FinOps Careers: Beginning the FinOps journey

Episode 5 • 10th May 2022 • FinOpsPod • FinOps Foundation

[00:00:00] Kate: How many attempts do we get?

[00:00:01] Joe: One.

[00:00:04] Hector: Nice.

[00:00:06] Vijay: Hi, Vijay Karthavya Kudithipudi.

[00:00:09] Hector: Hi, I'm Hector Junior. Menesses Jr.

[00:00:12] Kate: Hi, I'm Kate Ferguson and this is FinOpsPod. Do we get a second try now?

[00:00:35] Stacy: Hi, this is Stacy Case

[00:00:37] Joe: And I'm Joe Daly

[00:00:39] Stacy: and

[00:00:39] Joe: and this is FinOpsPod. It is hard.

[00:00:43] Stacy: Yeah, I need to know how I will match you. Tell me

[00:00:45] Joe: Okay.

[00:00:46] Stacy: do it

[00:00:47] Joe: Okay, I'm going to say, and this is FinOpsPod.

[00:00:50] Stacy: And this is FinOpsPod. You

[00:00:52] Joe: Yeah. All right.

[00:00:53] Stacy: FinOps weird, by the way, just say, and this, you went like this, you went, You said, and this is FINOPS pod! FinOpsPOD! FINOPSPOD!

[00:01:02] Joe: You gotta launch yourself.

[00:01:04] Stacy: Not for this one. So let's just say, and this is, and this is FinOpsPod

Hi, this is Stacy Case

[00:01:10] Joe: And I'm Joe Daly and this

[00:01:13] Stacy: FinOpsPod

[00:01:14] Joe: it's too hard. Okay. I

got it.

[00:01:17] Stacy: you keep slowing down, talk conversationally just say, and this is FinOpsPod not, and this is Fin Ops Pod.

He keeps telling them.

[00:01:26] Joe: I'm just going to say, and this is FinOpsPod. I'm going to go 1, 2, 3, and this has been FinOpsPod. Okay. 1, 2, 3. And this is

[00:01:34] Stacy: FinOpsPod

but We just got it. No, We just got it.

[00:01:39] Joe: We

[00:01:39] Stacy: success.

[00:01:39] Joe: it.

Okay.

[00:01:40] Stacy: more time. Just don't think about it. Just say it and it doesn't have to be identical, but that was pretty close.

[00:01:47] Joe: Yeah, it was pretty

[00:01:47] Stacy: Okay. Ready?

[00:01:48] Joe: 1, 2, 3.

And

[00:01:50] Stacy: And

[00:01:51] Joe: is

[00:01:51] Stacy: FinOpsPod.

[00:01:53] Joe: It's not bad.

[00:01:55] Stacy: C All the other times. Like other times you slowed down, like you're trying to wait for me to catch up. Oh, no, don't just, just talk It Yeah. Just say, just do it. You got it.

[00:02:07] Joe: We did it better than they did.

[00:02:08] Stacy: Well. All right, Joe, I'm totally coming in without knowing anything. So talk to me. What's in this episode? What are we going to listen to today?

[00:02:16] Joe: We had Deana Solis and Noel Crowley interview, three folks who are new on their FinOps career journey. They're not all new on their careers. New in their finops career.

We had Vijay Karthavya Kudithipudi, who is in Italy setting up a FinOps team for Nokia, Hector Junior Menesses Junior, who works for PPG in New Jersey and Kate Ferguson, who is a FinOps Analyst for Liberty mutual in Boston.

[00:02:47] Stacy: I really only know Kate's story because I've talked to Kate before to talk about what she's doing with her career and FinOps journey. So it's going to be really interesting to see what the other two people have to say to you. And also, did you say that Noel and Deana are the ones that interviewed them? You didn't interview them at all?

[00:03:03] Joe: I just stayed silent on mute with my camera off, playing producer role on this one.

[00:03:08] Stacy: That's awesome because I feel like Noel and Deana would have really interesting questions to ask them as well. What type of things can we expect to hear?

