How Global CFO Rachita Sundar Juggles Life & Leadership

“It’s a balance you have to strike every day”

Like many successful, highly ambitious people, Rachita Sundar starts her day early – in what the less-driven among us (me) would still classify as nighttime.

At 4:45am, she’s up and squeezing in a quick workout before prepping her kids’ lunches. By 8am, it’s down to business as CFO of Qualtrics.

Then, after a full day leading global finance operations for a company on the frontlines of enterprise innovation, she’s back in mum mode – albeit without fully leaving the office behind.

“In the evenings, you can have calls with me, but I’m going to be in my car in a soccer field somewhere,” she says, matter-of-factly.

Sundar is the first to admit that trying to balance the needs of her team, organisation, kids, and family can be “chaotic”. But thanks to impressive discipline and ruthless precision, she remains prepared for whatever comes next – at home or in the market.

Why CFOs now have to think like COOs

Sundar has earned her place at the table of modern tech leadership. From her time scaling Microsoft’s Azure business from $500 million to $10 billion, to tripling revenue at HubSpot, to now guiding Qualtrics through its next phase of growth, she’s lived the transformation of the CFO role first hand.

“Twenty years ago, CFOs came up through accounting,” she says. “Now, the ones who thrive are those who build business acumen, who can influence, problem-solve, and operate strategically. It’s counterintuitive, but CFOs today need to think like COOs – you’re expected to know the product and operations sometimes better than your business partners.”

She describes her role at Qualtrics as having three layers:

1. Operational excellence. AKA: “the baseline” that CFOs need to qualify for the job – everything from clean audits to tight controls and tax compliance.
2. Stakeholder management. Aligning expectations across teams, investors, and internal leadership.
3. Strategic influence. This “most critical layer” involves helping the company make bold, forward-looking decisions about capital allocation, innovation, and transformation.

Scaling fast? Here’s what often gets missed

Having led multiple companies through phases of hypergrowth, Sundar knows a thing or two about the patterns that make or break scaling businesses.

Here are three things she says are always at risk of being overlooked – and the questions she constantly asks herself about them:

1. People: “Are you hiring for current needs or future capabilities? Are you developing people? Are you giving them opportunities? Are you taking care of your top talent?”
2. Systems investment and process building: “When you’re moving so fast, you’re putting band-aids on systems and processes. How do you step back and make sure you put processes and systems in place that are scalable?”
3. Culture: “As you scale, you’re bringing a lot of external talent into the company and, at the same time, growing the internal talent. How do you integrate that and preserve the culture?”

The desire to preserve culture is why Sundar is exceptionally rigorous when it comes to vetting talent. After all, “a leader is only as good as their team”.

“I am very diligent in my hiring process,” she says. “The things I really look for are: first, culture fit. Then curiosity and bias for action – is this someone I can trust? Are they going to take initiative, follow through, and support the team? And lastly, how do they treat their own people? That matters a lot to me. I look for these three things maniacally in all the interviews we do.”

Leading through uncertainty

It gets tossed around a lot these days, but ‘agility’ isn’t a buzzword to Sundar. It’s a necessity.

“In an AI-first world, product cycles are changing fast,” she says. “That means planning can’t just be annual, so we’re moving to multi-quarter forecasts, and shifting how we release capital.”

In volatile times such as these, clarity is what helps her steer the ship.

“One of the biggest strengths a CFO needs to have is to be able to communicate complex financial metrics and understanding very simply to the organisation,” she explains. “In such a way that an engineer, or a marketing person – anybody – can understand what is going on.”

She adds that: “If you go talk to the company about four sets of metrics, everybody’s going to panic. So your job as a CFO is to clarify and explain what all these things you’re monitoring mean in terms of growth and outcomes – what it all boils down to for the employee.”

Making space for innovation

Sundar is candid about the tension between investing in emerging tech and cutting costs.

“It is all about capital allocation,” she says. “Where can you gain efficiency to free up capacity to invest?”

At Qualtrics, her team is experimenting widely: using Google Gemini for fraud detection in procurement, FloQast for AI-driven reconciliation, Workiva AI for investor prep, and machine learning to predict customer payment behaviour.

“There’s no big ‘aha’ use case yet. But what I’m seeing happen in our organisation and our peers’ is experimentation in different parts of finance to see what helps drive efficiency.”

How to do it all? Prioritise & Outsource

Like many women in leadership, Sundar carries not just the responsibility of her role, but the majority of the mental load domestically, too. But she rejects the title of “manager” at home.

“I’m more like the EA of the household!” she laughs. “The person that’s coordinating everything – that’s telling everybody where to be at what time, who to pick up, and all of that.

“I joke with my husband a lot of times that I wish I’d found myself a wife. And if you do find that sort of structure, it’s just fantastic. But a lot of the women you’ll see in the C suite will also have a spouse that has a really demanding career.”

With so much to juggle, Sundar’s approach to balancing work and life is almost radically practical: outsource everything that’s not a priority.

“Kids are always priority zero,” she says, but everything else – from cleaning to cooking and carpools – is up for delegation.

She adds that she wouldn’t be where she is now without a supportive and flexible workplace culture, and that’s something she’s determined to pay forward.

“When I was junior at Microsoft, I thought that my career might be over after I had my twins – that maybe I had to be less ambitious,” she recalls. “Because I had to leave at 4pm every day to get them from daycare – I’d literally leave in the middle of the meetings.

“But the company was so supportive in that moment, and that really stuck with me as something I’d like to offer as I progressed in my career. It’s just critical.”

Readiness as a strategy – and a survival skill

When your alarm goes off at o-dark-thirty, and tomorrow is always another big day, getting a good night’s sleep is a must. But a few pressing questions have been keeping Sundar up lately.

“Are we innovating fast enough?” she wonders. “Are we transforming fast enough? Do we understand the urgency of what’s happening in the market?”

After all, “The market, the demand, the industry – it’s all changing so quickly, and everybody is trying their hardest. And, right now, it’s a fight for relevance for every company. It’s not a fight for growth – it’s literally a fight for relevance.”

So the question for every finance leader then becomes: “Are you going to be able to sustain and survive over the next 10 years?”

But, within that pressure cooker, there are also incredible opportunities.

“If you are innovating fast enough, if you are transforming fast enough as a finance function – if you’re really moving yourself to be that strategic leader for the company, or the strategic function for the company, then you’re going to be in a different class of companies that have survived this shift,” Sundar says.

That kind of readiness is costly. It takes energy, clarity – and, yes, impressive discipline and ruthless precision. It’s a lot to manage, especially on top of invisible domestic labour, of which women tend to carry the lion’s share.

As Sundar puts it, “It’s a balance you have to strike every day.”

3 things every ambitious CFO should do

1. Invest in readiness.
   “Magic happens when opportunity meets preparation. You can’t control the opportunity, but you can control how ready you are for it.”
2. Stay open to the unexpected path.
   “Don’t be rigid. Curiosity and flexibility have taken me further than any five-year plan ever could.”
3. Build your village.
   “You cannot do this alone. Surround yourself with the right people – at home, at work, everywhere. That’s the only way it works.”