Lessons From The FinOps In Full Bloom Podcast: 6 Cloud Insights I Didn’t Expect

Every time I step on set with a guest for FinOps In Full Bloom, I’m anticipating the lightbulb moments I know will pop up during the podcast.

These are the conversations that reveal how curiosity and collaboration can spark real transformation in the cloud.

Forcepoint’s Anthony Leung covered engineer engagement and shaping smart build-or-buy decisions:

Kellie Righini of Aras shared how culture fuels transformation:

Fred FinOps (Larry Advey) explained how telemetry and trust connect data to confident action:

Most recently, a fresh FinOps voice, fellow FinOps account manager Anderson Oliveira of Brazil, shared a FinOps formula that can guide any team’s growth journey:

Across episodes, one theme kept shining through: progress happens when teams connect technology, culture, and visibility with purpose.

Here are six lessons that continue to shape the way I think about FinOps in action:

1. Engineer Engagement At Scale: From 5 To 600

Engagement grows when people feel ownership.

Anthony details how leadership led the way by prioritizing platform adoption in his company. CloudZero focused on making it easy and inviting for engineers through an intuitive platform and partnership with the Customer Success team. 

With these two ingredients, everything changed.

They built persona-based dashboards and curated views that guided discovery and connected daily work to business outcomes. Engineers could see how their work affected spending, with alerts designed to encourage blameless discussions.

The result? Engagement followed naturally because participation felt purposeful.

2. The Multi-Tenant Gamechanger: Unit Cost Clarity

In our conversation, Anthony also shared how unit cost visibility became a breakthrough for his multi-tenant organization.

Unit economics create alignment across every level — from engineers optimizing workloads to finance shaping pricing strategies.

Once you know your cost per customer, per feature, or per product, you can start answering powerful questions:

Pricing became data-informed, discount rates became strategic, and product roadmaps aligned with financial goals.

Unit Cost is where precision meets profitability.

3. Culture And Visibility: Alignment That Scales

Sometimes the biggest disruptors are the newest voices in the room. Newcomers bring fresh eyes; they ask why, and then do something SUPER smart — they listen. That’s a leader’s superpower.

In the episode with Kellie Righini, she outlined her newcomer power move: foundational tagging and how CloudZero’s platform made tag tracking seamless by highlighting both tagged and untagged resources.

Next came Dimensions, which gave their spend a story that every persona could understand.

Kellie detailed that teams began to trust the data and speak the same language.

Visibility fueled confidence in data-driven decisions. That’s culture ROI in action.

4. Trust, Telemetry, And Platform Partnership

Fred (Larry)’s perspective tied everything together: cultural integrity drives data integrity.

By mapping product streams and leveraging telemetry, teams build confidence in their data — and that trust turns visibility into actionable insight.

Outlining product streams and telemetry creates clarity. Context becomes instant. 

Fred also emphasized the power of platform partnership, with the CloudZero Customer Success team guiding the journey as an extension of clients’ FinOps practice.

This is when the path from zero to value becomes fast, clear, and repeatable.

5. Bonus: The FinOps Formula With Anderson Oliveira

I also spoke with Anderson Oliveira, CloudZero’s new FinOps Account Manager and FinOps advocate in Brazil. Anderson shared his FinOps Formula; a practical framework that helps teams identify the right goals at every stage of maturity.

Crawl — Visibility: Begin by understanding where cloud spend lives and connect it to outcomes.

Walk — Budget: Set clear, collaborative boundaries that promote accountability.

Run — Unit Economics: Learn how costs support value and guide growth decisions.

No matter where a team begins, you can use it to guide conversations, align goals, and build momentum.

6. The Bigger Picture: FinOps For Everyone

Every guest underscored the same message: FinOps is a shared mindset.

When people see themselves in the process, they stay in the process. 

So here’s to every insight that becomes an action, every dashboard that sparks a conversation, and every team that finds its rhythm in the cloud.

The lessons? Endless. The energy? Unstoppable.

Let’s Grow Together

Author: Thalia Elie

Thalia Elie is CloudZero’s “Friendly Neighborhood FAM” and part AWS Solutions Architect, part FinOps Engineer, and all about turning cloud cost complexity into clarity. She’s the one who brings dashboards, data, and a dash of fun to every FinOps conversation. Thalia has led projects that saved millions by blending deep technical expertise with a human-centered approach that gets engineers, finance, and product teams pulling in the same direction. Whether it’s building onboarding playbooks, crafting dashboards that actually get used, or sparking innovation with a well-timed hackathon, her mission is simple: be refreshing, relevant, and relatable through cloud, culture, and cost wins.