[00:03:16] Joe: They did. There were some great questions I laughed at. Noel asked, what baggage do you see people carrying at work? And I kinda was like, where is this going? It's not FinOps baggage for me. It's finops scars. But it's interesting to hear how Vijay, Kate and Hector answered that. They talked a bit about imposter syndrome, how they learn, what skills they bring to FinOps because a lot of folks, especially the first generation of finops practitioners, no one, no one started in finops.

Right,

they

[00:03:49] Stacy: right.

[00:03:50] Joe: another role. And said, this is a need that needs to get filled, and learned on their way. We're now getting folks who are starting their careers in finops. So that's an interesting perspective.

[00:04:01] Stacy: That's really exciting too. Cause we start digging into any of the advancing career stuff that we've seen so far as there's a small amount of people that took a job that was a fin ops job to start with. And there's so many other people that their transitioned into that role or became that. So , I'm excited to hear from these people. It's like such a cool perspective to see where we've come so far.

We've come where

[00:04:24] Joe: lots of great points. You know, I remember starting off. And back and I'm like, oh, if I only knew then what I knew now, but these three, all three of them have a lot of interesting wisdom and insights that I don't think necessarily I had when I was in their position.

[00:04:41] Stacy: Listen, it's great that people are out there that. are smarter than either you or I. So that's, that's what we need. Right? Right. We need the smarter people out there.

[00:04:51] Joe: Absolutely. And then I will tease Harry Potter Tri-wizard tournament is discussed towards the end. So be sure to be on the lookout for that. And with that, let's just jump in, let them introduce themselves.

[00:05:04] Stacy: Sounds great. I can't wait to hear it.

[00:05:08] Kate: Hi everyone. I'm Kate. I work at Liberty mutual. I have been here two years now. so if you do the math, I started during the pandemic, I am currently a data analyst for our cloud finops team here at Liberty mutual.

[00:05:22] Hector: My name's Hector. I currently worked at PPGs finops team. It's a newly developed role that they created. My role is FinOps cloud financial analysts. So going in the ins and outs of learning about cost allocation, how to optimize our costs, and how to budget them appropriately. The first project we're tackling is how do we go about budgeting and forecasting for our Azure cost and going a step further and allocating those costs to our customers. Fun fact about me. I actually never left this time zone, so I've been to Peru, but Peru is still in the same, longitude, latitude of the globe.

So like I've never left this time zone.

[00:06:07] Noel: Hold on ever left the time zone you're in the east coast of the U S New Jersey is this

[00:06:14] Hector: Yes,

[00:06:15] Noel: left Eastern time.

[00:06:17] Hector: no, other,

[00:06:18] Noel: You've never even gone to central.

[00:06:20] Hector: no, I haven't even no the furthest west. I've been it's Pittsburgh.

[00:06:26] Kate: Are you going to FinOps X? Cause that will get you out.

[00:06:29] Hector: Oh, yeah. planning on going too.

[00:06:32] Kate: Okay.

[00:06:32] Hector: changes.

[00:06:33] Vijay: Yeah, morning. My name is bit complicated but everyone calls me Vijay. I've been here in Italy from past 10 years and I have been in a company tech environment the past 12 years. I started my with R&D and moved to as a customer program manager and recently I took up this challenge to build and lead FinOps team.

The fun part about me is I love learning new languages. I mean, I can say that I'm fluent in Italian, but I want to learn at least three languages.

[00:07:10] Noel: Well, you're learning the language of FinOps. Which is a whole language on its own.

[00:07:14] Vijay: Yeah, it's quite complicated. Right? And I think learning other languages is quite simpler than learning FinOps language. That's what I'm having some challenges. I mean, you have different cross-functional teams and everyone start using their own technical terms and they have their own vocabulary and bringing a central vocabulary to the function, which is being built into organization. It's pretty much challenging, but learning languages, it's pretty straightforward. You have well defined vocabulary. Right? And FinOps, it's evolving.

[00:07:47] Noel: Yeah.

[00:07:48] Vijay: day by day. I think.

