And I often say to like, customers that are attending for the
first time to, uh, even though the, the breakouts are the bright
and shiny object, oftentimes if you go to like something like our
chalk talks or your workshops, you're gonna get a bit more out
of the in-person experience where all the breakouts are recorded.
So you'll get pretty much the same experience watching the, the talk
that Cory Bowen and I did on YouTube as you would be in the room,
versus doing something that's more hands-on or being able to ask that
question that's really burning when you're at these other sessions.
So that's what we try to like.
When we program for the event, like how do we have a good spread of the
topics that folks wanna cover in the places that they do wanna cover them in?
Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud.
I'm Corey Quinn, and unlike my usual approach, I have two guests on this time.
Now, the reason I often don't do that is
because it's very hard to get the dynamic right.
When you have multiple people who aren't used to
working together, they'll talk over one another.
It just becomes a very different kind of show.
I'm fine with it this time because of who my guests are.
Bowen Wong is a principal product marketing manager for A-W-S-C-F-M.
Wow.
That's a lot of words.
Ed Matt Burke is a principal technical account manager at AWS,
slightly fewer words, and the three of us together gave a talk at
reinvent COP two 18 best practices and new tools for cost reporting
and estimation, which again is too many words, but there we have it.
Matt Bowen.
Great to see you again.
Great to see you too, Corey.
Yeah.
Thank you for having us.
This episode is sponsored in part by my day job, the Duck bill group.
Do you have a horrifying AWS bill?
That can mean a lot of things.
Predicting what it's going to be, determining what it should be, negotiating
your next long-term contract with AWS, or just figuring out why it increasingly
resembles a phone number, but nobody seems to quite know why that is.
To learn more, visit duck bill group.com.
Remember, you can't duck the duck bill.
Bill and my CEO informs me.
That is absolutely not our slogan.
Oh, thank you for letting me participate in basically my good faith attempt
not to ruin, reinvent for everyone last year, and I think we succeeded.
No one threw me out of the building afterwards, so there was that and
we had excellent CSAT s, which we'll talk about is,
is one of the main reasons why we do these things.
Yeah, we're a
very data-driven company, so we definitely
look at customer feedback via the CS a score.
Yeah.
One of the reasons that we're having this conversation is after
I did that, people were surprised by a few different things.
Uh, first like, wow, they let you to reinvent.
Okay.
Yes.
They let you speak at reinvent.
And given that we were talking about things that had just been released
that week, wait, you are talking about things that haven't been released.
Clearly, you know, something about this in advance.
Who in the world trusts you at AWS?
It, I realize that my reputation sometimes gets ahead of me.
I, I talk to you folks a lot about a lot of different
things that the cost folks, uh, the CFM team are working on.
And I don't tell it to people's secrets.
It's not my place.
Yeah.
Um, so it's definitely one of our approach to collect feedback from
like customers or influencers like yourself before we launch a product.
Um, because we believe that if we showcase a product
idea or any product demonstration to our power users.
We will be able to collect feedback before
we finalize the experience with customers.
Um, so yes, for this particular talk, we definitely
had multiple, we call pre briefings with you qua.
So for us it's definitely, um, kill two birds with one stone.
Uh, just because pre brief, um, those products
with you, we collect feedback and in the same time.
We can start to have some ideas for this talk for the breakout session.
I fix AWS bills for large complicated companies for
a living, and I can never depend on any of these big
companies having any particular third party tool in place.
So since the very beginning, everything I do is.
Predicated on, okay.
Are you using AWS in your environment?
Gonna guess, yes.
Okay.
Let's use the native tooling that's offered, because that's
the only thing I can ever consistently depend on being there.
So from my perspective, I'm, I am a customer of these tools.
I use them constantly.
Yeah.
And that's the same thing as a technical account manager.
A lot of times, you know, we work with these large enterprise customers
and the way that we help them is by seeing the same things that they see.
So, you know, we can help look at their cost
explorer and identifiers of opportunity.
We can help see if there's budgets being set, and then once it
goes to a third party, it kind of becomes a black box to us.
