Vice President, Digital Finance Decision Systems — Hardware Product Economics

The mandate

Hardware portfolio finance is adding digital analysis to decisions about product investment and lifecycle support. Faster outputs have not resolved inconsistent treatment of shared development, sustaining engineering and end-of-life costs. The VP will own the financial logic and decision use of these systems, ensuring automation makes assumptions inspectable rather than distributing incompatible answers more efficiently. Technology teams build and operate the platform; finance must remain able to explain why its recommendation follows from the evidence.

The employment appointment is open-ended. Across the first eighteen months, the team will establish a controlled product-economics specification, launch an agreed analytical perimeter and embed its use in real portfolio reviews. Twenty-one finance specialists work through analytics and business-partner managers. Bengaluru is the base, with planned workshops across international product-finance teams. Selection of an enterprise software platform or ownership of general technology architecture does not transfer into this financial leadership remit.

The VP may set financial metric definitions, approve finance acceptance tests and determine analytical review standards within CFO delegation. Product investment approval remains with authorised executives; engineering owns technical estimates and controllers retain financial-booking authority. Where automated analysis proposes a product ranking, the team must distinguish valid comparison from false precision caused by different lifecycle stages or weak source evidence. A persuasive visual or model-generated explanation cannot replace financial reasoning that a reviewer can reproduce.

Continuing responsibility includes improvement of the finance system, development of internal capability and control over changes to its decision logic. The role excludes product design, cybersecurity certification and independent assurance over the enterprise's technology estate. Its value should appear in better product decisions and managers who understand the evidence, not solely in reduced preparation time. When information is too weak for a precise conclusion, the system must expose the limitation and support a bounded human decision rather than silently fill the gap with a convenient estimate.

What you will own

• Establish a product-economics specification covering development, support and end-of-life costs, distinguishing directly attributable expenditure from shared capability so comparable outputs do not depend on hidden allocation choices or incompatible lifecycle boundaries.
• Govern the finance acceptance of analytical outputs through source reconciliation and representative product cases, requiring clear limitations where engineering estimates or operating records cannot support the precision implied by the system.
• Define change approval for financial logic, preserving why a metric or treatment changed and assessing its effect on historical comparison before the revised analysis enters executive portfolio reviews.
• Lead real decision pilots with product and finance managers, testing whether users can explain trade-offs and challenge assumptions rather than treating completion of training or successful dashboard access as adoption evidence.
• Set human-review rules for automated estimates and recommendations, identifying material cases that require expert examination and ensuring unsupported confidence or incomplete inputs cannot bypass the authorised investment decision route.
• Prioritise finance system enhancements against decision value and control needs, coordinating with technology delivery while refusing feature requests that create unreconciled parallel measures or obscure the ownership of a consequential assumption.
• Develop analytics managers and business partners who can maintain the specification, investigate unexpected outputs and coach product leaders in responsible use, reducing dependency on a small number of original model builders.

Candidate qualifications

• Bring at least 28 years in finance with substantive leadership in accounting, planning or financial governance and meaningful digital transformation responsibility. Hardware, technology products, engineering or industrial portfolio experience is relevant. Show an analytical system whose financial definitions you personally shaped and whose outputs changed a real decision, identifying your contribution separately from the technology team that implemented it.
• Demonstrate management-accounting and product-economics judgement supported by recognised professional finance training or equivalent senior competence. Explain how shared development, sustaining costs or lifecycle differences affected a comparison you governed. You must reconcile analytical views to financial records and preserve an appropriate distinction between management decision measures and statutory booking rules retained by the controllers.
• Have applied advanced analytics with explainable assumptions, controlled changes and effective review. Information-systems assurance training is valuable where supported by actual examination of a finance process. A particular software certification is not compulsory; evidence should establish that another finance professional could reconstruct a material conclusion and detect a weak input rather than depend on your personal interpretation of a sophisticated tool.
• Have led finance specialists and coached business users through changed decision practices. Describe a pilot in which technically correct outputs were misunderstood or inappropriate for the intended choice, and how you repaired their use. Direct stakeholder engagement, clear finance-versus-technology ownership and the willingness to disclose uncertainty are essential. Leadership accountability centres on financial specifications, acceptance evidence and responsible adoption, with enterprise technology ownership remaining in the appointed technology function.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 9 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-234.