[00:07:49] Deana: So I'm curious to hear what sort of path brought you to your entry point. I know Noel, I have come through more of a technical or infrastructure side, but we've all sort of crossed over and cross trained. What was the entry point?

[00:08:05] Hector: That's a great question. My first role at PPG, I was a financial analyst for our global corporate spend. It was managing and forecasting budgets for HR, IT, digital, and EHSPS, environmental health, safety, product stewardship. And my time there kind of evolved into more of understanding the IT costs where an opportunity arose in our cloud center of excellence at PPG, where I could hop into a different experience to learn about FinOps

[00:08:41] Kate: And for me, I say it's pure luck that I'm in FinOps. Right out of college, I knew I wanted to work somehow in finance for technology after an internship I had where that was my only job essentially managing spend for IT departments. I like being that bridge between finance and technology.

So I found a job posting as a financial analyst in tech finance for Liberty Mutual. And it turns out I just so happened to be placed on the new, the evolving FinOps team, what turned out to be the FinOps team. First role out of college. I have a finance and management information systems background, as as a minor in Spanish, I'll add, although that doesn't help me day to day. That's sort of how I fell into FinOps. I'm happy I'm here. But the help of the foundation and mentors in my organization have helped me feel ever growingly confident in what I'm doing, because as you guys mentioned, everything is so new day-to-day that it can be daunting to try and keep up or know what I'm talking about.

[00:09:45] Vijay: It's amazing to hear the story, from Kate. I really wanted this road. There was some internal opportunity in Nokia there was a new function. That's coming up as lead this. And I mean, from scratch, you have to build and lead the team.

It has its own challenges apart from having an individual contributor role and then contributing to cost analysis. Apart from doing that, have to motivate your team and you have to motivate yourself, and you have to find the reason. And FinOps, I found it fascinating because every cloud vendor, they have their own technical complexities and mixing it with costing and pricing. It becomes even more complicated it really gives a platform for a lot of innovators to solve the problems. And I see FinOps ever growing environment, as we transition into digital transformation across the globe.

So There is a lot of opportunity and industry needs us. Right. And they thought it was a right opportunity for me and learn something from the community and give back to the next generations as well.

[00:10:56] Noel: Can I go in there and something, you said there VJ a second ago, right? Where you said that industry needs us, right? A few weeks ago, I was at the London finops summit and I was talking to some people there. What I discovered during some conversations I had there was for the first time I've seen people move from a job that was FinOps to another job that was FinOps. And now you're the first people who I've met, who've started in FinOps roles. I say, this kind of question kind of sounds silly, but I'm at this four or five years, whatever we, with the FinOps Foundation that kind of started all that, but now you're new. I had baggage from how we used to do things Are you able to this space without our bagage, if you know what I'm trying to get to.

[00:11:50] Vijay: It's a very interesting question. , And it has different levels of answering, right? Let me answer the part, switching from role FinOps role. Why? Right? So anyone who see the industry trend and how the public cloud adoption is happening, we know the challenges that come with the public cloud adoption and customers may be internal or external, and the good part, jumping on to FinOps role, without any relevant background. I don't say relevant background some other background where you can use the skillsets. Like, like I have been a program manager. I am using my facilitation and team building skills here. I mean, in R&D I'm using those technical skills to understand these cloud complexities. Right. So coming from that perspective, it gives you a chance to see the problem with the fresh eyes. Right? Coming from a fresh perspective, It gave me actually a fresh face off eyes like peeps or infants see the world when they are on their exploring opportunities for the first time. Right. Or learning new things for the first time. So that's the advantage.

[00:13:05] Kate: Yeah, I think my answer is more directed towards the baggage that you reference. Right? This is my first role out of college. All I know is what I learned in college, let's say so as Vijay was referencing is really great because. It's almost a level playing field in terms of knowledge, it feels like because the technology is continuously growing. And with that people's knowledge is continuously growing and not one person know everything about the cloud, possible. Let me know how, but I don't think we're there yet. But I know early in the slack channel, we were talking about imposter syndrome and I really identified with Deana and that the article she sent because everything is new, right? So there is a quote unquote level playing field, but I'm still a young, fresh faced college graduate presenting to people who have been working and have their own baggage. So it's kind of the inverse baggage of how do I convince them my perspective and my new knowledge is the way to go and use that influence, which has been an uphill battle.