So we try to at least walk the walk in the same
place when we look at something like Cost Explorer.
I, I wanna be very clear that you have an impossible
job when it comes to getting these things right.
I used to think that it wasn't that hard, and then I
started building tools that other people started using.
It's like, great, here's this finely crafted, tightly
honed instrument, and people would pick it up and
like, wow, this is a crappy hammer that you've sold me.
I don't understand it.
It's the way that people use things and interact with them is never quite what
you think it's going to be when you're sitting there designing it on day one.
Yeah, I mean Boeing, one of the things that we launched
at Reinvent in that talk was pricing calculator.
And there's been so many conversations of what that
product would look like, how we would present it.
Do you wanna talk a little bit about that?
Well, yeah.
Pricing calculator, it's definitely many years in the making, uh, for this tool.
So we have pricing calculator for, um, public accessibility.
So you don't have to be a Ws customers, you can use it.
And just to get a sense of.
What will be my cost for the specific applications, but for that
pricing calculator, we call this as a authenticated experience.
So you'll be able to log in with your AWS account and get all the
information, meaning your historical usage, import this, and make any
workload modifications such as moving to your new regions, et cetera.
Or if you wanna make any changes to your purchase options,
for example, you understand your predictable usage.
Um, add additional dollar here and there.
For my savings plans.
Um, and you get a bill estimate.
I, I was using this my, at a client, uh, conversation I was having three
weeks ago, and it got to the last step and it just sat there and spun.
I. And spun.
And spun.
So I texted the two of you and the answer was, is once again,
'cause I am super lucky like this, I went blundering into the
middle of an update to a service that the team was rolling out.
Now when I say I'm lucky like this, I'm not talking
with necessarily the cloud financial management group.
I'm talking across the board at AWS or even the industry.
Whenever I'm trying to use something, I have
this knack for timing it perfectly wrong.
I, I basically a walking disaster.
No, no, no.
I remember that day, um, I was getting my son ready
for daycare and then I saw message from Corey.
It was, that seems to be urgent.
I look at it, it's like, that doesn't be good experience.
So I tested my team who are based in New York, and they let
me know they're actually doing a testing right as we speak.
So you call that it's like 6:00 AM or something?
Yeah, it was because I was talking to a client
that is not based in the US normally a perfect.
Time to do it.
I'm sitting here basically trying to do the
song and dance of Yeah, it should be working.
I, I told everyone it worked well at Reinvent on stage.
Oh God.
Tell me.
I didn't just lie to everyone, but yeah, it was, that was exciting.
But it was fun too.
It, it was a useful tool and I liked it because what I was modeling
out at that point was, okay, uh, I even remember the regions.
You had built everything in US West One for this workload, Northern California.
It is more expensive than Oregon.
What would it cost to have run this in Oregon instead?
And super useful at highlighting that.
The downside, of course, was that it didn't
work at the time, so I had to basically just.
Guess and make numbers by speaking with my hands as I went.
It.
It's, it's show business.
Just like anything else, like our talk, you stumble over your words, keep going.
People don't know what you're supposed to have said.
What is interesting about reinvent that a lot of people don't
know, uh, and I'm assuming a lot of your listeners probably
either go or they, they look at, at least they YouTube content
from reinvent, uh, is that we start planning it super early.
Like I didn't realize until I started to, to help run the track that we are
already, like when reinforce is happening, which happens in June, June, we're
already at that point saying, okay, we have to start figuring out what the
content is going to be, what our allocations are from the, the high above.
Mm-hmm.
To start to build the track out.
And so folks will reach out around August, September.
Mm-hmm.
Either both internally and then customers and be like.
It's, we already, we already have it locked and loaded at this point because the
presentation is due September slash October.
Yeah.
So is,
yeah.
Can we get your final slides two months in advance?
And when I'm working with you folks, like they tell, they tell all
of us as this, and my default response as a speaker is, ha ha ha.
No.
And you actually have to say yes 'cause you work with these people
and, oh no, this is, this is not at all how I'm used to writing slides,
which is the morning before on the plane ride out there while crying.
This was actually planned well in advance.
