Leadership
Framework / Personas / Leadership
Primary Goal: Assurance that cloud investments are aligned with business objectives.
Executives, such as a VP/Head of Infrastructure, Head of Cloud Center of Excellence, CTO, or CIO, focus on driving accountability and building transparency, ensuring teams are being efficient, and not exceeding budgets.
Within the Leadership Persona, the Executives make up a special group. Though they work together to benefit the organization, each Executive has a specific set of objectives, challenges, metrics and outcomes they seek.
Particularly when adopting FinOps, there will be a need to work with most Executives in the Leadership Persona to gain approval, buy-in, and involvement in conducting FinOps and achieving its 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.
Deliverables from the Adopting FinOps working group provide more context for organizations just adopting FinOps. The FinOps Practice Operations Capability describes the structure and role of FinOps teams and their relationships with Leadership Persona over time.
CEO
Objectives
- Accelerate Company Growth YoY
- Strategic Competitive Advantage
- Faster time-to-market
- Deliver innovative, market leading solutions cost effectively
Challenges
- 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
CFO
Primary Goal: Manage the cost of cloud utilization (among other costs across the org) and ensuring that money is wisely spent.
Objectives
- Cost visibility and granularity, and accuracy
- Overall cost-per-unit / COGS reduction
- Managing costs during growth, disproportionate cost reduction during flat/declining periods
Challenges
- 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
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
Challenges
- 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