03 - Jeff Merlin, Sr. Director of Strategic Finance at Harness - The Headcount People

Jeff Merlin is the Senior Director of Strategic Finance at Harness, a well funded Series D startup with over 800 employees. He's helped the company manage exponential growth since joining and building out its strategic finance function. Prior to Harness, he led FP&A at OneLogin, and worked in FP&A at Gap Inc. In this episode, Jeff talks about the strategic side of headcount planning and management, and focuses in on how to utilize tools to provide highly accurate, near real-time data about the current and future team at Harness. He also talks a bit about capacity planning, headcount modeling, and provides guidance for other FP&A leaders around managing up and across as it relates to headcount spend and forecast. 00:00 - Cold open 01:27 - Meet Jeff Merlin 02:38 - What does your Strategic Finance team look like? 03:58 - Why is headcount planning important for companies to invest in? 05:02 - How do you do headcount planning at Harness? 06:37 - What is your headcount planning process? 11:07 - How are you determining the total envelope for headcount? 13:15 - How do you determine the ratios that go into your headcount model? 14:52 - What are the ratios to consider for Sales and Product roles? 19:12 - What are the best practices for managing and executing the headcount plan? 20:56 - How are you operating when you have to make these decisions? 22:31 - Guidance for other finance leaders? 25:41 - What are the tools that you use for managing headcount? 29:54 - How much time is spent syncing data and workflows? 32:12 - How did you streamline your headcount workflows? 34:44 - C-suite perspective on headcount management for next 12-24-36 months?