If you’ve just started working with CloudZero, then welcome to the family! You’ve taken the first step in an ongoing journey toward complete cloud cost visibility and optimization, with progress markers that you’ll work toward every single day.
Because it takes time — and plenty of guidance — for businesses to successfully adopt optimal engineering and FinOps practices, we’ve put together a rough timeline of what you can expect as you move through the very first steps of your journey.
If the following sounds like a long list of accomplishments packed into a short period of time, that’s because it is. But don’t worry! Our FinOps Account Managers (or FAM team) will be there every step of the way to keep you on track to reaching your cost goals.
What To Expect When You Sign Up With CloudZero
Typically, long before you sign on the dotted line — perhaps even two or three months before — a CloudZero representative will already be working with you on a one-on-one basis. During this time, you will have the opportunity to explain your goals to us and what you hope to get out of using the CloudZero platform.
In return, we will put together a Proof of Value (POV) that demonstrates exactly what we could do for your business if you choose to work with us. This POV is essentially a small-scale “dry run” that will give you an idea of what you could achieve if you applied our platform and techniques to your entire enterprise.
If you choose to move forward, the time right before you deploy will also include a meeting with our customer success leadership. These fine folks will walk you through your very first steps so you feel fully supported while you begin to learn the ropes.
These first steps are explained in more detail below.
Within the first 30 days, we’ll help you lay the groundwork and establish a path forward
Immediately after you sign up, you’ll be assigned a FinOps Account Manager (FAM). Your FAM is the person who will be responsible for forming a plan — based on the information you previously provided — that will make it possible for you to achieve your goals.
Remember that this plan is fully personalized, so your path forward might not look the same as anyone else’s.
However, in general, we’ll be driving toward the following milestones:
- A complete picture of your journey forward. Known as our “joint success plan,” it will include clear points of progress that CloudZero and your business will both contribute to along the way.
- 100% allocation of your cost data. We’ll ultimately use the results of these efforts to determine your company’s unit costs over the next couple of months.
- A properly configured Dimensions dashboard. The dashboard allows you to watch your cost data change as your team makes financial and engineering decisions. We’ll initially aim to create a board that will give you about 90% of the visibility you want; down the line we’ll continue to fine-tune it.
- At least a few valuable insights regarding potential areas of improvement. These will be based on the data gathered and displayed in Dimensions.
- A plan for which of your employees will receive training on FinOps and cost optimization principles. This training ensures that your organization can eventually become self-sufficient.
The idea is to get you up and running as quickly as possible, so you can begin to see positive results right away.
Everything you learn during this time will likely prompt plenty of new ideas about platform features and company cost policies you’d like to implement in the future. Remember to communicate these ideas with your FAM, so they can help you incorporate them into your plan going forward.
Within the first 60 days, you’ll start acclimating your team to the new changes
Once we’ve finished the bulk of the platform setup and the insights have begun to roll in, we can start using that valuable information to guide impactful decisions in your business model.
One of the primary ways we do this is by implementing a “shift left” strategy, where your engineers will assume responsibility for making smarter infrastructure and build decisions based on the new cost data they have access to.
We’ll also speak with your engineers, as well as your finance team, your FinOps specialists (if applicable), and any other stakeholders that will be involved in your cost optimization journey.
We’ll determine which dashboards and reports are most helpful to these key positions across a variety of different use cases. With that knowledge, we can continue to develop and customize your company’s Dimensions and dashboards to make them as useful as possible.
It’s important to communicate with your team that these new insights are more than just background information. Team members will ultimately be held accountable for the decisions they make that contribute to your company’s costs.
It might be a good idea to set up some educational seminars or gamification techniques to encourage your employees to take an interest in FinOps and to reward their early efforts.
Within the first 90 days, you’ll build a firm foundation for optimal cost management
After your dashboards are configured and your team feels empowered to make educated business decisions, we will continue to make iterative improvements to the process. The adjustments and fine-tuning will be continual throughout your journey, so we’ll help you get used to identifying areas that need improvement.
You’ll start to see reports rolling in, for example, that show you when engineering team A is on a trajectory toward overspending their allotted budget so you can take measures early to prevent those problems from happening.
Additionally, now is the time to devote some effort toward determining your company’s unit economics.
Unit economics should be considered the holy grail of SaaS cost optimization. Tracking metrics such as your cost per customer, per geographic location, per demographic segment, per product, per feature (or any other metrics that would be valuable within your business context) will allow you to truly take control of your finances and make impactful decisions going forward.
Knowing these unit costs will also allow you to forecast accurate projections of your costs well into the future, decide which projects are or aren’t worthwhile to pursue, and identify when certain customer segments or features are costing your business too much.
The unit economics you choose to focus on may change over time as you optimize your approach, but we’ll be happy to make some suggestions to get you started with a strong foundation.
In fact, we will have talked about these unit economics from the very beginning — likely going back several months, to before you officially signed up. All the steps that happened between then and now were laying the groundwork for this “holy grail” to materialize.
That means we’ll be just as excited as you are when we begin to see some truly valuable per-unit data appearing on your dashboard before your first 90 days are complete!
Your Personalized Assistance Doesn’t Stop After 90 Days
Expect us to keep working closely with you far into the future.
We never want our clients to feel as if they’re figuring things out on their own. While we place a lot of emphasis on the first 90 days after you deploy our platform, our internal customer success plans actually extend out a year or more from when you sign up.
With CloudZero, you can expect ongoing support, custom insights, and a friendly team who is always ready to answer your questions and keep you aligned toward your ultimate “North Star” goal.
and start your journey.
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