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What happens when all the low-hanging fruits are already in the basket?
You have cleaned up the obvious waste.
You have rightsized what could be rightsized.
You have bought the discounts.
You have built the dashboards.
Everyone agrees that cloud cost matters.
And then the real work begins.
FinOps After the Low-Hanging Fruits is a video podcast about the harder side of FinOps: communication, diplomacy, negotiation, policy design, forecasting, organisational tension, and strategic thinking.
The things that appear once the easy savings are gone.
The official documentation can make it look simple. In practice, it rarely is.
It is a bit like my son watching a few skateboarding videos and deciding he was good at it. The theory was clear. The confidence was high.
Then came the concrete.
FinOps is similar.
Reading about forecasting, governance, capabilities, or collaboration is one thing. Making them work across finance, engineering, product, architecture, procurement, and leadership is something else entirely.
This podcast is for FinOps practitioners who are past the basic cost-cutting phase and now need to make FinOps useful, credible, and strategic inside the business.
We will talk about what happens after the first wins.
When the dashboards are not enough.
When the answer is no longer technical.
And when FinOps has to become part of how the business makes decisions.
When you are a FinOps practitioner, the first phase is usually clear. You find the obvious waste. You right size, you build dashboards, you produce reports, you help people see the cost. But at some point, the basket is empty. Low hanging fruits are gone.
Speaker 1:And then the question becomes, What now? This is where many practitioners get lost. Because the next part of FinOps is not only technical. It is about influence. It is about decisions.
Speaker 1:It is about priorities. It is about power. So you need a map. Not a detailed street map yet, but map of continent. A simple map to show how power flow through a company.
Speaker 1:Because once you understand where power sits, you can make better decisions about your own practitioner journey. Who should you help? Who should you influence? Where can you create the most value? In this series, we will start at the top, one layer at a time.
Speaker 1:And the top is defined by power. Here is the strange thing about power. Power is often the opposite of doing. When you have more power, you usually do less direct work. You decide, you organize, you set directions, you create the structure.
Speaker 1:When you have less power, you do more of the work. You build, you deliver, you operate, you fix. This does not mean that one is better than the other. A company need both. Thinking without doing is useless.
Speaker 1:Doing without direction is chaos. But if we want to understand the top of a company, we need to ask a simple question. Who has the most power? At the top of the company are the owners. The goal of a company is to create value for its owners.
Speaker 1:In a public company, these owners are called shareholders. So if you buy one share in Amazon, for example, you become one tiny owner of Amazon. And that means something quite amazing. You now have hundreds of thousands of people working directly or indirectly to make that company more valuable over time. Engineers, finance team, product team, salespeople, executive managers, all of them are part of a machine designed to create value for the owners.
Speaker 1:In a small startup, the owners may fit around one table. A founder, a co founder, a few early investors, maybe friends and family. But in a public company, there may be millions of owners, millions of shareholders. And of course, millions of people cannot run a company together. They cannot all join the weekly decision meeting.
Speaker 1:They cannot all review the strategy. They cannot all approve every major choice. So they delegate. Shareholders vote to elect a smaller group of people to represent them. These people are the directors.
Speaker 1:And together, the directors form the board. The board exists to represent the interests of shareholders. Its job is not to run every detail of the company. Its job is to guide, govern, challenge, and protect the long term direction of the company. This is important.
Speaker 1:The board is not just senior management. The board sits above management. The board appoints management, supervises management, challenges management, and can replace management. So when we talk about the top of a company, we're not yet talking about the CEO. We're not yet talking about the CFO.
Speaker 1:We're not yet talking about the CIO or the CTO. They come later. At the very top, we have owners. Then we have the board elected to represent them. But this creates a problem.
Speaker 1:The board has a lot of power. A small group of people may represent millions of owners. They influence strategy. They approve major decisions. They oversee risks.
Speaker 1:They appoint executives. They protect the interests of shareholders. That is a lot of authority in a very few hands. And whenever you give people that much power, you need a counterbalance. You need someone independent who can check whether reality matches the story being told.
Speaker 1:That is where auditors come in. Shareholders also approve the auditors. The auditor is paid by the company, but the auditor's duty is to the shareholders. Their role is to provide independent assurance. In simple term, is the company telling the truth?
Speaker 1:Do the financial statements reflect reality? Is the picture shown by management and the board reliable? If everything works well, then reality and official story match. That is the role of the auditor, not to run the company, not to make strategy, but to provide trust. To give shareholders confidence that what they are being told is accurate.
Speaker 1:So at the top of the company, we now have three elements. The owners, the board, the auditor. The owners hold the ultimate power. The board represents the owners and governs the company. The auditors check whether the company's reporting can be trusted.
Speaker 1:This is the highest power structure in a company. Before management, before cloud team, before FinOps, before engineering, before dashboard, before tag, before optimization. This is where power begins. This structure may feel familiar. It is close to what we see in a democracy.
Speaker 1:In a democracy, the equivalent of shareholders are the voters. There are too many voters to debate and decide everything directly, so we have elections. Through elections voters choose representatives. Those representatives sits in parliament. And then there is a separate system that checks whether the rules are being followed, the legal and justice system.
Speaker 1:So in a simplified view, shareholders are like voters, the board is like parliament, auditors is like an independent control mechanism. The comparison is not perfect, of course. A company is not a country, but the pattern is useful. When power is too large to be exercised directly, it gets delegated. And when power gets delegated, it needs control.
Speaker 1:That is the basic shape. Now notice that we have not talked about yet. We have not talked about management. We have not talked about the CEO. We've not talked about the CFO, the CIO, the CTO cloud teams.
Speaker 1:That is deliberate because management is below the board. Management runs the company, but the board governs the company. That difference matters. The board decides whether management is doing the right job. Management decides how to execute within the direction and constraints set from above.
Speaker 1:So before we talk about FinOps, class strategy, budget, policies or engineering decisions, we need to understand this first layer. Power starts with the owners. The owners delegate to the board. The board governs management. The auditor gives confidence that the story matches reality.
Speaker 1:This is the first part of the map. It's not detailed yet, but it gives us a starting point. If you are a FinOps practitioner and you want to move beyond right sizing dashboards and reports, you need to understand when decisions really come from. Not where tickets comes from, not where dashboards are requested, where power comes from. Because advanced FinOps is not just about finding waste.
Speaker 1:It is about helping the organization make better decisions about technology, money, risk and value. And to do that, we have to start at the top, with the owners, the board, and the structure of power. In the next episode, we can move one level down and look at management. Who runs the company? What power do they really have?
Speaker 1:And how that starts to connect to FinOps.