The FinOps Operate Phase: Building a Cost-Conscious Culture

As cloud adoption accelerates, so too does the complexity, and cost, of managing it. For mid-market and enterprise organizations, cloud spend can now rival traditional infrastructure or software licensing costs. Yet, many organizations still treat cloud cost as someone else’s problem: finance’s job to track, or engineering’s job to fix.

A FinOps culture is not just about tooling or dashboards; it’s about making cloud cost everyone’s responsibility- from finance and engineering to product and even marketing. When cloud cost becomes a shared concern, organizations unlock better decision-making, faster iteration, and significant savings.

Here’s how to make that cultural shift stick.

1. Collaboration between Finance and Engineering

Building a FinOps culture starts with collaboration between engineering and finance - historically two groups that speak different languages. At the heart of FinOps is a tight feedback loop between those who provision cloud infrastructure and those who pay for it. In many organizations, this loop is broken. Finance sees bills too late to influence decisions, and engineering lacks visibility into cost impact.

A recent PwC survey noted that nearly half of CFOs are not confident in measuring ROI on cloud investments. Meanwhile, the 2023 State of FinOps Report shows that 77% of FinOps practitioners cite “getting engineers to take action” as a major challenge. In many cases, engineers have little incentive or visibility into cloud bills, while finance has limited insight into technical constraints. This siloed approach leads to missed optimization opportunities and frequent budget overruns.

A successful FinOps culture starts with a common language. 

Translate data into actionable insights.

Cloud costs shouldn't be buried in abstract line items or engineering-only metrics. Instead, build reporting that reflects constructs both sides understand: cost per service, per environment, per deployment. This alignment allows teams to make smarter, faster decisions. Tools like CloudHealth, Cloudability, or even custom Grafana dashboards tied to billing data can help translate costs into context- especially when cost alerts surface in the same Slack or Teams channels where engineers already work.

Embed finance into the engineering rhythm.

Don't wait for the month-end bill to trigger a conversation. Make cloud cost a regular part of engineering sprints. That could mean hosting joint budget planning sessions, including cost estimates in technical designs, and running shared post-mortems when bills spike.

Reverse the flow, too.

Finance shouldn’t be left deciphering AWS invoices in isolation. Instead, include engineering in financial planning and forecasting sessions. Their insight into architecture, scaling plans, and technical trade-offs is essential to making forecasts realistic—and to preventing surprises.

By making cost a two-way conversation from day one, you lay the groundwork for shared accountability and faster decision-making across teams.

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2. Organization-Wide Cloud Cost Awareness

Too often, only platform teams or finance departments care about cloud spend. But decisions made across an organization can materially affect cloud usage—and costs.

Make Costs Transparent

Provide engineers with dashboards that show the immediate cost implications of new deployments. For example, a team deploying a new containerized service to Kubernetes can see within hours how their usage spikes or decreases, encouraging swift feedback loops.

Use tagging and cost allocation to surface granular cost breakdowns: by team, by feature, even by customer segment. Then share that data broadly. At Slack and Atlassian, engineering managers regularly review their team’s cloud usage and track it against OKRs or performance targets.

Transparency avoids finger-pointing and builds trust. If every team can see how their usage stacks up, cost awareness becomes normalized—not punitive.

Educate and Onboard

Don’t assume everyone understands cloud billing models. Incorporate FinOps literacy into onboarding for new hires. Host internal lunch-and-learns on cost drivers, like storage tiers or egress charges. Offer workshops that introduce engineers to cloud billing concepts, reserved instance strategies, and effective tagging practices. Materials from the FinOps Foundation are a good starting point.

Engineers are natural optimizers, but only if they know what to optimize for. Frame costs in terms of waste reduction and efficiency- language that resonates with technical teams more than “budget compliance.”

Normalize Cost in Daily Work

Include cost checks in pull requests. Add a “cost impact” field in your engineering design docs. Make “cost per API call” or “cost per user” a metric as familiar as latency or uptime.

The most mature FinOps organizations treat cloud cost as a first-class metric across engineering and product development. That shift doesn’t happen overnight, but it starts with making cost part of everyday conversations.

3. Process and Policy Beat Pure Tooling

While many companies start their FinOps journey with dashboards and visualization tools, culture change is driven by process—not software.

Here are key (and relatively simple) processes to consider:

Establish a FinOps Function

Create a cross-functional FinOps team or working group with representatives from finance, engineering, and product. They don’t need to own optimization—but they do need to facilitate conversations, set policies, and evangelize best practices. A hub-and-spoke model works well: a central FinOps group sets strategy, while local champions in each department adapt it to their needs.

Implement Basic Guardrails

Implement specific policies that guide cost-efficient behavior. For instance, enforce auto-shutdown of idle resources after hours to curb waste. Set instance usage policies (e.g. disallowing super expensive instance types unless explicitly approved, or requiring spot instances for certain workloads where possible). Use quotas to prevent provisioning beyond a certain limit without review. Many companies also leverage “tag-based policies” – e.g. any resource not tagged with an owner gets deleted after 30 days, or any development environment older than 6 months is flagged. These guardrails, often implemented through cloud management tools or custom scripts, create an automated safety net against cost explosions while still giving teams freedom within bounds.

These measures reduce noise and create safety nets, so FinOps doesn’t rely on manual policing.

Embed FinOps in the Dev Lifecycle

Tie FinOps into your CI/CD pipelines. Run cost estimates for infrastructure-as-code changes. Set goals for “cost per unit of work” (e.g. per 1,000 requests). When engineering teams see cost as a design parameter - not an afterthought - they start to deliver more with less.

4. Incentivize the Behavior You Want

Changing behavior at scale requires both recognition and reinforcement.

Celebrate Cost-Efficient Wins

Call out teams that optimize their workloads or avoid budget overruns. Make cost-efficiency something to be proud of, not feared. Monthly shoutouts, internal newsletters, or “FinOps Win of the Week” spotlights can go a long way.

Gamify It

Companies like Fidelity, GitLab, and General Mills have successfully used gamification to boost FinOps engagement. Fidelity’s “Try FinOps Tournament” saw over 1,400 employees participate, with many continuing to contribute ideas and cost improvements. General Mills’ points-for-prizes system expanded FinOps participation from one team to 20. GitLab’s cost savings contest, complete with a leaderboard, cut Kubernetes costs by ~10%. These lighthearted competitions turned cost optimization into a collaborative, engaging effort- especially effective in engineering cultures that thrive on challenges.

Share the Gains

 Some organizations tie a portion of cost savings to team rewards - such as offsites, training, or innovation budgets—while others offer small bonuses for impactful optimizations. These incentives align financial efficiency with team goals, turning savings into tangible benefits that engineers care about.

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Final Thoughts

Your growing cloud bill most likely isn’t a tooling problem - it's a cultural one.

While dashboards and software can optimize your bill, the real savings will come when finance and engineering work together, when every team understands their impact on spend, and when cost is treated like performance or security- a metric to optimize, not a constraint. And, even better, you'll end up with smarter architecture, faster decision-making, and a company that scales sustainably.