Ep#156 Faces in FinOps Highlights with Alee Whitman @ Fortune 500 M&E

Host: Jon

Hi everyone, and welcome to the Faces and #FinOps podcast. I'm your host, Jon Myer. The Faces and #FinOps podcast is about highlighting thought leaders in the cloud, and financial management space, and insights into how they're making an impact not only in their organization but the broader #FinOps community. Today's guest is Alee Whitman, who's a senior staff product engineer at a Fortune 500 media and entertainment company. Alee has worn many #FinOps hats from consultants to vendors where she co-created the cloud Intelligent dashboards, also known as CUDOS. Kudos to you, Alee and now a practitioner as she calls herself, also a customer. Please join me a welcoming Alee to today's show. Alee, thanks for joining me.

Guest: Alee

Hello. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Host: Jon

Of course. So Alee, we're going to kick things off. How about you tell us a little bit about yourself and your backstory?

Guest: Alee

Awesome. I will start without my professional backstory. So a little bit about me. My name is Alee Whitman. I was born and raised in Tacoma, Washington, about 45 minutes south of Seattle, and I recently moved back there. It is the West Coast's Best Coast. If you haven't been to Tacoma, it has a bad rap, but it's a hidden gem, so I highly recommend you visit. You can boat in the summer and ski in the winter, so you'll find me doing both of those things there. Do you want me to go into my work background too?

Host: Jon

Yeah, let's jump right into it.

Guest: Alee

Awesome. So my work background is I didn't always start in #FinOps. I never wanted to get into the cloud. If you would've asked me, Jon, sitting in this chair probably four years ago, if I'd ever be working in the cloud, I would've said, heck no. I do not want to go into that space at all. My husband and I worked for the same company and he was in their cloud practice, so we're a great match, but I don't think we do well working together. And so I put up my guard and said, the cloud is the one space I do not want to get into. But of course life has other plans and the one piece of advice I have from everyone is never say no to anything, and keep an open mind because if I hadn't kept an open mind and taken the opportunity I had, I would not be in cloud today and I don't know where my path would've been, so keep an open mind, but from there I was able to get my start in cloud.

Host: Jon

That's good sound advice. I try not to say never wait, I just use it. No, but I try not to do the same thing. I never thought I would be podcasting or doing exactly what I'm doing, creating a lot of content. My background is technical, I love the cloud. I still play with Cloud day in and day out, but I never thought I would be here. So I like the advice of keeping an open mind. Alee, how about you? Tell us a little bit about your role at your current job and your title. What does that entail?

Guest: Alee

Yeah, so I think my title's a little bit confusing. I've always had confusing titles before joining my now current company, my title was Commercial Architect and people thought that meant I architected either commercials or buildings. So I'm used to having titles that are a little bit confusing. My current title is senior staff product engineer, and in short, what you can think about this is more of a #FinOps product owner or a financial engineer. I've heard both of those terms thrown around and I think there is an overlap in what I do to both of those. But again, the title doesn't always give a good view of what you're doing. How I describe what I'm doing is I drive all things cloud cost optimization enablement across my organization and my role is to make sure that my teams have everything they need to run efficiently and be accountable so that they can make the best choices.

Host: Jon

So Alee, how would you describe your organization's #FinOps function?

Guest: Alee

Yeah, so I think our #FinOps function is always evolving. The one thing that I would say about our #FinOps function is we've been working to reprioritize how we organize ourselves and how we can more effectively use resources. And how I think about this is right now we're going into our FY 24 planning and we're looking to colorize ourselves so that there are accountable people in each of the different key areas. So my pillars for example are cloud, vendor management, billing, and optimization. Optimization is probably the broadest one, and I think optimization today isn't going to be optimization, what you see in the future, but my counterpart, her kind of areas kind of overlap and connect and mesh well with mine. She does financial planning, so we cross over a lot in the billing areas as well as reporting. She also does cloud governance and metadata management and all of those are huge in letting me be successful in my role there are a lot of areas that I do that she needs to be successful in her role. So we collaborate and we are working to create more of hub and spoke model across our organization today.