Yeah.
We did a few rehearsals even, right?
Yeah.
We did a few in person rehearsals and I still remember the, we did
this on a Thursday and I think it was the, that week, uh, right.
I think on a Monday where we were talking about something
that was going to be released, uh, custom billing view.
And you folks said, ah, yeah, surprise that that's.
Getting held back because it's not ready yet, which is like, okay, I'm talking
about uh, with new tools, like do we have to change the title to be new tool
and best practice all singular as these things start getting paired down.
Uh, and it was, we had to go through with a fine tooth comb to make sure we
weren't mentioning anything, uh, inadvertently that hadn't been released yet.
So I'm curious, I have to ask.
Why did it get held back?
Because it came out a few weeks later.
This was not one of those Back to the drawing board things.
Yeah, we was supposed to be having a perfect score, 10 out of 10, but in reality
we launched nine service slash features at Last Ring, invent, and we held back.
I. Customer billing view.
Um, it was because during the final QA process, um, our
product team and engineering leads, when they look at this
whole process, so again, customer billing view is the ability
for you to have a delegated admin with your organization.
So that person without having the access of a payer account,
can access cost explorer view for multiple member accounts.
So basically a few steps, right?
You create that.
Um, we call scope down view.
You can use cost allocation tags or account IDs.
You can create that view, um, and then share that with a delegated admin.
But that sharing process during that QE process
is you have to go to Resource Access Manager.
So it's a kind of a separate page.
You learn about resource access manager, then you share a billing view.
Uh, we believe that is not a. Perfect experience.
We believe that for anyone who is creating or sharing the customer
billing view should be able to accomplish that within one landing page.
So we push back on that experience and we looped in that same
sharing experience on the same landing page in the console.
And that requires another two to three weeks of, um, engineering time.
So we decide not to launch it at reinvent.
But before Christmas.
That is amazing.
'cause I still remember the battle days when
you would set things up in parts of the console.
It's like, would you like to get an email to
be notified when a thing happens effectively?
Sure.
Great.
Put in the R for the SNS topic that you've set
up elsewhere that will then drop into your inbox.
This weird JSON object.
Uh, this was.
To be clear, 15 years ago or so, it, it doesn't do that anymore.
I think because someone tried to use it once
and realized how terrible the experience was.
But even now, bouncing to another service like that now,
trying to smooth off that rough edge, it was the right call.
Yeah.
But what was funny is that I was so excited about this use
case in this service because I work with a lot of enterprise
customers that kind of bang their head against the wall of this.
This idea that I don't want to give access to the payer account.
I don't want, I don't want folks to have that cross view, but I do want.
Uh, a group of account specific access or a business
unit specific access, which this then now provides.
So I was like, this is awesome.
I'm so excited.
And, and we peppered it through the talk
and then it's like, Nope, pull it all out.
And so what you don't realize when you're doing a what's new or a
launch heavy thing like this is the, it's always a moving target.
We're always, things are coming in and sliding out.
Yeah, and we're, we're literally editing things that week to
make sure that we're saying what was the right thing or, or
that the, the verbiage is, is right on point with what Boen has.
Because that's the funny thing too, is that we don't
wanna over promise something that it can, if it can, uh,
toast bread and it could slice eggs, I should say both.
But if it can't, then I should only say a toast bread.
One of the things that I also think that folks who don't do a lot of speaking
themselves might not realize is it's not just the slides 'cause okay, great.
Children can look at that and make sure they're not referencing a
particular topic, but so much of it is presenter notes and given
the way that we all use presenter notes somewhat differently.
It's not a verbatim copy of the words we're going to say.
I mean, by the time I get ready to give a talk, a non-trivial amount
of my own presenter notes are, don't say this thing usually because I'm
going to make that same observation three slides later, and then I just
stand there and it lands with a thud if I do it twice in a 32nd window.
But in this case, it's like, don't do this, or you've just broken NDA.
Don't do that.
So it was.
Great.
Let's make very clear that I know where the lines
are here between one service offering and another.
'cause a lot of these things touch each other in very similar ways.
