Leadership
Primary Goal: Ensure technology investments are aligned with business objectives to maximize business value.
Leaders set the strategic objectives of an organization, drive accountability, and ensure teams are sticking to budgets and driving value.
FinOps teams in most organizations report to a CIO or CTO, but their activities must inform and support leadership at every level and in every role. Within the Leadership Persona, Executives make up a special group. They work together to lead the organization, but each Executive has objectives, challenges, metrics and outcomes they seek. Particularly when adopting FinOps, or when adding significant investment in any technology category, such as Public Cloud or AI, there will be a need to work more closely with Executives in the Leadership Persona to gain approval, buy-in, and involvement in conducting FinOps and achieving the organization’s goals.
Each Executive in the Leadership Persona is described below. By understanding the motivations of each executive persona, FinOps practitioners will be able to describe the value of FinOps more effectively, minimizing the time and effort to gain alignment.
In addition to Executives, the Leadership persona includes all those in leadership positions whose job it is to set the organization’s objectives and ensure that technology investments help to achieve them. As the technology landscape of an organization grows or diversifies, there will be a need for FinOps to work with technology executives to provide the decision support needed to understand the value of investments.
CEO
Objectives
- Accelerate Company Growth YoY
- Strategic Competitive Advantage
- Faster time-to-market
- Deliver innovative, market leading solutions cost effectively
Challenges
- Increasingly unpredictable technology landscape under management
- Difficult to quantify value linking engineering initiatives and business objectives
- Unsure of the return on their company’s technology investments
Key Metrics
- Revenue Growth
- Product Margins
- COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)
- Investment Efficiency
FinOps Benefits
- Manage business, financial, contract, and technical risk
- Connect engineering decisions with business outcomes
- Predict how technology spend will grow as the business grows
- Guide organization to make good cloud investments
CFO
Primary Goal: Manage the value achieved through technology (and all other) spending and ensuring that money is wisely spent.
Objectives
- Cost visibility and granularity, and accuracy
- Effective budgeting, forecasting, and planning within expected variances
- Overall cost-per-unit / COGS visibility
- Spending and value predictability
- Consistent operational performance within the bounds of compliance and regulatory requirements
Challenges
- Unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, technology spend and pricing
- Unsure of the return on their company’s technology investment
- Cost fluctuations and innovation may not align to budgeting cycles
- Increasingly relying on consumption-based services which change quickly and unpredictably
- Loss of control points of technology purchasing approval that existed in the past
Key Metrics
- Revenue Growth
- Product Margins
- COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)
- Unit Cost Stability
- Predictability
FinOps Benefits
- Increased accountability for technology cost
- Increased reliance on budget and forecast models
- Direct impact on company bottom line
CTO / CIO
Primary Goal: Leverage technology to create value in support of organizational objectives.
Objectives
- Accelerate Company Growth YoY
- Strategic Competitive Advantage
- Faster time-to-market
- Deliver innovative, market leading solutions cost effectively
Challenges
- Rapidly expanding and increasingly unpredictable spend across all technology categories
- Loss of control gate of purchase approvals in decentralized usage models
- Rapidly changing and evolving environment of services across categories
- Engineering organizations increasingly complex to manage and maintain
- Business continuity requirements are quickly changing
- Reliability and Performance as projects and applications scale
Key Metrics
- Technology impact to revenue or other organizational objective
- Margin contribution from technology
- COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) impact of technology
- Technology Efficiency
- Time to market for new features/product
- Engineering productivity
- Track R&D vs. Production spend
- Maintain operations within budget
FinOps Benefits
- Predict how technology 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
FinOps Leadership Persona includes:
- FinOps Enabled Technology Executive
Increasingly, this role in large and complex organizations is being created to coordinate the delivery of technology solutions to meet organizational objectives across all of the organization’s technology categories (e.g. Public Cloud, data center, data cloud platforms, SaaS, Licenses). This role is typically one or two levels below the Executives. - VP of Product/Chief Product Officer (CPO)
The top product executive in the organization, responsible for all product-related functions and aligning product strategy with overall company goals. - VP of Procurement/Chief Procurement Officer (CPO)
The top procurement executive in the organization, responsible for all procurement-related activities and aligning procurement strategy with overall company goals. - VP of Finance/Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
The top financial executive in an organization. They are responsible for overseeing all financial aspects of the company, including financial planning, analysis, reporting, accounting, treasury, and risk management. - VP of Technology/Chief Technical Officer (CTO)
The top engineering executive. They’re responsible for overseeing all engineering and technology-related activities, including product development, research and development, infrastructure, and technical strategy. - Technology Directors / Managers
Lead various parts of the technology organization to ensure that organizational objectives are translated to action, and that information from the FinOps practice is communicated effectively to inform decision making.