Host: Jon

Oh, I like that. You touched on the hub and spoke model. You typically, I like to ask, are you like a centralized, a decentralized, a hub and spoke and the overlap between you and your counterpart allows you guys to collaborate and kind of reach out and broaden your skillsets?

Guest: Alee

Yes, definitely. I will say that one thing about our organization is our organization essentially has multiple different types of businesses running within it. A full centralized model just wouldn't be successful here and a decentralized model would create a lot of rework. So we have a lot of great counterpart teams in our different business segments that we can work at more of that hub and spoke model because they all have different needs, different levels of maturity, but also different priorities. So how can we meet them where they're at and meet their teams where they're at so that they can also hit their priorities, but we do not have a bunch of duplicate processes? And I think the trend that we see in FY 24 is how we remove duplicate processes and duplicate costs wherever possible. And I don't mean that just in the cloud space, I mean that across all of the areas that also touch the cloud space. So tools, SaaS, also maybe content delivery networks, things such as that where we might have duplicate processes that we can standardize across the board.

Host: Jon

I think doing the hub and spoke allows you to kind of remove that friction between your teams and build that trust and you're able to accomplish more. And it sounds like that's working well for your organization.

Guest: Alee

It is, and I would say the one thing that works well for us too is making sure our leaders and all of the teams are aware that there's no sole owner of optimization or #FinOps or anything in that space. We might own certain areas from a hub standpoint, but there are certain areas that if we're not able to meet every need there, take it, run with it. We don't want to become a blocker. The second that you have a single point of failure or a single point of contact for all things optimization is the second that you make it so your teams cannot run efficiently because you put yourself as a single point of failure.

Host: Jon

That's very true. How would you rank your company's maturity around #FinOps? Are you a crawl, a walk, a run, a variation of them?

Guest: Alee

I think we're a variation of them, but just in my background, so my background's in finance, so I'm a little bit risk-averse. I would say I'm always going to put us as walk. And the reason for that is I think the second I go to run is, or our organization, we say that we're at run is the second. We miss some of the key areas that we might not see if we're already running so fast. So if we're just at that walk stage, there are areas from crawl we're able to pick up. So I think a topic that I've heard about on your podcast, in fact you'll bring in AI. I think AI is an area that no customer can say that they're in the run stage of. I think most of us are in the crawl stage because it's so new, so there are so many different areas that are evolving that walking allows us to take advantage of them. We just might walk faster in certain areas.

Host: Jon

I like that walk faster. That's like a subset of there's a crawl, there's a walk, walk, faster, power walk, and then run.

Guest: Alee

I know I thought about it, maybe jog, but now even jog, you got to always keep that one foot on the ground. It's like that power walking. Exactly.

Host: Jon

It's a marathon, not a sprint. Ali, let's talk a little bit more about your organization. Are you utilizing automation in certain areas?

Guest: Alee

I think we do. I'd say I will always be able to use more automation. The one area within automation that we're always looking to do is how can we prioritize the automation that we're investing in so that it maximizes the use of our team and our team's time. So for example, in the bill processing space, bill processing is a space that no one wants to be manual and we all know within the cloud there's always a manual aspect of it, but how can we continue to make it more automated so that our teams can better prioritize in other areas, optimization, identification, we want to automate that as much as possible. So we're always continuing to look for automation, but we do use a lot of automation today and work with a lot of big data.

Host: Jon

I don't think you're able to accomplish much or as much as you'd like without automation. Some type of automation. I know reporting is going to be automated, but if you look at it at the top down, the less that you have to do manually and around the optimization, all that stuff that has to be manually done. If you can tackle at least 80% using automation where the other 20% is a manual effort, you're going to achieve so much more.

