As a SaaS leader, you probably understand how crucial it is to get your engineers to make strategic cloud cost decisions. After all, your engineers are responsible for most of the cloud operating costs within your company.
Unfortunately, getting engineers to care about costs isn’t always intuitive or easy. In fact, it’s commonly thought to be one of the most difficult challenges faced by SaaS leaders and FinOps specialists.
If you’re running into this problem in your own business, it might be time to shake up your strategy.
We believe that the following suggestions are some of the most effective methods of encouraging — and empowering — your engineers to take charge of the costs they incur.
6 Ways To Bring Engineers Into The Cloud Cost Optimization Process
1. Gamify your FinOps learning process
Gamification can be a surprisingly powerful tool for encouraging your employees to learn more about FinOps and begin using FinOps principles in their daily work lives.
Try setting up a contest to foster friendly competition among teams, or design a Bingo game that invites participants to learn new FinOps topics to win a prize. If gamifying your FinOps experience seems like a great fit for your team, check out these ideas that other companies have used to great success.
2. Offer rewards for finding cost savings
Whether your reward goes to the ultimate FinOps Bingo winner or simply to the person or team who makes the best infrastructure choices over the next month, you can easily entice your engineers to take extra initiative by throwing in a prize.
Rewards can be anything from insulated thermoses to gift cards or financial bonuses. In fact, giving employees some percentage of the money they saved for the company can be an excellent way to incentivize great cost decisions.
3. Make costs easier to understand at a glance
All the incentive in the world won’t get your engineers to act if they have no way of knowing their cost contributions.
This is where a platform such as CloudZero can be a game-changer. The CloudZero platform gives every key participant in your company a clear view into cloud costs and trends over time. Set your own metrics to make cost data even more helpful for your unique situation.
4. Set real-time cost anomaly and budget alerts
It’s much easier for your engineers to stay within your set budget if they receive immediate notifications when spending appears to be going off-track.
This is another place where CloudZero shines; you can customize your anomaly alerts and budget updates to suit your circumstances and send real-time notifications to all relevant stakeholders on a daily basis.
5. Focus on a culture of autonomy
Once you’ve empowered your engineers with the tools, training, and knowledge they need to make good cost decisions, it’s time to set them free. Progress typically happens much faster when employees are able to make autonomous decisions.
If each person had to run their decisions through a third party — even if that third party is simply an executive or a FinOps specialist within the building — that lost time will significantly add up.
Plus, allowing your engineers to take the lead transfers the responsibility and accountability to them. This means your engineering team will take care to make good decisions and get extra satisfaction from successfully improving the company’s margins.
6. Avoid the temptation to constantly remind your team about costs
Similarly, it’s ideal to only remind your engineers to mind their costs if one of the above methods begins to go off the rails.
If your engineers are already doing the necessary work, asking them again isn’t going to help anything. Worse, it could start to come across as nagging or micromanaging. If you want your engineers to take charge of their own cost decisions, you’ll need to give them the space to do so.
It’s far better to gently address when something goes wrong rather than try to preempt every mistake with a not-so-helpful reminder.
CloudZero’s Cost Intelligence Platform Gives You A Head Start On The Action Items Above
When it comes to understanding costs in detail, finding opportunities to save money, and building a culture around making smart cost decisions, there’s no more powerful tool than the CloudZero platform coupled with our expert FinOps Account Management team.
We’ll help you analyze your cloud costs — regardless of your current allocation strategy — and provide helpful insights about where you could optimize for future savings. 
to see what CloudZero can do for your bottom line.
The Cloud Cost Playbook
The step-by-step guide to cost maturity
