She joined as CFO in month four after Series B and spent her first ninety days doing nothing but reading the roadmap. By month five, she had killed roughly 40% of it. Six months after that, the company posted its first quarter of accelerating net new ARR in two years.
What follows is an edited conversation about what she actually cut, how she got the engineering org to forgive her, and why she now believes the single highest-leverage move at Series B is almost always subtraction.
On reading the backlog
Half the items on the roadmap, she says, were there because someone senior had asked for them eighteen months earlier and nobody had the standing to remove them. The other half were genuine bets. The job was telling the difference, in writing, with the founder in the room.
"The roadmap is a list of promises the company made to itself when it was a different company. Most of those promises were made by people who have since left."
She kept a one-page 'killed list' pinned in the company wiki with the rationale for each cut. The list, she insists, did more for engineering morale than any all-hands. People want to know why the work stopped, not just that it did.
The honest takeaway: Series B is the stage where companies stop being able to do everything and start having to choose. The CFO is usually the only person in the building with the standing and the spreadsheet to force the choice.
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