Lessons from the journey to IPO: Part 2 (with insight from Figma, Chime, and Once Upon a Farm)

Today, we’ll be exploring more of the advice I received from finance leaders at Figma, Chime, and Once Upon a Farm - all companies that’ve walked the path to IPO successfully.

To read part one, click here. 

We’re picking up with the third piece of advice…

3. Build the IPO team before the pressure peaks

All the experts I spoke to stressed that the key to a successful IPO process is having a dedicated cross-functional team in place early. Simply adding headcount won’t do it: you need clear ownership, strong communication, and the right people in the room.

Who are the right people to be in the room?

A strong IPO team typically includes:

FP&A
Owns the financial model, forecasting process, planning assumptions, and scenario analysis.

Accounting
Ensures alignment on accounting treatment, audit readiness, revenue recognition, close processes, and reported metrics.

Investor Relations
Connects the internal financial story to the external market narrative.

Legal
Guides what can and cannot be disclosed, reviews metric definitions, and supports S-1 language.

Data Engineering
Owns the pipelines, transaction codes, and backend infrastructure behind key metrics.

Product, where relevant
Helps define metrics tied to product behaviour, such as active users, consumption, or usage-based measures.

A project quarterback
This is usually the CFO, Chief Accounting Officer, or a senior finance leader who can triage requests, coordinate workstreams, and keep the process moving.

What happens without clear ownership?

When ownership is unclear, teams duplicate work and arrive at different answers.

Finance builds one version of the analyst model, investor relations builds another, and the bankers react to both. Feedback comes in one change at a time, creating endless revision cycles and draining the team.

Several leaders described the exhaustion that comes from receiving incremental feedback from bankers, where each small change triggers another meeting, another model update, and another round of review.

Teams that improved this process put a finance leader directly in the room with the bankers. That helped the group pressure-test the full model architecture in a more structured way, instead of operating through a fragmented feedback loop.

IPO team setup checklist

Before serious preparation begins, tick off these action items:

• Identify the IPO quarterback
• Define information security tiers, including who can know about the IPO and when
• Set a weekly working cadence across stakeholder groups, increasing to daily during the final sprint
• Put someone from Finance, not only Investor Relations, in regular contact with bankers
• Make sure FP&A is staffed before the IPO process begins, not halfway through it
• Separate responsibilities by workstream, such as IR relationship, data and systems, model quality, and disclosure support

4. Make your planning platform IPO-ready

Pigment can be a powerful planning platform before and after IPO, but as with any planning tool, the architecture needs to be designed intentionally.

Invest in architecture early

Systems decisions made quickly can create technical debt that shows up later, often during the moments when the team has the least time to fix it.

Figma’s finance team pointed to early investment in data architecture as especially valuable when the business needed to absorb significant change close to the IPO window, including changes to pricing and packaging.

That is exactly what good architecture should do: allow the business to change without forcing the finance team to rebuild everything from scratch.

Connect your models

A recurring recommendation was to ensure you connect your models.

When top-line revenue flows into order-to-cash, which then connects to expense forecasts and the P&L, the impact of any change becomes visible quickly. This matters for scenario analysis, auditability, and decision-making during volatile periods.

A connected model structure also reduces the risk of manual errors. Instead of teams updating several disconnected files, changes flow through the system in a controlled way.

Use versions and snapshots carefully

Post-IPO, forecast accuracy and auditability become non-negotiable.

Teams described using both version dimensions and monthly snapshots in Pigment:

• Versions help track how forecasts evolve over time
• Snapshots create frozen reference points that prevent retrospective changes and support audit requirements

The design principle is straightforward: if a number is treated as a source of truth, it should not change historically.

When a number has been published internally or externally, it needs to be locked. Building processes to flag month-over-month changes in historical data is one of those unglamorous but high-value controls that finance teams appreciate later.

Pigment architecture best practices for IPO-stage companies

Finance leaders recommended the following:

• Implement Pigment at least 12 to 18 months before your IPO target date
• Build interconnected models across revenue, order-to-cash, expenses, and P&L
• Use both versioning and monthly snapshots for forecast auditability
• Define a clear data flow from Pigment to downstream systems such as Snowflake or BI tools
• Establish role-based access permissions and need-to-know controls from day one

In the next article…

Check back next week for the final part of the series, in which we’ll explore forecast accuracy, what happens after the IPO and how to prepare for it, and run through an ideal IPO readiness timeline.

But if you can’t wait that long, the entire series is available at this link for download as an eBook.

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