Personas Flashcards
FinOps Practitioner
Primary Goal Drive best practices into the organization through education, standardization, and cheerleading
Objectives
• Cultural change flag bearer
• Create cloud cost management best practices
• Create benchmarks for teams to use
• Create visibility and transparency to cloud cost
• Create or inform cloud budgets and forecasts
Frustrations
• Lack of access to needed data
• Distributed accountability
• Building adoption at enterprise scale
• Tool reliance that does not deliver capabilities needed
Key Metrics
• Accurate budgets
• Accurate forecasts
• Unit Cost Economics
• Discount/Reservation coverage
• Percentage untagged resources
• Efficiency opportunity
FinOps Benefits
• Centralized cloud cost management in single cloud or multi-cloud environment
• Align accountability to cloud users
• Build confidence around budgets and forecasts
Advance communication throughout the organization
CEO
Primary Goal Assurance that cloud investments are aligned with business objectives
Objectives
• Accelerate Company Growth YoY
• Strategic Competitive Advantage
• Faster time-to-market
• Deliver innovative, market leading solutions cost effectively
Frustrations
• Unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, cloud spend
• Unable to see link between engineering initiatives and business objectives
• Unsure of the return on their company’s cloud investment
Key Metrics
• Revenue Growth
• Gross Margins
• COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)
• Unit Cost Economics
FinOps Benefits
• Manage risk
• Connect engineering decisions with business outcomes
• Predict how cloud spend will grow as the business grows
• Guide organization to make good cloud investments
CTO/CIO
Primary Goal Leverage technology to give the business a market and competitive advantage
Objectives
• Accelerate Company Growth YoY
• Strategic Competitive Advantage
• Faster time-to-market
• Deliver innovative, market leading solutions cost effectively
Frustrations
• Extreme pressure to either justify or bring the cloud bill down
• No guardrails on spend
• Unsatisfied engineers
• Business continuity
• Reliability
Key Metrics
• Revenue Growth
• Gross Margins
• COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)
• Unit Cost Economics
• Time to market for new features/product
• Engineering productivity
• Track R&D vs. Production spend
• Maintain operations within budget
FinOps Benefits
• Predict how cloud spend will grow as the business grows
• Drive organization to make good cloud investments
Enable engineering organizations to gain more freedom to utilize newer cloud technologies and deliver solutions to market faster
CFO
Primary Goal
Objectives
• Cost visibility and granularity, and accuracy
• Overall cost-per-unit / COGS reduction
• Managing costs during growth, disproportionate cost reduction during flat/declining periods
Frustrations
• Unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, cloud spend
• Unsure of the return on their company’s cloud investment
• Cost fluctuations and innovation do not align to budgeting cycles
Key Metrics
• Revenue Growth
• Gross Margins
• COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)
• Unit Cost Economics
• Predictability
FinOps Benefits
• Increased accountability for cloud cost
• Increased reliance on budget and forecast models
Direct impact on company bottom line
Product Owner
Primary Goal Quickly bring new products and features to market with an accurate price point.
Objectives
• Accelerate Product Growth YoY
• Decrease time to market
• Deliver innovative, market leading solutions cost effectively
Frustrations
• Unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, cloud spend
• Cannot predict the costs closely enough for new features and products resulting in pricing misses
• Cannot predict how costs will change when launching existing products in new regions/markets
Key Metrics
• Revenue Growth
• Gross Margins
• COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)
• Unit Cost Economics - Cost per customer, Cost per product/feature
FinOps Benefits
• Manage risk
• Connect product decisions with business outcomes
• Predict how much cloud infrastructure will factor into feature/ product price
• Guide team to make good cloud investments
Engineering Lead
Primary Goal Deliver faster and high quality services to the organisation, whilst maintaining business as usual
Objectives
• Drive accountability to engineering teams that are responsible for the application/services.
• Provide guidance to engineering teams to have a cost-effective application/service by identifying anomalies and best practices.
• Work together with engineering teams to identify rate reductions and possible cost avoidance
• Cost allocation
Frustrations
• Unsatisfied engineers as their workload keeps rising.
• Long delivery cycles
• Cannot predict the impact on the budget
• Difficult to identify service or application ownership
• Cannot predict the costs closely enough for developing new features and products.
Key Metrics
• Revenue by infrastructure costs
• Cost per deployed service & service utilisation rates
• Showback & Chargeback of IT costs to the business
FinOps Benefits
• Increased visibility to cloud cost
• Connection to cloud cost and unit economics
• More accountability for utilization
Incentive towards solid architecture principles to factor efficiency
IT Finance Manager
Primary Goal Accurately budget, forecast and report cloud costs
Objectives
• Cost out and budget maintenance
• Prepare accurate forecasts
• Report actual costs and trends
• Normalize spend predictability
Frustrations
• Unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, cloud spend
• Frustrated team as cloud cost accountability is distributed
• Challenges with legacy finance models (cap-ex vs op-ex)
Key Metrics
• Revenue Growth
• Gross Margins
• COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)
• Unit Cost Economics
• Budget and forecast transparency and accuracy
• Policy compliance
FinOps Benefits
• Identify unallocated spend
• Facilitate showback/chargebacks to increase financial accountability
• Drive budget and forecast accuracy
• Guide team to make good cloud investments
Procurement
Primary Goal Cloud platform relationship management
Objectives
• Negotiate the best win-win cloud contract
• Exercise enterprise discount / volume commitment programs
• Manage relationship with Cloud platform provider
Frustrations
• Lack of visibility to cloud cost data
• Lack of centralized process for cloud commitments
Key Metrics
• Software license optimization
• Cost per license
• Utilization of licenses per team
• Cost or IT Spend per Vendor to provide possible consolidation opportunities
FinOps Benefits
• Obtain the best cloud cost rates available
• Translate billing data to activity based costing
• Provide visibility and enable understanding of cost per technology license and contracts