Yeah, yeah.
And you don't even, I think what was funny for folks
that do, look at the recording, you'll see we're on this.
Stage and we did not know what that was going
to look like beforehand, the three of us.
'cause there's, you're normally going to be in some
sort of ballroom or some sort of partitioned room.
And we go out there, we're like, oh, okay, where do we stand?
How do, like, can we see the notes from here?
Yeah.
If you don't speak, do you step back or do you stay at the same place?
Yes.
One thing that was, that was new for me on this talk was about
an hour before we gave it my, my watch buzzed, and there was a
notification from my weather app that there was a tsunami warning
in San Francisco and where I live and we're standing in Las Vegas.
At the time, it was, Hmm.
It, it was quickly canceled, fortunately, but I, I ha part,
it went through my mind as a dark thought that Okay, if.
If it hadn't been and I wasn't able to get in touch
with my family, like how would that have gone on?
Like, I'm on stage or hi, uh, my family is missing.
But now to make jokes about cloud money, uh, it
seems like that would not have gone super well.
I have to imagine there are contingency plans on the backend for, for
tragedies like that happening, but I'm super glad if we didn't get to find out.
It,
it happened to us.
It, this happened to us actually.
So the first time that Bowen and I did a talk at Reinvent, we
had two different people that were gonna come on from there.
And one of them actually had a family emergency the
day before we were supposed to see the night before.
Yeah.
And so we, we thankfully had a backup.
We were resilient that we had an his boss that
was there, give the rest of the talk for us.
So yes, things can happen.
Yeah, definitely.
Families comes first.
Yeah.
At least that was a day's notice, not 40 minutes beforehand.
I, I, I don't know how that would've played out,
but I'm super glad we didn't get to find out.
Me too.
I I, one of us would ha had to have read your presenter
notes and it would not have gone well for either of us
or all the promises or your fans in the audience seats.
That too.
I feel that's a big Oma promise under deliver
other people's material fits about as well as other people's shoes.
And my presenter notes are not the most helpful thing in the world.
Like make the rabbit joke.
Like, great, what, what are you supposed to do with that as you're
giving someone else's talk and that's what you would encounter.
You're probably not gonna mention rabbits.
Yeah.
That was the funny thing about rehearsing too.
'cause we're all like using the same PowerPoint slide and then I would look
at your slides and be like, what is, what is he going to say at this point?
So it was a lot of trust falling that we did.
Yeah.
And that was the best part because people
ask me, what are you going to say here?
It's like, I don't know.
We're gonna find out together as the words come out of my mouth on stage.
And I do wanna tell all the listeners that, that this is not, we're not
recommending that you do this when you present with your AWS counterparts.
Yeah.
I ought be very clear.
I knew where the high points were.
I know the direction of the conversation had to go and what.
Material I had to cover.
But the ad, the ad-libbing, the jokes, the, the way I talk about
it in reference to what was just said or the inflection that went
through that stuff, I always change dynamically as I give a talk.
In fact, during the pandemic, I gave a number of video
talks that were very wooden, specifically because on the
teleprompter I would wind up writing out my entire script.
I need to have it condensed into bullet points so I stay engaged.
That's that.
That gave a much better talk when I started doing that.
Yeah, for us is once we have a good storyline, like
we understand how we kind of engage with customers.
'cause personally we have very high bar of how a breakout session looks like.
Like you can't just have like product feature
number one, product feature number two.
Um, so I think for that talk we designed kind of the funnel view.
Of how we believe.
When you do cost analysis, you, you start from the top of
the funnel, which is cloud service provider, and then go
to organizations and business unit and resources level.
And that's how we plug in each of the product announcements.
And when you do cost planning, you probably will do bottom
up just to make sure it involve all the stakeholders.
And I just, I just realized that for the top
of the funnel, you announced the, the focus.
Um, data exports for focus.
Yes, that's definitely another thing.
We're working kind of very closely with, uh, finops
Foundations and to make sure we target our customers who
understands deeply of how a finops use case looks like.
