Lensing and GaapSavvy - Going from accounting to product management
Dan Bischoff: I moved from Venezuela to the Bay Area in 2014, and as you see here, I have held several jobs in both accounting and finance. Now, leading the record to report and procure to pay areas at Lensing. And just quick background of how I ended up working here. Back in the day, 2021, Sandeep and Jackson reached out for my feedback on Lensing, very early product development, maybe just a few screens.
I was so excited by the promise, a few months after, I joined, and I have not looked back since. I think it's a cool transition that I've done, and I had no intent of like, "Oh, you know, I'm not doing accounting anymore." I actually get to do even more accounting because I actually have to think about how accounting works, in multiple dimensions. I have to break those pieces and practices down into software.
Going from accounting to product management, there are actually a lot comparable elements. From an accounting side, every number is a source or has a source. And for product managers, every feature has a real need. It goes to a customer pain point. Everything that matters comes from somewhere traceable. You're not just making up a solution out of nowhere.
Now for accountants hoping to make the same transition, the domain knowledge and understanding the software functionality is key. For product managers, understanding the uses that are coming from customers, but also understanding how something can be built piece by piece. And I just wanted to give a little bit of background on this part.
When I came to Lensing, we really didn't have anything in the area of record-to-report. All we had was a concept of a chart of accounts. And I came in having been a Controller at Agilsoft and a senior accountant at Docker, saying, "Okay, I want to have consolidation." We couldn't just go off and start building chart of accounts and journal entries. We had to think about that final end state. You, you go step by step to get there. So that's what I mean piece by piece in software. Sometimes you have an assumption that maybe a system or something is already done, but it's not at all done from your customer's perspective. So you have to think those pieces before you even consider building.
Also, for accountants, you end up applying a lot of judgment to business edge cases, and it's the same for product managers. You have to spot what breaks in a specification of feature. Sometimes we may not have a use case, so we have to capture that way.
Accountants go from owning a close start to end. For product managers, you own the feature from prompt or from definition to shipping. And then accountants, this is something I think it translates really well to what product managers do: You have to explain the processes to auditors. You have to know why there are variances to auditors and CFOs and boards and all sorts of people who don't know accounting. In product management, especially in a very domain rich accounting, you're always doing that: Explaining a feature to someone without much understanding of what that accounting means. So you have to understand it well enough to teach. You have to let them understand what you're going from, even before you build the feature, so that then the feature does what you want, and what they expect.
