This past Father's Day, my eleven-year-old gave me a card he made himself. He drew me at my desk on a Zoom call, and the speech bubble read "Blah Blah FinOps."
I laughed. Then I thought about it for a day. Then I started a newsletter. It's about what the money trail tells you about how an organization really works, which usually isn't how it thinks it works.
My kid doesn't know what FinOps is. He just knows it's a thing his dad talks about, apparently at length, apparently on video calls, apparently with a lot of other people who also have opinions about it. I've been in this space long enough that he picked up the vocabulary just by being in the room. That's a particular kind of entrenched.
My background isn't finance, and it isn't traditional FinOps either. I came up through software engineering, databases, and technical program management, the part of the org that sits between how things get built and how they run.
FinOps found me sideways, the way it finds most people who aren't cloud cost analysts by training. It happened gradually, then all at once, usually when someone put a spreadsheet in front of me and asked why the numbers were doing that.
What I've found is that the interesting questions are almost never about cost. They're about process and accountability: how engineering teams make decisions fast, and what falls through the gap between what they meant to do and what they did. FinOps is a good lens for that, maybe the best one there is, because it makes invisible things visible.
So I won't be writing cloud cost tips or tool comparisons. I'll pull one thread at a time from real work, and from the conversations in rooms where the dashboard is live and nobody's quite sure what to do next. I won't name companies, and I won't dress up case studies as thought leadership. It'll mostly be stuff that seems obvious once someone says it out loud.
My son drew me talking about it. Might as well write it down.
There's good writing about FinOps out there. J.R. Storment and Mike Fuller wrote the book on it, literally. Corey Quinn has been sharper and funnier about cloud costs than anyone.
But most of what's out there is practitioner how-to or vendor content. I haven't found much that treats FinOps the way John Cutler writes about product or Will Larson writes about engineering leadership, as a lens on how organizations behave and not just how to tag your resources.
That's the gap I'm interested in: the messy, human stuff that happens after the dashboard goes live.
My goal here is small on purpose. If this starts three real conversations over the next year, with people who've sat in those rooms too, it did its job. So if you manage engineers, run a platform team, or you're the one who keeps getting invited to the cost review, I'm writing this for you. A new issue shows up about once a week.
Quote of the issue: "Blah Blah FinOps." (my son, age 11)
This week's meme:
Where have you watched the dashboard go live and nothing change?