How accountants can think like product managers
Vibe coding is real — but does that mean accountants are now expected to run a product team too, on top of closing the books?
Based on Gaapsavvy's June Shareforum poll, about 1 in 5 finance practitioners have already shipped something into production using AI.
The real question isn't whether your team builds anymore — it's whether you know what it means to think like a product person, and what it takes to ship something safely and reliably, even with an engineering team beside you.
Daniela Bischoff spent years running accounting at Docker and then Agiloft, working through some of the messiest intercompany, multi-entity, multi-currency headaches you can imagine — bridging the controller seat and product-building the whole way. She joined Everest very early, one of the company's first hires, picked to own the general ledger for one reason: her curiosity, the instinct to poke at something broken until she figured out how to fix it.
At Lensing she's grown into owning that same terrain end to end — intercompany eliminations, multi-currency, multi-entity structures, expense allocations — the exact spreadsheet-breaking problems most finance teams are still fighting today. Her MBA and her coding chops both came later, earned on the job — grit and tenacity turned into a habit of building real product instead of just flagging what's broken.
This session is a collaboration between Gaapsavvy and Lensing
Lensing (formerly Everest in stealth) was founded in 2020 by Sandeep Chopra, formerly VP of Product at Veeva — and Franz Faber, innovator of SAP’s S4 Hana. Gaapsavvy's own founder, Angela Liu, was part of that original founding team too, helping shape the strategy. Daniela is living proof of: hire the accountants, and teach them product, not the other way around. It's why Lensing treats "AI-native ERP" as a discipline, not a demo — you may get a glimpse of that live, in Lensing's AI Specify, built to let business users own their own extensibility.
Daniela will show — live — how she's building Everest's latest expense accruals features: prototyping with Claude, scoping and prioritizing with engineers, and knowing when to throw a rough idea away versus solidify it into production - include the new speed we're working in, including bug triage.
Angela and Sandeep open with the thinking behind the shift — why the subject-matter expert, not the AI, has to decide what "good" looks like.
You'll leave with:
The real, unfiltered build story — not a case study
A working framework for prototyping vs. solidifying
A clear read on where your team sits on build vs. buy vs. vibe-code
Learn more about Lensing at https://lensing.ai/