This one has taken a while to figure out due to the folks/disciplines involved. You probably aren’t interacting with the CFO everyday and know how to communicate easily with them. That’s fine but the language is budgets, money, and dollars saved (via time management perhaps). In the past I’ve asked for money on subscriptions to new tools - Cypress Cloud, Browserstack seats, Jira - and for hardware - Windows machines and Android devices. Some of these (Cypress Cloud) were my practice to see the level of documentation required for a business purchase. This allowed me to calibrate for my next ask: Windows computers for my QA folks.

My template for these requests is simple.

1. Assign Owners and timelines
2. Define the issue (Problem Statement)
3. Recommendation
4. Cost
5. Research

Mrs. Phillips (my geometry teacher) still rings in my head - “Show your work!”. That’s what you’re doing - showing the problem, how you think some money (hardware/software) could fix it, and how much it’ll cost the company. And then if they want to fact check you it’s all laid out! Transparency and clarity are a big deal for this type of request. Owner/timelines could be a basic table. Problem Statement + Recommendation should be the bulk of the document - think 3-4 paragraphs. Cost should be incredibly clear so it’s easy to see the total cost or recurring cost and have it broken down by current users and future users. For hardware it’s worth describing the cost of returning to the business address. Research should be bullets out to other documents, discussions, or urls.

It’s your job to get the tools your team needs to be successful. They can provide the problem statement, recommendation, and some research, but your role as a leader is to get it approved.

I didn’t use AI for this, but did plug it into a word counter/spell checker. 2 words misspelled isn’t 2 bad