Stop Running FinOps Like a Finance Project...Build It Like a Platform!

Like a lot of my posts, this conversation came up last week with a customer. As per usual, I figured a quick glimpse into what I've seen work with customers might help demystify concepts that customers and the community may be struggling with.

Over the last decade, the term FinOps has gone from industry buzzword to a critical capability for modern, cloud-driven organizations. The concept is straightforward in theory: bring together engineering, finance, and business teams to manage cloud costs, maximize value, and drive accountability.

In practice, it rarely works that smoothly. Just like...you guessed it...DevOps! So many parallels, so many jokes...in theory it sounds amazing! In practice, it's trickier to implement.

Why?

Well...many organizations swing to one of two extremes:

• Engineering-owned FinOps: The focus is on tooling, dashboards, and optimization scripts, but the CFO never gets a clear explanation of what the savings mean for budgets and forecasts.

  
  

• Finance-owned FinOps: The focus is on chargebacks, budget enforcement, and cost reduction targets, but the engineers who could actually implement efficiencies are often left out of the decision-making process.

  
  

Both of these models tend to break down over time. Let’s look at why that happens and how treating FinOps like a Platform Engineering function can make it work for everyone.

Why FinOps Struggles Under Engineering Ownership

Engineers excel at solving technical problems. Given the right tools, they can automate rightsizing, terminate unused resources, and re-architect for efficiency. These efforts often produce impressive-looking dashboards and reports.

However, when FinOps is entirely run out of engineering, several issues emerge:

• Lack of business context: Savings are not linked to revenue goals or strategic priorities. A well-meaning cost reduction could unintentionally slow innovation or limit a product launch.

• Weak budgeting discipline: Optimization is performed, but without linking those changes to forecasted spend. Finance still deals with unpredictable spikes.

• Tooling for the sake of tooling: Engineers may focus on building the “perfect” automation or dashboard without ensuring it actually changes behavior in the wider organization.

  
  

Without financial governance, FinOps within engineering can drift into a “spend less” mindset instead of focusing on “spend right.”

Why FinOps Struggles Under Finance Ownership

Finance brings structure, accountability, and the ability to tie spending directly to business outcomes. They excel at setting targets, tracking actuals, and enforcing budget discipline.

But when finance alone owns FinOps, the technical execution side gets neglected:

• No technical enablement: Finance can spot waste, but they cannot implement the infrastructure or automation changes needed to remove it.

• Frustrated engineers: Cost targets often arrive without context, creating friction and resistance.

• Delayed insight: Without engineering telemetry, finance relies on invoices and delayed reports, which means reacting after the overspend has already occurred.

When engineering is not part of the process, FinOps risks becoming an inflexible cost-control mechanism that slows the pace of innovation.

The Platform Engineering Model for FinOps

Platform Engineering focuses on creating reusable, self-service capabilities that allow product teams to deliver quickly while staying within defined guardrails. A centralized FinOps team should operate in the same way.

A Centralized FinOps-as-a-Platform model:

• Owns the core tooling, data, and automation so every team works from a single, trusted source of cost and usage truth.

• Defines and enforces standards such as tagging policies, budget thresholds, and rightsizing recommendations, all integrated directly into development and deployment pipelines.

• Provides self-service cost visibility so product and engineering teams can see the financial impact of their work in real time without waiting for month-end reporting.

• Translates technical usage into financial insight so forecasts, budgets, and optimization decisions are based on current and accurate data.

In this model, FinOps becomes a service that teams consume, rather than a policing function or an isolated project.

How Everyone Wins

When FinOps operates like a platform engineering team, it stops being “owned” by finance or engineering and becomes a shared, enabling function:

• Engineering benefits from clear, actionable cost insights integrated into their existing workflows, which reduces interruptions and guesswork.

• Finance benefits from accurate, predictable reporting that ties spend directly to business outcomes and future forecasts.

• The business benefits from a model where innovation moves quickly without runaway costs, and savings are reinvested where they deliver the most impact.

The takeaway: FinOps should not be handed entirely to finance or engineering. Instead, it should be treated as a shared service platform with a dedicated team that understands both the technical and financial sides. This team should own the tooling, ensure consistent data, and drive a culture of cost accountability across the organization.

Ultimately, FinOps is not about spending less or spending more. It is about making sure every dollar spent in the cloud is spent with purpose and delivers maximum value.