How I went from FP&A to running 75% of the company, with Sabrina Yeh

Sabrina Yeh is the CFO of Citizen, a Series D consumer and enterprise technology company, where she leads Finance and broader operating functions across the business. Over the past three years, she has led significant transformation of Citizen's financial profile, driving growth, profitability, cash efficiency, and organizational scale while leading teams across Finance, People, Legal, IT, Operations, and Marketing. Previously, Sabrina held senior finance roles at Zoom, Roku, and The New York Times, building her career at the intersection of strategic finance, business operations, and executive decision-making.

Every so often you meet an operator whose career makes you rethink what a title is supposed to mean. Sabrina Yeh is one of those people.

Sabrina started out squarely in finance. At Zoom, Roku, and The New York Times, she built her foundation in FP&A — managing large budgets, partnering with business leaders, and helping teams figure out where to invest for growth.

Then she joined Citizen as head of finance and business operations, and her scope just kept growing. She became CFO. Then HR came under her. Then legal. Then IT. Then marketing. Then operations. Today, Sabrina oversees roughly 75% of the company, while Citizen's founder and CEO focuses primarily on product, design, and engineering.

That range has changed the way she thinks about her job.

The more of the company Sabrina took on, the less useful it's become to look at a problem strictly through a finance lens. She's had to learn unfamiliar functions, move constantly between very different kinds of decisions, and become directly accountable for outcomes she once would have evaluated from the outside.

Here are some of the lessons she's learned along the way.

Lesson #1: Do one job well enough that people trust you with another

Sabrina didn't set out to build a role that covered most of the company. Her scope expanded one function at a time. She did well in finance and business operations, so leadership trusted her with more. She took on HR. Then IT. Then marketing and operations. As new needs came up across the company, she kept becoming the person leadership trusted to take them on.

That pattern is common among operators who end up with unusually broad careers. You build credibility in one area first. Then, when the company has another problem to solve, people already have evidence that you can figure things out.

That doesn't mean you need to know every function before you take it on. Sabrina certainly didn't. It means you've built enough trust that the company is willing to let you learn.

Takeaways:

• Scope grows through trust. Doing one job well can open paths that were never part of the original role.
• Some of the best operator careers are built by following the needs of the company rather than a predefined ladder.

Lesson #2: When you take on a new function, learn the actual work

Taking responsibility for operations at Citizen meant Sabrina suddenly had to understand work far outside her finance background.

Citizen ingests public safety information, including 911 incidents, and turns it into real-time information that helps people understand what's happening around them. Some of the infrastructure behind that is highly technical.

Sabrina didn't come into the role knowing how any of that worked. So she sat down with the people who did. Week after week, she learned pieces of their jobs directly from them, asking them to walk her through what they did, why they did it, and how the systems fit together.

It takes time, and Sabrina sees that as part of the job. She wants to understand her teams deeply enough to represent their work, make informed decisions, and know exactly what she's asking of them. It also signals to the people doing the work that their leader cares enough to learn it.

That approach has become her playbook every time she steps into unfamiliar territory. She doesn't need to be the best technical expert in every function she manages. She does need to understand the work well enough to lead the people who are.

Takeaways:

• Learn from the people closest to the work. A dashboard can tell you what is happening; the people doing the job can tell you why.
• Going deep early makes it easier to lead at a higher level later.

Lesson #3: Going broad is its own operating skill

There's a real challenge that comes with running finance, HR, legal, IT, marketing, and operations all at once: the problems have almost nothing in common. A conversation about financial performance might be followed by an HR issue, then a legal matter, then IT onboarding, then a question about how Citizen is sending notifications.

So she's gotten good at switching contexts quickly. The broader her role has become, the more that skill matters. Going deep in one function requires expertise. Going broad requires the ability to move between very different worlds, ask the right questions quickly, and recognize when you actually need more detail. Sabrina has learned to do both.

Takeaways:

• Broad roles require a deliberate approach to context switching. Get oriented before you go deep.
• You don't need every detail about every problem. You need to know which details matter.

Lesson #4: Owning a function changes the way you judge its decisions

As Sabrina has taken on more of the company, she's learned to own each function's priorities, not just weigh in from the finance seat. That shift has changed the way she makes decisions.

Marketing is a good example. Earlier in her career, she often partnered with marketing from the finance side. If a team came asking for more budget, her instinct was to look at the numbers. What's the ROI? What's the CAC? Are we getting enough return on this? Justify the spend.

Those are still important questions. But once Sabrina became responsible for marketing herself, she was also responsible for the outcome it was trying to create. If signups were behind plan or revenue was missing its target, she couldn't just ask the team to justify its spending. She had to help figure out what to do next. The question got broader. Instead of "justify your spend," it became "all hands on deck, revenue is missing — what are we going to do about it?"

That's true across every function she owns. Owning multiple functions gave her a view of tradeoffs that was hard to get when she sat only in finance. She could see why another leader might ask for an investment, what constraints they were working around, and what happened when the company chose not to make it.

She still brings financial discipline to those decisions. Now she brings direct operating accountability, too. And that's shaped the kind of CFO she wants to be. The cross-functional leaders she works with don't just need someone who can tell them whether their numbers work. They need a partner who understands what they're trying to accomplish and can help them get there.

Takeaways:

• When you own a function, you own its priorities, not just the job of evaluating them from the outside.
• Financial discipline becomes more useful when it's paired with an understanding of the operating problem.
• The best cross-functional decisions start with a shared company outcome.

Lesson #5: Build for the company, not your function

Sabrina's expanding role has changed the lens she uses to make decisions. She increasingly thinks like someone responsible for the whole company, not just one part — and that often means pushing her teams to revisit longstanding assumptions about how their work gets done.

That, Sabrina has learned, can be one of the hardest parts of scaling. Processes can change quickly. Culture takes longer. As companies grow, the people who grow with them have to keep questioning habits that made sense at an earlier stage. New leaders can bring experience from companies that have already solved similar problems, and existing leaders have to be willing to learn from them.

Sabrina has lived that evolution herself. She started her career helping individual functions make better financial decisions. Today, she's responsible for a large part of the system those decisions sit inside. Her job has become less about a function and more about the company problems she's there to solve.

Takeaways:

• The broader your scope, the more you have to build for the whole company, not one function.
• Processes can change quickly; culture is the slower, harder part of scaling.
• Growing with a company means being willing to question the habits that got it here.

The broader your scope, the more your perspective changes

Sabrina still considers herself a CFO. She still brings years of FP&A experience to how she evaluates investments, forecasts the business, and makes decisions. But running HR, IT, marketing, operations, legal, and finance has expanded what that title means to her. She's learned that taking on a new function means becoming a student again, that range requires its own set of skills, and that accountability looks very different when the performance of the function across the table is also your performance.

Her advice for operators who want to expand their own scope is simple: "Stay curious and be humble." Get really good at the job you have. Stay curious about the work happening around you. Learn from the people who know more than you do. And when the company gives you a chance to carry more responsibility, be willing to take it. Her one addition: "Have fun — but not too much fun. Keep some time for yourself."

Want to learn alongside operators like Sabrina?

Sabrina joined Operators Guild because she wanted exposure to people beyond the finance world. At OG, she found CFOs, COOs, investors, banking leaders, and operators across functions who were willing to share what they were seeing and how they approached the work. For someone whose whole career has been built by staying curious about how other parts of the business run, that range was exactly what she was looking for.

OG brings together leaders who want to learn across functions, share what they know, and help each other navigate the work that rarely fits neatly into one job description. If that sounds like how you operate, we'd love to have you in the room.