning process and systems leadership experience with a proven track record of excelling in high-performance, analytic and data-driven cultures
• Skilled at working across multiple levels, including high level strategy and insights thinking to disciplined processes leadership of complex planning cycles
• Solution-driven, innovative, and creative mindset
• Zero-defect and principles-first mindset
• Ability to be hands-on where needed Modeling and analytical skills are key to be a role model for the team
• Proven track record of financial systems, process & tools improvement/automation
• Strong people leader with proven experience managing global teams and a demonstrated track record of building & elevating high performing teams
• Excellent communication, presentation and facilitation skills with a proven ability to work collaboratively & influence across all levels of leadership
• Ability to travel approximately 20% of the time
• Bachelor's degree in finance, business, accounting, economics; MBA preferred
• Background in management consulting, investment banking, or equity research preferred