But say I am personally going on that journey and trying to get better at it. But the imposter syndrome is real when dealing with other people's baggage, not to say I don't have any, but not years of experience baggage, if that makes sense.

[00:14:21] Hector: Yeah I think when it comes to the idea of baggage, I think it depends on. The organization that you're in. Right. When I was in a data analytics firm, there were always heavily always trying to think of new ideas in how to solve their problems. Well, in the manufacturing firm like PPG, it's a much more different because you know, their main focus isn't on their technology, it's production of their product. Their time invested in innovation comes along and it's predominantly focused on that. Not necessarily saying that there isn't, opportunities to be made in the cloud space at PPG.

It's more or less when I think of baggage, I think of working around that space and really understanding the constraints that the organization has set up. It adds to that challenge of how do we continue to network with our customers and our stakeholders to provide them the solution that they need in a manner that is cost efficient timely.

[00:15:21] Deana: I wanted to touch on those are really great stories. I want to say. It sounds just from my perspective that you three are so much more prepared than was at your point in my career. But at the same time, I also know that it doesn't take cloud provider to make you feel like you're having to understand your employer's baggage. Are there ways that you're able to get mentorship or able to provide even reverse mentorship in terms of leading with curiosity or, leading with a learning mindset compared to folks who normally might expect to lead you?

[00:16:08] Vijay: I mean, I have a great story here , Deana. Because as people as human beings, we learn from our past and we try to apply the learnings from the past to our current roles or responsibilities or environmental situations. Right? So when I took up this challenge, as you said , you need to find a mentor or you need to find someone who supports you or you need someone to pave the path for you.

But in my case, being to lead the team and build a team from scratch, so the challenges were to find the right people with the right mindset. And personally, I wanted to be, well-educated and well-informed myself before I lead the team. So there was curiousity. And the story that I wanted to say was in back in 2012, when I came to Italy and I was not able to speak word of Italian. Right. So at that time, I was very curious. I used to sit with my friends, colleagues on the table where they have wine, meat everything. And then everyone was chatting. Then I used to look at them and they say, one day I'll be there. Right? After three or four years, I was there. And the same way I started my journey back one year back and everyday I'm learning some new stuff.

And this is the motivation for my , as you say, lighthouse, right, which is guiding you towards something at the end of the tunnel, and this is my motivation and when I speak with my team members and other. I gave the same explanation.

I was lucky enough to find a team who are intrinsically motivated. Right? These are the things that I can share from my experience.

[00:17:50] Kate: Yeah. And in terms of mentorship, I would say at my company, I was really lucky that the only other woman on our small, but every important FinOps team is our product owner. She's our fearless leader. She's amazing in every aspect. I've been able to get that indirect mentorship, I guess you could say, just by learning and watching and sort of mirroring what the aspects that I like or admire.

So I've been really fortunate in that, but I'd also say even when I was attending the finops summit and seeing other women presenting each month and just being like, wow, they do all of these things. I don't see why I can't too really is impactful. I know I've heard whispers about a mentorship program for the FinOps Foundation and I think that would be fantastic. I'm just going to put that out there. But just being able to see and hear stories of other people in FinOps gives me courage because I am by no means running in FinOps. So being able to see people who are, and sort of see what I'm working towards.

There's no fences in the ground of what this FinOps is necessarily cause it's ever growing. So being able to see people work towards that is really great. If that makes sense.

[00:19:00] Vijay: Makes complete sense, Kate.

[00:19:02] Hector: It definitely makes a lot of sense. And I think when we consider what mentorship is at the end of the day, it's guidance towards what we do in our day-to-day jobs. I think, we can seek that mentorship through different mediums. Right? Similar to how you've had people who've guided you through the FinOps practice. For me that's my manager, who is the senior manager of the CCOE. And with my finance manager, who I worked for previously, who is a finance manager for IT. And coupled with that interaction, I have also gotten a lot of feedback and mentorship through the FinOps organization, their website and the community that we built together.

