Why your organisation needs FinOps

Let me paint you a picture. Every month, an invoice arrives from AWS. Someone in finance looks at it, winces slightly, and pays it. Nobody really understands why it went up 15% this month. Nobody knows which team is responsible for that mysterious spike in data transfer costs and nobody has time to dig into it because, well, the bill needs paying and there’s actual work to do.

Three months later, the CFO asks why cloud costs have increased 40% year-on-year. “Cloud is expensive,” someone offers. Meeting adjourned.

Sound familiar?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most organisations treat cloud costs like they treat the office coffee budget: necessary, slightly annoying, and someone else’s problem. Except your coffee budget probably isn’t increasing by 40% year-on-year.

The Problem: Everyone Owns Cloud Costs (Which Means Nobody Does)

I’ve seen this pattern across government, fintech, and e-commerce:

• Engineering treat it as a finance problem
• Finance say it’s an engineering problem
• Leadership says “just make it cheaper”
• Everyone nods seriously in meetings and continues doing exactly what they were doing
• Repeat

This is where a FinOps Product Manager comes in, as the person who finally makes someone accountable for turning your cloud spending from a runaway train into an actual strategic asset.

What Even Is a FinOps Product Manager?

If your cloud infrastructure is a product (and it absolutely is), then someone needs to treat it like one. That means:

• Defining success metrics that matter to both engineers and accountants
• Building roadmaps for cost optimisation that don’t involve “turn everything off and see what breaks”
• Translating between “We need Reserved Instances” and “We’re locking in savings with strategic commitments”
• Prioritising which of the 47 cost-saving initiatives will actually move the needle

Basically, the person who stops your monthly cloud bill from looking like abstract art.

The FinOps Framework: Your Roadmap Out of the Mess

The FinOps Foundation has created a framework that organisations worldwide use to manage cloud costs. It’s built on six core principles:

1. Teams need to collaborate (finance, engineering, product, leadership actually talk to each other)
2. Business value drives technology decisions (it’s not about being cheap, it’s about being smart)
3. Everyone takes ownership (no more passing the buck)
4. FinOps data should be accessible, timely, and accurate (you can’t optimise what you can’t see)
5. FinOps should be enabled centrally (this is where the FinOps PM lives)
6. Take advantage of the variable cost model (cloud’s flexibility is a feature, not a bug)

FinOps operates on a continuous three-phase cycle.

Inform: creates visibility, understanding where cloud spend goes, who’s responsible, and why it’s changing through proper tagging, dashboards, and cost allocation.

Optimise: takes action on those insights, rightsizing resources, implementing commitments, eliminating waste, and making architectural improvements.

Operate: embeds these practices into business-as-usual, establishing policies, automating processes, and enabling teams to make cost-aware decisions independently. This isn’t a linear process but a continuous loop: as your business evolves and workloads change, you cycle back through Inform to understand the new reality.

Additionally, it includes a maturity assessment that shows you where you actually are versus where you think you are.

Crawl: You get a monthly bill. You gasp. You promise to look into it. Repeat monthly.

Walk: Regular optimisation activities, established processes, teams understand their costs. You’re proactively managing spend.

Run: Cost optimisation is embedded in everything, automated where possible, continuous improvement. Engineering teams compete on efficiency.

The brutal truth? Most organisations are stuck at Crawl and don’t realise it. Having a billing dashboard doesn’t mean you’re at Walk.

How I Matured the Home Office FinOps Capability

When I joined, we had multiple teams spending cloud budget with limited visibility, no standardised approach, and reactive optimisation. We scored so poorly at the FinOps assessment (Crawl at best and the majority of the capabilities didn’t even meet even this criteria). Here’s what I did to mature us:

Got the basics right:

• Implemented comprehensive tagging and cost allocation strategy
• Built dashboards that non-technical stakeholders could actually understand
• Established clear KPIs separating strategic metrics from operational ones
• Introduced reporting and alerting to ensure accountability and visibility (especially amongst leadership)
• Implemented basic cost controls such as Budgets and Anomaly Management (easy wins)
• Basic cost hygiene. Turn things off when not needed (Instance Scheduling), delete things no longer needed (EBS & AMI Snapshots) & put things in cold storage where possible.

Built the culture:

• Created a FinOps working group (cross-functional, monthly cadence)
• Implemented FinOps by Design, ensuring cost discussions occurred at every stage
• Made optimisation business-as-usual, not heroic firefighting
• Introduced internal benchmarking to incentivise teams to be more cost-efficient.

Results? A comfortable Walk maturity across the majority of capabilities, and more importantly, teams actually taking more ownership of their spend.

Using the FinOps maturity assessment as a baseline, I was able to create a roadmap that allowed us to iterate over time and introduce capabilities at the right time.

Do You Actually Need a FinOps PM?

Small Organisations (<£50k/month cloud spend)

Do you need a dedicated FinOps PM? Probably not yet.

Someone senior spending 20% of their time on basic visibility and low-hanging fruit will do. Revisit when your bill makes you spit out your coffee. Make sure to get in the routine of tagging appropriately, as this becomes crucial as you scale.

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Medium Organisations (£50k-£500k/month)

Do you need a FinOps PM? Yes, and you needed one yesterday.

This is the danger zone. You’re big enough that inefficiency costs real money, but small enough that nobody’s been specifically tasked with fixing it.

ROI calculation: 15-20% savings on £300k/month = £54k-£72k annually.

Framework benefit: Instead of making it up as you go, you’re implementing proven practices that thousands of organisations have validated.

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Large Organisations (£500k+/month)

Do you need a FinOps PM? You need several, probably organised by platform or business unit.

At this scale, you’re fundamentally shaping how the business invests in technology.

ROI calculation: 10-15% optimisation on a £6M bill is £600k-£900k. Even a small team pays for itself several times over.

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What Success Actually Looks Like

I’m not promising:

• ❌ Your cloud bill becomes zero
• ❌ Everything gets cheaper without trade-offs
• ❌ Instant results (maturing capability takes 6-12 months)

I am promising:

• ✅ Visibility into where money goes and why
• ✅ A clear maturity roadmap
• ✅ Alignment between engineering, finance, and leadership
• ✅ Systematic, sustainable cost reduction (typically 15-30% in year one)
• ✅ Teams equipped to make cost-aware decisions independently

Why Not Just Hire More Engineers?

Because engineers are optimised for building features, not optimising costs.

A FinOps PM brings:

• Product thinking (treating cost as a feature)
• Framework expertise (proven practices, not guessing)
• Stakeholder management (CFO speaks a different language than your tech lead)
• Persistence (this isn’t a one-time project)

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How I can help

If you’re spending six figures monthly on cloud and nobody’s specifically accountable for optimising that investment, you’re leaving money on the table.

I bring:

• 8+ years of product management across regulated industries
• FinOps Certified Practitioner (I know the framework inside out)
• AWS Solutions Architect Associate & Azure Certified (I speak engineer)
• Proven track record maturing government cloud platforms at the Home Office
• A track record of translating technical optimisation into business value

When I join, I assess where you are, define where you need to be, build the tactical and strategic roadmap, and execute with discipline.

The truth? Your cloud bill is a product. It needs a product manager with a proven methodology.

Want to find out if I’m the right one? Let’s have a conversation.

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PS: If you got to the end and thought “this person clearly knows what they’re talking about,” thank you. If you thought “this person is dangerously confident about cloud costs,” you’re not wrong, but that confidence comes from having seen organisations waste millions living in denial and not accepting they need professional intervention.