Meet the Team: Mathieu Delisee, Vice President of Product Management

Mathieu Delisee is VP of Product Management for OnPlan, and has nearly a decade’s experience working with FP&A solutions in North America and Europe.

Q: Tell us more about your background. 

I’m from France but recently became a Canadian citizen. My girlfriend and her family are from Mexico, which adds additional flavor (and a lot of linguistic confusion) to the cultural mix at home. I’ve lived in France, China, Spain, Argentina, and now Canada. I love sailing and actually spent three weeks on a 40-foot sailboat crossing the Pacific. I managed to survive for three weeks without the Internet!

Q: What do you remember most about that trip?

It was in 2011. I started in Martinique in the Caribbean, went through the Panama Canal, and ended in Tahiti. It took a total of six months because we made a few stops along the way. There was a good three-week stretch on the open sea, though. I remember seeing a lot of dolphins and trying to dodge container ships. We were hit by very intense storms a few times. Those really test your mettle: you have to stay calm and grounded to get through it.

Q: What do you like doing when you are not working?

I love being outdoors – hiking, discovering new places, and traveling whenever I get the opportunity. I’m a big fan of ball games and board games. I used to play rugby, so I’ve shown up to work with bruises on my face a few times! I think people thought I was getting into fights over the weekend!  

Q: What is your favorite quote and why?

“The electric light did not come from the continuous improvement of candles.” It reflects my core values, which is that you need innovation grounded in audacity to succeed. 

Q: What do you like about working with OnPlan? 

The culture of innovation and our amazingly diverse team. We’re also able to make it work with people that are geographically dispersed. It really resonates with me; it feels like a great big adventure. 

Q: If you had to give customers an elevator pitch for OnPlan, what would you say? 

OnPlan keeps everything that is good about Excel and spreadsheets but with all of the defects removed. You can spend more time analyzing instead of just crunching the numbers. 

Q: Is there anything in your past experience that has helped you in your current role?

I’m actually an Excel nerd, so I empathize with everything that finance teams have to go through when they build plans!

Q: What is something you see finance ops teams struggle with that you would like to fix? 

I think finance teams struggle with the basics. They spend far too much time stitching data together instead of analyzing the numbers; OnPlan can really help them there.

Q: Why stick with Excel instead of learning a new language?

Excel is the most widely adopted modeling language in the world, and most finance teams are familiar with it. They can own the logic and analysis and understand the numbers from the start.

Q: How does OnPlan help finance align with other reporting lines within a business? 

Prepping for board meetings can be really stressful for the finance department because you spend a lot of time assembling the numbers at the last minute. You’re always running into data integrity problems. OnPlan can really help you avoid those issues and make the entire process easier. 

Q: Thinking about OnPlan, which feature excites you the most? 

Scenario management, because you can construct variances without worrying about where or how the data is stored. It does all the heavy lifting for you. I also love dynamic lists because you can maintain the structural changes to your Chart of Accounts and see them automatically update throughout the entire solution without having to touch the spreadsheet.