Guest: Alee

I think the hardest part for me right now is trying to balance, do we automate tasks that I and my team are doing or should we focus on automating tasks that our customers are doing? And for right now, we've been focusing a lot of the tasks that our customers are doing because if we're able to free up their time, they're able to run more efficiently, action, more optimizations, and hit the business priorities that they have. So although we do invest in a lot of our optimization, I try to focus on how we help our customers automate and help them be able to free up their time because every optimization takes effort. So the more time they have to focus on architecting for optimization, the larger the success or organization can have.

Host: Jon

I like the customer obsession. You're moving friction like you're removing it all around. Not only you could take these automation and make your life easier, but making your customer's life easier is ultimately going to allow them to buy in and do more of implementing the #FinOps culture and being aware of doing all the optimization efforts or taking ownership of everything.

Guest: Alee

Yes, I would say, I know it sounds a little cliche, but if my customers don't have trust in me and don't find that I'm adding value to the job, I shouldn't be here anymore. They are the key reason why we're doing what we're doing. And so it's important for me that we're assessing their needs on an ongoing basis, but also getting ongoing feedback on how we can improve for them.

Host: Jon

Additionally, it also helps with the buy-in, right? They're trusting you and if you make their jobs easier, they're going to be bought into more of the stuff that you're trying to accomplish as a business.

Guest: Alee

So I'd say transparency is key. So for anyone who's running a #FinOps practice or first thinking of bringing #FinOps to their space, transparency from the start, the second you try and hide things behind the scenes or aren't transparent with your data or what your priorities are is the second you're going to lose teams and they're going to start trying to reinvent the wheel on their own. And you're going to have a lot of repetitive processes, but also a lot of disconnects across your organization.

Host: Jon

Definitely. Now Alee, were you the first or one of the first hires #FinOps hires in your organization?

Guest: Alee

Technically, yes. And the way I say technically yes to that is because before me my partner in crime joined together, which was about a year and a half ago now, almost two years coming up on, we had #FinOps in pockets and it was a priority, but it wasn't practice and my leader saw that, Hey, we need to invest in this. We need to invest in bringing people in to be dedicated to this. And so me and my counterpart were brought in. So you could say we were kind of the first two in the actual #FinOps practice there, and our first kind of task was just understanding what should #FinOps look like at our organization. And that's kind of where the hub and spoke model is where we've been navigating. And so I would say we were one of the first, but we've been doing #FinOps for a long time, just not if we call it that.

Host: Jon

Now that you're officially called #FinOps and it's been like a year and a half in the role, what was the first one or two things that you wanted to tackle immediately after its creation?

Guest: Alee

Data transparency. That was the first key, and I think I've heard it on the other podcast in the past, but if you don't have trust in the data or traceability in the data and customers don't understand and you're bringing 'em on the journey, you will lose them because the data is the foundation of optimization. Understanding your cost, understanding your business value, and what your total cost of ownership and an impact on the business you can have is. And so taking a step back and saying, let's rework our data based on what we know now, how do we make it more transparent, more scalable? So as cloud providers mature in what they provide us, we're able to take advantage of that too. So re-architected a lot of our data processes and pipelines and how we structure the data. The second piece of that is just understanding what our customers need. We have so many different levels of maturity across the organization, so how did we categorize and see what our more mature teams need? What are our teams that are newer to the space need and how do we balance and prioritize and get a roadmap available that allows us to hit the different teams where they're at, but also scale and grow with them but not be a blocker? So I'd say the first bit about was re-architecting data and then understanding the customer.

