As Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Articulate Marketing, Mirela Mart brings more than a financial lens to her work.
She combines technical knowledge, ethical rigor, and a passion for clarity. Her journey, from studying math and programming in Romania to managing performance and financial systems at global firms like GE Capital and Visa Europe, has shaped her philosophy on working with data.
Her approach is simple but demanding. Data should tell the truth, and people should understand it.
Mirela’s background in mathematics and economics instilled a deep respect for structured thinking.
“You can manipulate data. Not necessarily in a good sense, but kind of skewing the data to tell a different story,” she explains. “But it’s very important to get a feel for the data. You need to like data to be able to be a good analyst. If you’re scared of data, you go nowhere.”
This analytical grounding served her well when she transitioned into finance. At Unilever, she learned from a finance director who could predict financial outcomes with remarkable accuracy using only pen and paper.
“He would say, here’s what I would expect. Then go and tell me if I was right with the system data. That stuck with me.”
One of Mirela’s key priorities is making data accessible, especially to non-technical stakeholders.
“If you can explain a concept to a five-year-old and they understand it, you’re doing a good job,” she says. “It shows more skill and more expertise if you can explain something in simple terms.”
That means translating financial performance into language that resonates.
“Sometimes you do an analogy that relates to nature, food, or everyday life. Finance and data surround us. You can translate them into everyday terms.”
Mirela is a strong advocate for data storytelling, but with clear ethical lines.
“You need to find the right story. But it’s also important not to manipulate the story in the wrong way,” she says. “If you remove some bits to adapt the story and make the data look better, or to hide a lack of performance, that’s unethical.”
Her process begins with completeness.
“You need to make sure your data contains everything. That you haven’t missed something in a drawer or somewhere else. Mistakes can happen, but you have to do everything possible to make sure you have all the data before telling the story.”
In one of her most complex data initiatives, at a global company before Articulate, Mirela tackled a revenue-tracking gap that affected a strategically important product line.
“We knew the total revenue, but we didn’t know exactly what that line of business was generating,” she says. “We had to start from the basics. What’s the list of products, who owns them, what are the billing codes, and how do we map them?”
The technical challenge was substantial, but it was the human element that proved most critical.
“It was a lot of conversations with headquarters, cross-checking what I was doing, adjusting my thinking so I wasn’t going in a divergent direction. It was more about managing stakeholders and alignment than just fixing a data problem.”
The result was a scalable system for extracting revenue data across more than 100 products.
“We built something intuitive, where you could see things based on names or codes. It could be replicated for future products.”
In her view, the biggest risks in data projects aren’t always technical, but organizational in nature.
“People think data belongs to finance or IT. But to build architecture, restructure systems, and align methodologies, you need support from the top.”
To hear more from Mirela, listen to her Behind the Data episode, which is out now.