Um, so again, that I feel like if, if, if you have a good storyline and
customer understand, you kind of talk to them, um, with the context of their
workflow, um, that's a better experience for breakout session at least.
Um, when we design a talk.
This episode is sponsored by my own company, the
Duck Bill Group, having trouble with your AWS bill.
Perhaps it's time to renegotiate a contract with them.
Maybe you're just wondering how to predict
what's going on in the wide world of AWS.
Well, that's where the Duck Bill group comes in to help.
Remember, you can't duck the duck bill.
Bill, which I am reliably informed by my
business partner is absolutely not our motto.
You two have given talks together a number of times.
In fact, I think you have one coming up.
Uh, it's late April, as we're having this conversation at the beginning of June.
Is finops X in San Diego?
All of us are going to be there.
I'm not speaking at this one just because I, uh, I'm viewed as a vendor
and the, that tends to be a bit more of a, uh, of a bit of a needle.
Eye that you have to thread.
So I'm just gonna sit there and clap in the front row.
But, so yeah, I'll just be on blue sky.
Live skiing.
Anything you have to say.
No pressure.
But I, I imagine you're, uh, how far along are you on building that talk out?
Given that we're about six weeks out,
um, we actually just about to finalize the agenda for
different talks, and some of the talks will include customer
speakers or, um, product announcements or workshops.
I. Um, so starting probably next week or two, um, every
speaker will start to put together the actual content.
Um, and because we're platinum sponsored, uh, we
actually can use our template so there's no actual Okay.
Transport our content to a different, um, slide.
And with Platinum sponsor, we also have a dedicated room called a Ws stage.
So within AWS stage, we literally can just.
Design content throughout the day.
I'll be running a workshop, probably on the first
day we're gonna do something called an AWS Game Day.
For those of you that haven't participated in
one of those before, it's a gamified workshop.
We have a, a sort of leaderboard, and so the one
that we have on offer that we'll be doing at x.
But if you ask, if you've got an account team, you wanna ask
them to run this, you're super interested in cost optimization.
We have something called Frugality Fest.
So you can optimize in real time, compete against other teams to see who can
find the most savings and prove their ROI within a two to four hour workshop
challenge accepted.
Yeah.
So we'll see you there.
Yeah, so day two will be, uh, focused on product announcements.
So again, you probably will be pre briefed
again, Corey already with a few services.
But we have a few product enhancements to be announced
again at the day, two keynote slash breakout sessions.
And I'm awaiting that with bated breath.
Uh, I. I'm excited to see what you folks come out with when all said and done.
I, I just get to sit in the cheap seats and clap.
Uh, it's exciting.
You don't have to use the official template for this stuff.
Uh, I, I gave a talk at a leadership track talk.
I gave a part of one on the first reinforce when it came out, and they
did that same thing where you have to use the slide template and I
used my own for part of it and I got it approved because as I said.
Look, you want it to be exquisitely explicitly clear
that I do not work for AWS in any way, shape or form.
And then they reviewed my slides like, yeah, you're right.
We definitely want to make sure no one is confused on that point.
Holy god.
So yeah, big silly platypus right up on the screen and that worked out.
But.
Often when, especially when you're giving talks, the way that
we gave that talk at reinvent where it isn't, and now it's my
section and now it's your section and then we're closing out.
It's interleave throughout the entire thing.
You have to go with the flow.
Yeah.
And
I often say to like, customers that are attending
for the first time to, uh, even though the, the.
Breakouts or the bright and shiny object.
Oftentimes if you go to like something like our chalk talks
or your workshops, you're gonna get a bit more out of the
in-person experience where all the breakouts are recorded.
So you'll get pretty much the same experience watching the the talk
that Cory Bowen and I did on YouTube as you would be in the room,
versus doing something that's more hands-on or being able to ask that
question that's really burning when you're at these other sessions.
So that's what we try to like.
When we program for the event, like how do we have a good spread of the
topics that folks wanna cover in the places that they do wanna cover them in?
Yeah.
That's, that's always the hard part is trying to understand who the audience is.
I, I got it hilariously wrong.
At an AWS Community Day, a few years back, I'd
forgotten that I'd been giving a whole lot of.