Host: Jon

Speaking of mirror mature #FinOps teams, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you might see immature #FinOps teams make or implementations

Guest: Alee

Say, the biggest mistake is not doing standardization from the get-go. If I started from scratch and it was a brand new cloud practice, brand new space there, I think starting with standards but making sure your standards are also adaptable because I think some of the biggest issues that we see with a lot of new #FinOps organizations is they get very set in their ways or they're very rooted towards a certain process. I think the biggest advice is it's just your first wrong answer because if you go with that model, if you get your leaders comfortable with, it's our first wrong answer, we're going to iterate, they're comfortable with change, think about how much #FinOps has evolved just since the #FinOps foundation was created, it started as more of a very cloud billing or cloud finance type of role. And now it's so much more than that. There are engineering buckets, there are vendor buckets, and there are all different personas within it that I think if you would've said, this is what my #FinOps team does today, you would be failing. Now

Host: Jon

When you're talking about standardization, are you talking about standardization of reporting, standardization of tackling some of the challenges and the issues that come up, the cost, and the motivation of teams? Is it everything?

Guest: Alee

I'd say standardization of your organization's practices. If I could go back in time and create standards for tagging, I think the standards need to be adaptable, but now you have better visibility into your costs, and maybe your tagging standard is an accounting standard instead, but it's just what works for your organization. I'd also like to create standards on how we manage data and how we have to get data from our vendors and be able to push back on our vendors from the beginning. Beyond the cloud, there are a lot of other costs associated with it that you need to manage to run efficiently and not all vendors provide data in a very transparent way. So being able to set standards of here's the different ways that we will ingest data, it needs to hit one of these standards so we can have our standards for data ingestion set up.

Guest: Alee

I also think standards for how you decide where to run and what you run, I think is one of the biggest areas if you could have better visibility or better safeguards in place so teams can run efficiently from the start, and if in practice, it's a lot easier to start with optimization than it is to bring it in later. So how do you embed optimization in your culture from the get-go and what are your standards for optimization? And I think standards for optimization at a large organization are really hard to say. So for my team, I can't say with certainty our full standards of optimization because they vary so much from team to team. Whereas if I was just starting, that would be probably the first thing I define as what does optimization, what does financial engineering mean to us? And here are the tenets that we live by and grow on.

Host: Jon

I think just being flexible in your standards, knowing that you're going to be wrong or you're going to iterate, they're changed, or a living breathing type thing. It should be known within any organization, big or small. Alee, we were talking about what are the mistakes that immature #FinOps cultures make when they're trying to implement it. Now, #FinOps has been around for a while, but it's only become widely known within the last couple of years. You're at your company, you're, they're a year and a half and I'm going to say you're more of a mature type because the implementation for variations, they're still being implemented as a mature #FinOps culture. What are some of the mistakes you might see that you might be making or others might be making that you can help

Guest: Alee

Say for you to be a successful mature #FinOps organization? You need leadership support, you need leadership buy-in, you need support, and you also need leadership prioritization. If you don't have that, you're going to make a big mistake because your leadership's priorities might not align with your team's priorities, how do you make sure that you can hit your priorities if your leadership isn't on board, it just won't work. I think the other biggest mistake I see mature #FinOps teams making, and there are probably two of them analysis paralysis. Sometimes when you're so mature you get so stuck and it needs to follow this exact path or this exact way, and you end up spending so much time analyzing that you don't action. And so how do we take a step back and make sure we're not doing that? And I think the third one is not meeting teams where they're at, and that is really at a mature organization, not everyone's going to be mature. There is always going to be a new team that maybe it's their first experience running on the cloud or maybe you acquire a company or maybe you divest a company that's going to change the maturity level of where each of your different teams are at. And so your organization to be successful needs to be able to meet those different teams where they're at in their journey today.

Host: Jon

I think calling it out where you already have maybe a mature #FinOps culture within your organization, but there's going to be new teams and new acquisitions, so it's going to be your mature, but that new team's going to be immature and how do you integrate with them or bring them up to speed into just as a whole to kind of implement things and get everybody on board. That's the first time I've heard of that.