I think that has been a very important stepping stone in terms of my growth. And I'm sure as well, other people's growth through the literature that they provided and the materials that they have prepared.

[00:20:03] Kate: And I would also, this might be a tangent, but I think in FinOps starting out, it's really hard to know where I want to grow to. This is something I'm struggling with a lot right now, because FinOps is so broad and there's so many opportunities, right. Which is great. It's fantastic. It's growing, but it's hard to know where I see myself in the future and what I want that to look like.

Right? I don't know if either of you have encountered that, but like I know Vijay, you wanted to lead a team and you are in that's great, but I don't know what my future looks like yet. So I'm trying to define that.

[00:20:37] Noel: I saw an IT meme recently, right? And it says, if you can't describe your job in three words, you got a BS job. How would you describe FinOps?

[00:20:49] Kate: Can the worst be hyphenated.

[00:20:53] Noel: Any way you like, Kate. I genuinely would love to know how describe FinOps, because my follow on to this is how do you describe this job to your parents?

[00:21:03] Joe: Pause button. I pause the interview.

[00:21:07] Stacy: Why did you pause the interview?

[00:21:10] Joe: I want to play this game. I want to describe my job in three words, or I want to describe finops in three words.

[00:21:16] Stacy: FinOps or your job.

Cause you know, , you're the director of community now.

[00:21:21] Joe: director of community, that's three words. no, I want to describe FinOps in three words.

[00:21:25] Stacy: Okay.

[00:21:26] Joe: Ready?

[00:21:27] Stacy: Yes. Do cloud. Good. You said that so fast, like it was one word.

[00:21:35] Joe: It's not hyphenated. Do cloud good.

[00:21:38] Stacy: Is that a question, mark? It sounds like Yoda do club. Good cop. Good deal.

[00:21:44] Joe: cloud. Good dude.

[00:21:46] Stacy: No, that's good. I like it.

[00:21:48] Joe: Alright. Alright. Let's see what they said,

[00:21:50] Vijay: Can I go first here

[00:21:52] Noel: I don't mind.

[00:21:53] Vijay: Because I tried to explaining these things to some of my friends, colleagues . Right? So it's a big organization where I work. So everyone will, what do you do actually? So I thought explaining them in a very simple way: hey, I just analyze, analyze, and then inform right.

To analyze and then inform. So you should not take any action as central team or whatever it is, right. You are the guard rates for engineers and central of excellence, everything. So that means you have to analyze the data, analyze again, so that you are confident with the data and then inform or guide the people.

Right. so three words. I mean, I have used this same word two times, but it's okay. Right?

[00:22:41] Deana: That is actually a really good.

[00:22:45] Kate: I was going to say, I don't know if one of these is hyphenated or not, but we're going to roll with and hope you'll give exceptional. I would say first and foremost, I don't know if cloud it's included in that, but cloud is the first thing I tell people problem solving. I feel like every day I just get emails and pings with problems or needs, and it's figuring out a creative solution to that. then partnership because a majority of the job is working on influencing more than actually taking action yourself. So I think building those partnerships and relationships throughout the are important.

[00:23:21] Noel: No pressure, Hector, no pressure.

[00:23:23] Hector: Man, these are all great words. Honestly, that's really hard. For the words that popped into my head initially, when you asked me this question I'm guessing myself, now that I'm thinking about it more, but I'm going to say them anyway and just roll with it. My words would be gamification of cloud. Because at least for one particular process in Cloud FinOps, which is our cost allocation optimization, there is a sense there is a game that is being played, right where the architect of the game is our cloud service providers. They're the ones who us how they're charging us in base of our cloud usage. And it's our responsibility FinOps practitioners to try to allocate those costs to our customers, to optimize that expenses as well as to forecast and budget, any particular issue or problem, or trying to problem solve any type of issue that may arise from any changes that they make on their end.

Right. So three words, but

[00:24:33] Noel: That's good.

[00:24:33] Hector: what I had.

