Do CFO / COO / CIO Become 1 Role?

This week we have the following CFOs answering your reader questions:

If your question is picked for the Mailbag, you’ll win a Mostly Metrics Yeti Rambler ($84 economic value, unlimited street cred).

Topics for today:

Now let’s get into it!

I don’t think these roles fully merge, but the overlap is legit and getting larger.

The CFO is increasingly the connective tissue between strategy, data, AI, and risk (especially when you think about customer data/privacy in an HR/payroll software business like mine). AI pushes this hard because finance sits closest to the source of truth and can better articulate the trade-offs.

If you want to be a CFO in ~5 years, the job is less about accounting mastery and more about judgment: capital allocation and understanding how AI changes messy data into decisions. You don’t need to code, but you do need to understand systems, incentives, and where the bottlenecks are. The lines between CFO and COO are definitely blurring.

I don’t think there’s a single, final version of the CFO role. Job titles can be misleading, and context really matters.

From my career - at Coda, Superhuman, and Google - the CFO title meant something different at each place. The industry matters too. For example, a software CFO needs to understand AI, data, and product speed, while a manufacturing CFO needs to deeply understand the movement of physical goods. The skills and work should match how the business creates value.

The other big variable is the management team you’re on. Organizations adapt to the people within them. I’ve played closer to product on some teams and closer to GTM on others. The CFO/COO/CIO blend is less about org charts and more about who’s best positioned to own a decision and the responsibility behind it.

Hemant Tenaja (CEO of General Catalyst) is an investor I’ve worked with closely for the past 10+ years. And at one point, he gave the advice to “play your game” - don’t play to the expectations of others.

Said differently, learn where you get energy and what you’re good at, develop that as a deep spike, and then join teams and companies where that creates alpha in the role.

Others may see a “CFO” title, but what matters is how you complement the management team, solve problems, and help build a winning company.

I think the CFO org stays intact (FP&A, Treasury, Controllership, Procurement). However, the clear lines of other organizations (COO/CIO/InfoSec) will continue to blur across the enterprise.  In one direction, the CFO org will play a more influential role across the enterprise to provide important insights with capital allocation, customer analytics, operations, risk management and compliance. And in the opposite direction, the Finance org will be heavily reliant on InfoSec teams for better data insights and more automated reporting.  

So, even with the blurred lines, Finance will remain a separate org, as it will still need to maintain independence and be the overall steward of data integrity across the organization.

This notion of independence will need to be maintained across strategy (likely in COO org), as Finance can serve as a "check" or independent assessment of capital allocation and would be best suited to ascertain buy, build, or partner analysis.  

What this means for an upcoming CFO... master financial management (table-stakes), understand how all the other teams interplay across the organization, and understand how enterprise data is best managed.

You can change definitions, but you can’t change reality. Rolling early expansion into “New ARR” might make sense internally if that’s how customers really ramp. But externally, be careful. Investors anchor hard on NRR as a signal of product strength. Juicing New ARR at the expense of NRR usually backfires.

My bias: keep external definitions clean and consistent, and run a separate internal view that shows “land + ramp.” If you do change definitions, do it once, explain it clearly, and never touch it again.

I’m a bit of a purist about this.

Your metrics should reflect how customers actually use your product, not just what looks good on a board slide.

In a land-and-expand motion, I’d anchor on which signal captures the most meaningful economic commitment for the product. If your motion is truly PLG-first and then upsell into a managed motion, I’d define New ARR as that very first credit card purchase. That’s when the customer decides, “This product is now part of my workflow.”

If your managed sales process is more independent, and you’d never close a deal without a salesperson, then I’d define New ARR as starting with the first enterprise contract. In that case, product-led growth is more about generating leads than driving revenue.

Those are the two extremes, but most companies fall somewhere in the middle. Smart investors will easily see through definition hacks - especially when they start modeling the business themselves. And at the end of the day, you want your definitions to reveal the underlying dynamics of your business, not obscure them or excessively inflate one aspect.