If your company may pursue an IPO, the tempting move is to wait until the filing window is visible, then recruit executives who have done it before. That sequence solves for credentials. It does not necessarily build the decision system the business will need.
Figma took a different path. An operator who joined when the company had about 30 people and was not yet charging for its product grew into the CFO role, while the company adopted public-company habits years before its 2025 IPO. The useful lesson for you is not simply to promote insiders. It is to develop executive judgment, operating cadence, and economic instrumentation as one connected system.
Key takeaways: the playbook on one page
- Expand a leader’s decision scope before expanding the title. Look for progression from doing the work, to framing the questions, to allocating resources, to improving decisions across the company.
- Install public-company behaviors before the transaction demands them. Figma began operating this way three years before its IPO, using quarterly rhythms, tighter controls, a close that could withstand scrutiny, and a coherent forward-looking narrative.
- Treat product, finance, and go-to-market as joint owners of the economic model. They need the same driver tree, definitions, telemetry, and assumptions before they debate pricing or investment.
- Manage AI investment as a portfolio of explicit bets. Usage, customer value, cost-to-serve, decision triggers, and risks should be visible even when the underlying economics are changing quickly.
- Use leadership transitions to redraw decision rights. Replacing a departing executive without reconsidering the operating model preserves yesterday’s bottlenecks.
Scale executive judgment before you scale titles
Praveer Melwani joined Figma in 2017 as its first business operations and finance hire. The company was still around 30 people and had not begun charging for the product. He became CFO in 2022 and helped lead the company through its IPO in 2025.
The important pattern is the sequence of work. Early responsibilities included building driver trees, challenging go-to-market assumptions, and establishing the mechanics of board management. Later responsibilities moved toward defining the questions the company needed to answer, directing capital, and shaping the operating cadence. The role grew because the decisions grew.
You can use that sequence as an executive-readiness ladder. It is more informative than tenure or the seniority of a candidate’s last title.
| Executive mode | Work that demonstrates readiness | Failure signal to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Operator | Builds the model, tests assumptions, and makes the basic process reliable. | Produces accurate work but cannot explain which decision it should change. |
| Question-setter | Identifies the uncertainty that matters, frames options, and defines success. | Waits for the founder or another executive to determine what deserves attention. |
| Allocator | Connects product evidence, financial constraints, and strategic upside to resource choices. | Treats the budget as a fixed entitlement rather than a set of revisable bets. |
| System leader | Improves the cadence, decision rights, narrative, and judgment of the wider team. | Remains the indispensable reviewer for every important decision. |
Do not promote someone merely because they are excellent in the first row. Give them work from the next row and observe what happens. Ask a strong operator to frame an ambiguous company problem, recommend where resources should move, document the trade-offs, and run the decision through the relevant functions. You are testing whether the person can create clarity beyond the boundaries of the original role.
I use a similar first-principles test when evaluating a prospective VP, especially in a function the founder does not know deeply:
- Can the candidate map how the business creates and captures value?
- Can they define success metrics and show where those metrics could mislead the team?
- Can they explain a meaningful trade-off in plain language?
- Can they describe the team and decision system they would build, rather than only the work they would personally perform?
- Can they teach the executive team something useful in 30 minutes?
Run this test on your actual business context, not a generic case interview. A candidate who asks sharper questions, exposes a hidden assumption, and improves the decision has demonstrated more than someone who recites the standard playbook from a previous employer. Prior experience still matters, but learning velocity and expanding scope deserve more weight than familiarity alone.
Make IPO readiness a company cadence, not a finance workstream
Figma began behaving like a public company three years before its IPO. That is not a universal countdown for every company. The more important point is the order of operations: the habits came before the event that would test them.
Late preparation forces teams to create controls, reconcile definitions, improve forecasting, and construct a credible narrative while the stakes are already high. Early preparation turns the same work into ordinary management. It also reveals weak ownership and unreliable data while the company still has room to correct them.
- Quarterly operating rhythm: Review changes in the business drivers, the assumptions behind the forecast, the resulting resource choices, and the risks that could alter the plan. A performance presentation without a decision is reporting, not an operating review.
- Close and controls: Make ownership, evidence, access, and material judgments explicit. The goal is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is to produce numbers that leaders can use without reopening the entire chain of custody every time.
- Forward-looking narrative: Connect past performance to the decisions now being made. Explain what changed, why management believes it changed, what will be done next, and what evidence would invalidate that view.
- Decision record: Preserve the assumptions, alternatives, owner, and follow-up trigger behind a material choice. This prevents the company from rewriting the reasoning after the outcome is known.
This discipline can accelerate decisions because product, finance, and go-to-market stop renegotiating the basic facts in every meeting. Product brings evidence about behavior and roadmap alternatives. Finance brings the model, sensitivities, and constraints. Go-to-market brings customer context, commercial implications, and execution dependencies. The executive owner makes the cross-company choice and records what would cause it to change.
A useful quarterly decision packet should answer the following questions:
<!– wp:list {
Leave a Reply