[00:24:34] Noel: So taking answers you have, right. Could you tell me about what you've seen out there in your time here. And I know you said influencing, analyzing and informing, gamification and problem-solving with our costs, with your partners in your business. Right. But when you've come across, what I call Un-FinOps activities how have you handled that? I assume you're going to have met resistance or some resistance, perhaps not.

[00:25:00] Vijay: No, No, it's, it's a very good question. And the simple answer is whenever you get a resistance , you just ask why. If you get the why behind that resistance, or conversation, right, you are able to guide the team or, you will be able to partner with anyone, right?

So , from my experience, why I said analyse, analyse, and then informed, because you analyze once and go to some calls or some meetings where you have to resolve the issues, then you might not be confident what you have analyzed, and you should ask the question what they will be asking and why they're asking what they're asking.

So this is my approach. And you have the data. And cloud providers are very good at providing lots and lots of data. My team, we analyze the data in a way that we try to answer the questions or anticipate the questions. And it's the tricky part. Maybe the answers that we are trying to explain are not the ones that they are expecting.

[00:26:02] Kate: Yeah, I guess I'm not sure what you mean by Un-FinOps. But I think whenever we meet resistance, it really goes back to the partnerships because FinOps, at least an organization can be nebulous. It's not clearly defined per se, just because we know the information doesn't mean that we're the ones in charge of it.

If that makes sense. Like we're not in charge of the architecture decisions necessarily. Right. But we get asked about architecture recommendation sometimes. Right. I think it really comes down to being able to partner across the enterprise whenever I'm not sure about something because someone else definitely knows the answer. Am I building those relationships? I'm able to customer's problems, and get them the answers they need. I'll leave it like that.

[00:26:50] Hector: I believe that when faced with resistance, there's always a communication issue involved, and I think our role as FinOps practitioners is to build and create a communication plan to our customers or to our stakeholders to ensure that they're in the loop as to what we're trying to accomplish and the goals that we're trying to achieve. And from my experience, that's where, you know, you can proactively manage resistance in organizations. Being able to tell your customers, you know, this is a process that we're going to take in regards to X, Y, and Z. And this is where we need your feedback to help us through.

I think that's very valuable and very important in terms of managing people's expectations and their role in helping finops grow as a practice in the business.

[00:27:47] Kate: And I think bouncing off of that Hector, cause that's a great point. I think, related to the communication is that I found being able to change communication styles, depending on the audience is probably one of the most important lessons or skills you could have in FinOps, because the way that we communicate numbers, opportunities, et cetera, et cetera, to a senior director or the CIO versus even the CFO, right?

Those are completely different audiences with completely different knowledge bases. And then you bring that down to a developer or a product owner. I think going back to Hector's point, being able to communicate effectively with each of those personas, is super important.

[00:28:28] Deana: So well said all three of you. But actually before I, before you take my compliment and before I ask my next. Noel, did our contestants get the, quiz question? Correct? Is that what you meant by Un-FinOps?

[00:28:44] Noel: So, this is nice because you've literally gone there and. The audience you're talking to matters and how you deliver your message matters, but you all said, you weren't sure what I asked. Right. And this I like, because when I say Un-FinOps, I go, I come from the development background, IT background, all of that. When we used to develop stuff back in the day, when I used to do that stuff, we made it to basically work that Superbowl , that happens once a year, that's 30 seconds long. And our website was going to get hammered for a couple of hours after that. developed our application to take in that load and just carry on as normal right now today, hopefully from a FinOps point of view, we're trying to say to people, actually, you want to make your application to be as small as possible at that moment in time.

And for it to be as smart, as possible to be able to scale up and down and do whatever it needs to do. Right? And that's what I meant by it, but the audiences we're talking to is important.

And you said, a few minutes ago about gamification of cloud, I actually recently started doing gamification of FinOps within my company. it the Tri-FinOps Tournament and yes, we completely based on Harry Potter. Right. And we had Dumbledore out there encouraging people to come in and play and great fun.