Talks at places like reinvent and whatnot.
But a community day is where you have folks who are brand new
to the industry are showing up, and it was a security theme.
So yeah, I can sit here and make fun of CloudTrail great.
But for that audience, I needed to explain
first what CloudTrail was, and I didn't do that.
So I. I would make the joke that I thought was hilarious,
and they just sort of stared at me in a, in a very
understandable question of what is wrong with that man?
And honestly, lots of people would like to know,
but I was, I was certainly, uh, challenged by that.
So you have to know who your audience is and we can meet them where they are.
Just like customers.
Yeah.
It took us a few trials and errors to understand, um, how to
write a good abstract, how to decide the right technical levels.
So you set up the right expectation for your audience, right?
It's a 200 slash 300, 400 level.
Do you, um, promise a hands-on experience like demonstration
or it's introductory level con, um, session and what.
Terminologies or maybe how can you set up the stage for your talk?
It's just the right amount of mix.
Yeah.
Honestly, I talked a little bit about CSAT right at the
top, but like that is the, the really powerful tool that
we use when we go and, and think about reinvent next year.
So if you're the person that's in the seat.
This December and you were like, eh, I don't
wanna really wanna fill out the survey.
That is what this is how we improve and what we do.
And so there's funny trends that we find over time when
we look at the data year over year and how to improve.
One of them is that if we do something that's
a 300 level or even 400 level expert talk.
Generally, those actually get better CSAT scores than running it as a 200.
Now, when we did our talk, we thought, okay, could we make this 300?
But we couldn't.
We originally started as a 400 level talk, and as we talked about
this, it's like, I don't know that there is a great 400 level talk.
In this direction just because by the time you get to that level, you are so
into the weeds of a specific configuration and environment that it'll be super
handy if everyone works at the same company or alternately the seven people
on the planet with this specific problem in this specific point in time.
But everyone else is gonna wonder why they wasted their time.
Yeah, it's the breadth versus depth.
Yeah.
Honestly, the support group with the 400 level talk
about costing and cloud generally is meets at the bar.
That's, that's my experience.
Like, oh God, what have I seen this week?
But it was an awful lot of fun.
Now, what advice do you folks have for folks who want to have
their opportunity to give a talk with an AWS service team?
How should they go about doing it?
'cause I'm honestly not entirely sure how I wound
up in that place, but, uh, results not typical.
Consult your, uh, span your account manager for details.
How does that work?
You, you give one at first, then I'll give
one.
Yeah.
I, I think from the product team perspective, um, a lot of times
when we collect feedback from our power users, we also know for
specific customers or organizations, they're extremely good.
For example, in cost planning or reporting or governance.
So if you are known to the product teams about a specific.
Place you are an expert of.
And when they design those talk, they probably have a
few shortlisted customers and they can reach out to those
customers to even invite them to, to speak with them.
So I think just be very proactive if you, if there's something you wanna do.
With the product leaders and just be very generous of your time providing
feedback and even maybe creating any customer success stories over the
years so they understand, okay, that person is extremely good at this.
We understand they can contribute a lot to the session
because you can't just have over high level, um, content.
You need be able to dive deeper into, uh, specifics.
Uh, that's funny.
I thought, I thought we would have different answers.
I kind of have the same answers, but, but I'll, I'll, I'll.
Phrase it slightly differently as someone that that directly interacts with,
with the customer in the field all the time, which is that like a lot of times
as a customer you see something with a service and you say, okay, this is a
feature request, and we log that as a feature request, it goes into the pile.
Yes.
PFR is the term I've heard bandi about,
which seems like an internal term of arb.
I'm not entirely sure what it stands for, but yeah,
there's no, no, no secret sauce on that front,
but, but then it goes in the pile of pfr, right?
And what is better is RPMs are really customer obsessed, right?
That's, that's the phrase that gets thrown about, but it is true.
So if you have, I have this use case that you are
not serving, then you wind up in a meeting with them.
You have your account team broker that meeting, and then it becomes,
hey, a couple months later, I wrote a doc based on your feedback
and other customer's feedback to build the thing that you want.
