Having worked in the finance function of a few companies, this resonates. Finance leaders (especially those who have grown up in large companies) have been trained and rewarded for quantification. They grade initiatives on speed, cost, quality, and ROI. There's no cell in the model for "we don't know yet" unfortunately. So the idea either gets forced into a spreadsheet or it doesn't fit.
And if you are someone within a finance org who recognizes this, trying to convince your leadership that we should be investing in an unproven idea feels like swimming against the current.
This gets at a pattern I see often in analytical work: teams ask for ROI before they have agreed on the outcome worth pursuing. That creates the appearance of discipline, but very often it just measures the wrong thing with more confidence.
In practice, a lot of waste starts when organizations optimize for what is easy to justify in a meeting rather than what changes behavior in the field. The interesting question is not whether the business case is polished, but whether the team is still solving the right problem.
This is a great breakdown.
The same pattern shows up outside product too - people stay busy, produce a lot, but avoid measuring what actually moves anything forward.
Outcomes require a different level of responsibility.
Great article. It would be interesting to define the thresholds or metrics when the financial guardrails should become the goals/ ROI.
Having worked in the finance function of a few companies, this resonates. Finance leaders (especially those who have grown up in large companies) have been trained and rewarded for quantification. They grade initiatives on speed, cost, quality, and ROI. There's no cell in the model for "we don't know yet" unfortunately. So the idea either gets forced into a spreadsheet or it doesn't fit.
And if you are someone within a finance org who recognizes this, trying to convince your leadership that we should be investing in an unproven idea feels like swimming against the current.
Really nice observation!
This gets at a pattern I see often in analytical work: teams ask for ROI before they have agreed on the outcome worth pursuing. That creates the appearance of discipline, but very often it just measures the wrong thing with more confidence.
In practice, a lot of waste starts when organizations optimize for what is easy to justify in a meeting rather than what changes behavior in the field. The interesting question is not whether the business case is polished, but whether the team is still solving the right problem.