Beyond Velocity: Yury Zabella on Financial Clarity for High-Performing Agile Teams

Today we are joined by Yury Zabella, Founder & Fractional CFO, the top fractional CFO for manufacturing and tech startups, with a founder-to-exit track record and verified 8-figure revenue outcomes.

In this conversation with Yury Zabella, Yury explores a tension that many fast-moving product teams quietly face: how to maintain speed and flexibility without losing financial discipline. Drawing from his experience, he shares how teams can better align day-to-day execution with long-term business outcomes.

Q1: Agile teams are designed for speed and flexibility. Where does financial discipline fit without slowing things down?

Yury Zabella: Financial discipline doesn’t have to mean rigidity. It also can mean clarity. The misconception is that structure slows teams down, when in reality, the right structure helps teams move faster with fewer missteps.

In agile environments, decisions are made quickly and often. Without financial visibility, those decisions can compound into inefficiencies – features that don’t generate value, or resources allocated to the wrong priorities. What I’ve seen work is introducing lightweight financial checkpoints into existing workflows. For example, tying sprint goals to expected business outcomes, not just deliverables. That way, finance becomes part of the decision-making process, not something that shows up after the fact.

Q2: What are the risks when high-performing teams operate without strong financial visibility?

Yury Zabella: The biggest risk is misalignment between effort and impact. Teams can be highly productive on paper, but still not contributing meaningfully to the business. One red flag is when teams can’t clearly connect their work to revenue, retention, or cost efficiency. Another is when prioritization is driven purely by urgency or stakeholder pressure rather than value.

I’ve worked with companies where engineering output was high, but margins were shrinking. When we looked closer, it wasn’t a performance issue, it was a prioritization issue. Once we introduced financial context into planning, the same teams became significantly more effective without increasing workload.

Q3: How can teams practically incorporate financial thinking into their day-to-day workflows?

Yury Zabella: It starts with making financial data accessible and relevant. Teams don’t need full financial models but context.

One framework I often use is what I call “decision-level visibility.” For every major initiative, teams should understand three things: the cost of execution, the expected upside, and the timeframe to see results. Even rough estimates can dramatically improve decision quality.

Another practical step is aligning product metrics with financial outcomes. If a team is tracking feature adoption, for example, the next question should be: how does that translate into revenue or retention? The goal isn’t to turn product managers into finance experts, but to give them enough visibility to make smarter trade-offs.

Q4: Many teams rely heavily on prioritization frameworks. Where do those fall short without financial input?

Yury Zabella: Most prioritization frameworks are strong on user value and effort, but incomplete on business value. For example, two features might score similarly in terms of user impact, but if one requires significantly more engineering time or ongoing maintenance, the long-term cost is very different. Without that perspective, teams can unintentionally prioritize work that looks good in the short term but creates inefficiencies over time.

The teams that perform best are the ones that layer financial awareness into their prioritization – not as a constraint, but as a way to sharpen decisions. It’s less about saying “no” and more about understanding trade-offs clearly.

Q5: For leaders managing agile teams, what does “healthy” financial discipline actually look like in practice?

Yury Zabella: It looks like alignment, not control. Healthy financial discipline means teams understand the impact of their work, leaders have visibility into where resources are going, and decisions are made with both speed and intention. In practice, that often includes regular check-ins between product and finance, shared dashboards that connect team activity to business outcomes, and clear criteria for evaluating success beyond output.