What I learned from it, and kind of goes back to who you're talking to is for three years, I've been doing presentations, talks, lunchbox sessions, everything. Right. And I've been giving people the FinOps message, right? The amount of people who have pinged me in the last two weeks to go, oh, didn't know that the tool could do this and that. I didn't know we could do that. . It's like different ways of getting a message out to people.

[00:30:41] Deana: I wanted to ask Hector how resilience has factored into his career journey, his journey into finops.

Because you mentioned it, I mean, it's like the first word on your LinkedIn and so it must have a meaning to you

[00:30:58] Hector: Yes. So resiliency for me comes from an ability one's ability to recover quickly from difficulties that arises from the job. We've all encountered and to be resilient means to try to come up with creative solutions, to want to rise above the occasion, try to problem solve. For me, my career has always been trying to think of those creative solutions. I guess an example, I would give at least in the FinOps world would be you're creating a communication plan. It's something that I've never done before. Right? Presentations, not my forte. You put me in front of her spreadsheet, give me numbers. I can work on that days on end. I'm very confident with that skillset. But when it comes to, you know, putting presentations together and communicating what we said, there's a lot of difficulties and opportunities of improvement that I can definitely work on.

You know, like how to design a slide and sure the formatting's proper what to say in the slide, how to say it, who's the audience, get some, something similar to what Kate's take mentioned earlier. Right? I think countering that challenge, I had to really think about, okay, clearly this is a challenge that I'm facing that I don't necessarily know how to adjust or what to do, but what are the steps I can take to reach that solution and try to come back from a failure that I had about bringing in a presentation that wasn't up to par to what my personal expectations were for the project.

[00:32:36] Deana: That is thank you for sharing that is I wasn't sure what to expect when I asked that, but I got the sense from reading some of the accomplishments that you've had is that the bigger, the problem, the faster you run at it. I definitely think that might be how you're building your own resilience.

Vijay or Kate, do you want to add anything you would like to share, anything you want to promote, anything you want to brag about? Anything you want to complain about?

[00:33:06] Kate: I would just say huge. Thank you, as someone who started in FinOps, like I said, for the FinOps Foundation. I remember going to the summit meetings like two years ago and that's where I first started getting my bearings. I guess you could say. Cause I was just sort of told here, go learn all of these vendors and FinOps and the billing data. So I would just say a huge thing for you to the FinOps Foundation for just existing and being there for a resource.

[00:33:31] Vijay: I want promote my own life cycle ops. I have invented one. So I want to brag about this one. It's: Identify, Inform, Implement, and Iterate for I talent before I process. So I like this. Like, you identify the problem, you inform it to the right stakeholders, implement the solution. And then iterate if the results are not good. Right? so iteration is the key. So I know that we have these crawl, walk, run all this stuff, right. Maybe I'll try to inject this for a into our FinOps, right?

[00:34:09] Deana: I look forward to seeing you join one of the, or working groups and finding a way to possibly evolve the language we use to describe maturity,

[00:34:22] Vijay: I think I have to do yeah. so why, because I'm preparing for my pro certification. So I have to do it right. I don't know. I have to ask Joe and you guys, if this podcast counters some of the contributions or not, I'm being selfish here.

All right. We did it. Another episode of FinOpsPod complete. You, the completionist listener the FinOpstinaut. You are here with me and we are going to wrap this up. Let me thank everyone on the podcast. Big thank you to Deana Solis Noel Crowley Kate Ferguson Vijay and Hector Jr. Vanessa is Jr. Also big, thank you to Stacy Case helping me intro and navigate the episode as always so much fun.

If you can't get enough talking about FinOps, join us, June 20th through 21st at FinOps X two full days of fin ops content. We got career content. We got shop talk. You want charge back? We're gonna talk charge back. You want to talk automation? We're going to talk automation.

Governance policies, career building skills and networking with folks. Who do the same sort of work you do? It's going to be so much fun and cannot wait. Hope I get to see you. The complete, if you're listening to it at this point, and you're finding out about FinOps X, you're awesome and I can't wait to see you out in Austin, Texas. June 20th and 21st. All right folks, that's it for this week. I'll see you next time here on FinOpsPod!

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