Can, can you help, can you help provide a quote for that or can you
help like make sure that we're going in the right direction now.
Mm-hmm.
And then over time, that partnership evolves to the point
where then you're potentially beta testing a feature.
You're on a, a private preview for a feature, and then that allows it to kind
of go to, to the space of Yes, we want you to be the customer to talk about it.
On the flip side, then there's always the success stories where a product's
been out for a while and you found a new way to use it, or you, you.
Had some great success and your account team is probably
going to be partnering with you to, to bubble that up.
But I think that that folks don't realize there's this
other avenue, this longer term partnership that I think
most, if not all of our PMs are always searching for.
I have first person experience in first party experience in
this, where I had learned pretty early on that I have to be much.
Clearer when I'm making a joke.
I think it was around using, uh, route 53 as a database.
At one point I made that reference, like, this is terrible.
I could barely query it across table at all.
And someone from the product team reached
out with, I'm interested in your use case.
Could you tell me more?
It's, which is a terrific question if you don't
understand something, but I had to clarify.
No, no, I, I'm just trying to be intentionally ridiculous.
For God's sake, please don't.
Actually do this.
This leads to madness.
You have a bunch of other services, way better suited for actual database use.
That was the painful piece.
Yeah.
I have a bunch of pfr that you logged Cory about paying
your AWS bill and pennies and I didn't really understand
whether that was a joke or that you actually won
Wheelbarrow full of nickels was my line and.
Felt, I actually used that in the talk where you can start breaking down
bills into individual invoices to start charging different orgs and have them
responsible for it, which is great because you know that the data engineers
pay for their, pay their own way and stop having people yell at me about it.
Yeah.
Sometimes you need that official PDF to know that you have to pay something.
You know, you'd be surprised the power of a logo
and enough fine print that says scary words.
Yeah, you just mentioned the doc.
I have so many docs circling around right now for any product ideas.
Our product managers for so many docs.
Yeah, I mean, maybe folks, it is funny like having
been here, Bo and I have been here for a while.
You've been way here longer than me, years, years.
But I, I'm almost at six years.
And so we throw it on like docs, but like for folks that don't know or on
the outside of Amazon, like everything is a, is a document driven culture.
Mm-hmm.
And so whenever I have an idea, it's, oh, did you write a doc?
But whenever the product team is writing idea,
it's, it's a working backwards document that.
Presupposes, what is the pro press release
for the thing that you're building look like?
And we do that.
We do this.
Like if you have, you know, our account team, again, like the, we
do work, we do these sessions with customers too, to, to teach them
on the culture, on, on how to do what we call a working backwards.
Yeah.
And it's, it's really powerful.
Like it, it's, I know we're saying this while we're
talking about doing a reinvent talk where there's a
PowerPoint, but it's very easy to build the PowerPoint.
To kind of get a point across, it's much harder to write it
down and then have to sift through everyone's comments and
hundreds of, of comments of feedback to then actually get to
the, the crystal or the idea that you're, you're trying to build.
And it, it's, it's a really powerful tool.
And also the fun part is after you build the pure FAQ.
You can also put the product owner hat on.
You can also write a pricing document to understand all
underlying infrastructure costs to decide a pricing point.
Well, in this case, most of the CFM services are free of charge.
Then you need to make sure there's enough, you know, adoption to cover the cost.
And then you can also play the naming games.
What kind of name you wanna put.
Don't get.
Corey
started on naming,
so it's like PFAQ pricing.
Naming documents are something a product manager have to
complete before we even start this whole engineering process.
I heard read years ago that I think some executives said
that, oh, we sometimes even get PF FAQs from customers.
At which point my response was.
That's genius.
So I wrote one and inflicted it on a few people a
day, Ws, and four years later it became a product.
You can probably guess which one it was, and
I'll tell you if you're right in my memoirs,
I don't even know what it could be.
What was amazing was I was read in on it before it launched, and I mentioned
that story to the general manager, the person who's owning that product,
and their response was the polite corporate version of, yeah, bullshit.