Guest: Alee

Yeah, it's something that I'd say probably before becoming a customer myself, I don't know if I would've said that it is, but now sitting in the shoes and working with a team right now who's never actually run on the cloud, they've been very much on-prem for their lifetime of it and they're now looking to the cloud. It's really fun actually to start at the beginning again and say, here's what you need to think of. Here's what I wish I had known when I first got started. Here are the different resources that you have at your disposal. Watching them be able to get started, be curious about it. I think the best is when they ask questions about, Hey, why would I start with this? Someone recommended I use this, but based on what you're saying, I think I should use this process or this area of it.

Guest: Alee

And it's watching it click in their minds and watching them be able to make the right decision from the get-go because they are so new, but they're also very immature in that space as they don't even have a real production workload on the cloud yet. So how do we make sure that when they have that real production workload on the cloud, we're able to track and manage how much it costs to migrate it on? When they normalized it, what is the cost of it? And when they're running efficiently, how much were we able to move the needle versus when they first started?

Host: Jon

I also think that having a new team challenges the standards and processes, and actually, it makes you think about why you have certain things in place while you've been doing it an X number of times. They're like, well, why are you doing that? Because this has changed and it allows you to reevaluate and put you maybe back to a crawl in certain areas so you can move forward and be more efficient.

Guest: Alee

I completely agree with that. We're having a workshop here. We're bringing together a few of our different teams that are associated with some of our processes because we had a team question say, Hey, why are we doing this today? And the question was, the answer was, this is just what we've always done

Host: Jon

And that's not a good answer. That's the hardest, I'm sorry. Every time somebody says that, I always think of a friend who says, we doing it this way because we've always done it this way.

Guest: Alee

Yep, exactly. And so I think everyone on this podcast looks at some processes that you're doing and say, does it have to happen that way or have you just been doing it so long that way that you're comfortable?

Host: Jon

Ally, you had the chance to present at #FinOps X back in June. What was the topic?

Guest: Alee

The topic was is it a savings or a spend reduction?

Host: Jon

Well, it,

Guest: Alee

I think this is one where if you would've asked me about a year ago, I don't think I would've even thought about this. And this is where if you look at the economic landscape going on, just in this past year, there's been some different shifts and one of our organization's priorities was we need to save. We need to cut costs not just in the cloud, but everywhere. And we had some savings targets. Well, the problem that we were facing was we would call out optimizations as savings, and it was losing trust with our finance teams. Our finance teams sat me down and said, Hey, look, I'm confused here. Can you explain to me what a savings is? And that's kind of where this all started. My manager was the one who came up with the title of the topic because she and, because I were just both getting so bombarded with what is a savings, but kind of the area within this was, do you know what savings is today?

Guest: Alee

And when we sat down with our finance team, I came to realize that in the #FinOps space, we throw around the word savings a lot and to an engineer, I get it, savings to them is what they are accountable for, what they can do. But savings to an organization is something very different. A savings is your cash in hand, and that is where I think I was super guilty of just throwing out that SS word all the time. So what we did at our organization was take a step back and say, let's define key terms. What is a saving? And if it's not a saving, what is it? And so we came up with three different categories, savings, spend reduction, and cost reduction. I mean, and cost avoidance, sorry, not cost reduction, cost avoidance. And that allowed us to better have conversations with our different teams but speak the same language. It took a lot of getting used to, I still catch myself accidentally saying the SS word, but I can now have a lot more productive conversations with our finance teams, with our leadership teams, and also let engineers understand the full impact of their optimizations, whether it be a cost avoidance or a spend reduction.

Host: Jon

I'd rather you throw out that SS word than the other SS word.

Guest: Alee

Definitely

Host: Jon

Alee, I'm going to switch gears a little bit. I want to talk about the co-created dashboard, the cloud intelligent dashboard, actually kudos, which I love the name that you did with a W Ss. What is kudos?

