Overview

Product / Initiative: Partner Financial Insights Digitization
Role: Principal Product Manager – ELM
Location: Global (Firm wide Initiative)
Scale: 5,000+ Partners, 20,000+ active engagements, multi-geography operations
Outcome: Replaced manual Excel-based financial tracking with a centralized, AI-powered digital platform, reducing analysis time by 70% and enabling proactive decision-making through real-time insights.

Problem / Opportunity

The partner financial workflow at firm was highly manual and fragmented, relying almost entirely on spreadsheets.

Key challenges:

📊 Partners used Excel files to track engagement financials, manually adding and aggregating numbers for connected engagements.
🔁 No single source of truth—each partner maintained their own files, creating inconsistencies and version issues.
🧾 High dependency on manual work made financial analysis slow and error-prone.
⏳ Lack of real-time visibility delayed critical decisions on resource allocation, staffing, and pricing.
🧠 No intelligence layer to identify trends or flag risks early in the engagement lifecycle.

Opportunity:

• Digitize financial data flows to replace manual spreadsheets.

• Provide real-time, reliable visibility into engagement and program-level financials.

• Introduce AI/ML-driven insights to surface trends, risks, and opportunities proactively.

• Empower partners to make faster, smarter business decisions.

Goals & Success Metrics

Primary Goal: Replace Excel-based financial tracking with a digital insights platform to improve speed, accuracy, and decision quality.

North Star Metrics:

• Time to financial analysis

• Accuracy and consistency of financial data

• Partner engagement with insights platform

Supporting Metrics:

✅ 70% reduction in time spent on financial analysis
📊 100% digitization of engagement financials
🤖 Proactive AI/ML insights on performance and risks
📈 Improved decision timeliness and accuracy

Strategy & Approach

Vision: Build a single, intelligent financial insights platform to unify engagement data, automate analysis, and surface actionable insights in real time.

• Digitization: Centralize financial data from multiple sources into a single online system.

• Automation: Remove manual Excel aggregation through real-time dashboards and automated calculations.

• AI & ML: Use predictive models to identify anomalies, trends, and opportunities for intervention.

• User-Centric Design: Build intuitive experiences that align with partners’ existing workflows.

• Governance: Ensure data consistency, version control, and secure access.

Frameworks Used

• North Star Framework for aligning business outcomes and user value

• Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) to define partner needs

• RICE Prioritization to sequence feature delivery

• Dual-Track Agile to parallelize discovery and delivery

• Predictive analytics modeling for financial insights

• Telemetry & Observability to track platform adoption and usage patterns

My Role & Contributions as Senior PM

• Defined product vision and end-to-end transformation roadmap for financial insights.

• Partnered with finance, data, and engineering teams to design and deliver the digital platform.

• Worked closely with partners to understand workflows and pain points, shaping the UX and insight layer.

• Led integration of AI/ML models to provide early warnings on budget overruns, revenue risks, and utilization trends.

• Drove executive alignment and adoption, ensuring seamless transition from Excel to the platform.

• Defined success metrics and telemetry to measure platform impact and engagement.

Solution & Execution

🧭 Centralized Digital Platform

• Unified engagement financial data into a single online system.

• Enabled automated aggregation and calculations across connected engagements.

• Removed dependency on manual Excel sheets.

🤖 AI & ML Intelligence Layer

• Automated trend analysis and variance detection for engagement performance.

• Delivered predictive alerts for potential revenue leakage, margin erosion, or staffing inefficiencies.

• Provided program-level visibility for better resource allocation.

📊 Real-Time Insights & Dashboards

• Built partner-facing dashboards with real-time financial metrics, forecasts, and visualizations.

• Reduced time to insight from days to minutes.

• Enabled faster strategic and operational decisions.

🔐 Data Governance & Quality

• Established automated data pipelines, validation rules, and access control.

• Ensured consistency across geographies and engagement types.

Impact & Results

⚡ 70% reduction in financial analysis time for partners
📈 100% digitization of engagement financial workflows
🧠 AI/ML insights enabled early detection of risks and trends
🤝 Improved cross-functional alignment and decision timeliness
🧾 Reduced dependency on manual work and spreadsheet errors

Retrospective & Learnings

✅ What worked:

• Focusing on partner workflows made adoption seamless.

• Embedding AI insights directly into the workflow drove faster and better decisions.

• Replacing Excel with a single source of truth significantly improved efficiency and accuracy.

🛠️ What could be improved:

• Early-stage training and change management could have accelerated adoption even faster.

• Expanding scenario modeling earlier would have unlocked more strategic use cases.

🧠 Key learning:

Digitization alone improves efficiency — but AI-driven intelligence transforms decision-making. Embedding insights at the point of use is far more impactful than reporting after the fact.