Ding, it's in your inbox.
Let me know how close I got to the final product.
It was a wild conversation.
I'm curious to know what category, like identity storage computes.
Hey, if I get officially those permission to tell the story, I
certainly will, but I, it's, it's, it's true when customers articulate
painful parts of the story, it gets addressed if the customer's right.
Yeah.
We definitely include customer influence.
During our operational planning process, that's another
document everybody participate, we call OP one OP two Process.
You are definitely need to justify why do you even ask for resources
to build this feature because all the PFR and customer influences
behind this and we believe this will make meaningful impact.
To customers experience.
It's a target rich environment too.
'cause when every, and you can say yes to a bunch of stuff and get nowhere,
how do you decide what to say no to so you can focus on the good parts.
And it feels like AWS is honing its focus a fair bit lately.
In good ways.
I, I want to be clear, like there have been some deprecation
of services that were basically unloved and unused and it's.
It's long past time for that to happen.
I, I don't disagree with any of the deprecations that have come across
my desk with the single exception of I, I will miss Chime when it's gone.
I think I'm the only person who will, well,
uh, I, yeah, I think you, you are the only person that will, I, I'm,
for anyone that's, that's going to do an interview with Amazon, we are
still using Chime right now, but one day it'll be something different.
But I feel bad for everyone that has to, to sign
in and, and all my customers that try to do it.
Yeah.
Because I think.
Corey is still one of the only few people use Chime to Chime us.
Oh, yeah.
Corey messaged us on our on Chime, and it feels like now
it's like, I'm about to say our internal messaging platform.
It's a public, it was a public product.
It's still public.
I, I never misrepresented myself to be clear, but people have open security
tickets on that because, oh God, he broke into the internal system.
It's like, no, no, no Chime does that.
Just, no one uses it.
Like, mm.
There's, there's little, um.
Uh, like, like something, there's like a what brackets
that come up with your external Oh, just like anything.
So it was fair.
I'm why, yeah.
Not that I ever misrepresented myself, but it scared the heck out of people.
Uh, that that was a, yeah, that was a fun era.
We'll see what happens going forward.
Uh, if people wanna learn more about what you folks are up to and.
Ideally think it wrote into you at finops X, but in the event
they can't, where's the best place for them to stay current.
I will make a plug for AWS Cloud Financial Management Block Channel.
'cause we do post all of this upcoming events, activities, news, announcements.
I. Best practices solutions there.
Um, if you are interested either in our teams or the solutions we're
building, that's definitely place you should go check out regularly.
Yeah.
And then my shameless book is I helped do
a Twitch show on the AWS Twitch Channel.
On Mondays at 5:00 PM Eastern, 2:00 PM uh, Pacific every week,
uh, we, it's called AWS Tech Tales, and we try to highlight
real life customer problems, what you can do to solve them.
We try to troubleshoot in real time and help folks in
the chat, like it's not necessarily finops or CFM because
we have the great keys to a s opt optimization show.
But, um, yeah, I'm, I'm on that every week, so that's like the best way to get.
The name.
Oh, it's AWS Tech Tales Tails.
That's, that's Tech Tails.
I didn't realize that existed.
I should really spend more time watching videos instead of working.
I know, that's the thing.
I have to plug it 'cause there's just so, there's so much content
that comes on live on our Twitch channel and, uh, but we have a,
a, a pretty cute following of, of folks that tune in every week.
So that's, that's, if you wanna reach out to me, you can always find me.
Uh, you always chat in on the show and I will respond.
Yep.
And both on LinkedIn.
And we'll put links to all of this and our talk, of course, into the show notes.
Thank you both so much for taking the time to speak with
me as well as including me in giving that talk last year.
That was phenomenal.
Yep.
Thank you,
Corey.
It's fun.
Thank you, Corey.
It was,
uh, it was a great collaboration and I really enjoyed it.
Absolutely.
More to come on this Bowen Wong Principle product marketing
manager for AWS's Cloud Financial Management Unit.
Matt Burke is a principal technical account manager.
Also at AWS, and I'm cloud economist, Cory Quinn.
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