Guest: Alee

Okay, so kudos in the cloud intelligence dashboard started as a way for me to scale what I was doing with my customers. So the very first one of the cloud intelligence dashboards was in the kudos dashboards was the cost intelligence dashboard. This all started because I was working with over 20 different customers and I found myself repeating the same process multiple times. As we know with customers of complex nature, a lot of the native tooling doesn't meet their needs. So instead of having to rework everything I was doing or explain the same concept over and over, what it started was how can I get teams to think about data in a more scalable way? And so the dashboards themselves just started as data logic that would allow me to have better conversations with my customers that fed into how can I better optimize my reporting and working with them and help them get started so that they're not having to reinvent the wheel.

Guest: Alee

I met some amazing folks along the way, and that's where kudos came into place. Timur and Yuri as well as Aaron're kind of our band of pirates. We were kind of the co-leads of this that turned it from a dashboard to practice, and they are some of the smartest folks that I know, and they saw it from a different space. Yuri and Tamer were both teams, so technical account managers, and so they knew what customers needed from that technical side, not just the fin out space. And so I think by bringing us all together and starting with the problem that helped us better support our customers, turned into how can our customers better support themselves. And the key thing about these dashboards is they're always open source and they were free to use. I think the two models do that allow it to be a collaborative practice where we get the community to help add their insights into what they want to see next. I remember getting so many emails saying, Hey, this is a cool way of doing this, but here's how we think about our organization. How could you maybe add to the dashboard or change this approach to it? And so that's how the dashboards were born. They were just a way to help us better support our customers which turned into a way to help customers better support themselves.

Host: Jon

Is this a topic that you might be presenting at future events that are happening later this year or later?

Guest: Alee

There will be presentations there on it, but I will not be doing any of them on a customer side. I think one of the key areas that I try to make sure I maintain as a customer is neutrality across our vendors. I never want to make sure that I am closing my mind because I'm so caught up in the ways of how one vendor is doing things. And so you probably won't see me at those. You might see me speaking at #FinOps X or more vendor-neutral type of spaces where I can make sure I'm thinking more of a thought practice and less of a vendor-specific area. But there definitely will be talks on 'em and I know Yuri will be there. So if you are going to reinvent this year, definitely reach out to Yuri. He'll be there, you'll him going around. He is one of the smartest folks I've ever met, and his engineering background and technical background as a TAM bring so many new ideas that I don't always think of in the #FinOps space. So bring questions to him, and bring ideas for dashboards, you won't be disappointed.

Host: Jon

So I like the vendor-neutral space and staying in that because it allows you to stay broad and not focused on one when one implements something. Now you have to kind of think about all your customers might be multi-cloud or a single cloud, whatever. And what happens is if you're focused on one, you're not seeing the problem from a broader standpoint.

Guest: Alee

Exactly, and I think the key thing we try to ingrain in our organization is the workload should be run where it best fits, and there are a couple of different factors for that. Cost, performance, team, education and background, and also a vendor fit. And so it doesn't always have to be the cloud too. We would like to assess teams to assess this on a workload-by-workload basis, but we're always trying to improve the training that our teams have so that they can make the right decision of where they need to run and they have the skill sets they need to be able to run on where they want to run that workload.

Host: Jon

A workload should be run where it best fits. That's a really good quote.

Guest: Alee

Thank you. It's something that it's sometimes hard because you're comfortable running where you are, but I think there's going to be a lot more hybrid-type workloads coming to space and a lot more areas where vendors who have the niche market in an area, you might run that piece of that workload there or that whole workload might run on that vendor because of the one area that sets them apart. It's not always the one you're comfortable running on, but if you're not comfortable running on it, how do we make sure that our teams have the tools so that they can educate themselves to run where they need to run?

Host: Jon

Speaking of your teams, what does your typical or week-to-week look like within your organization?

Guest: Alee

It varies so much depending on the time of year and time of month. I think we all in the spinoff space know there's a time when billing has to happen. Billing can be a very quick process if there are no issues, but if there is an issue that you should always prepare for, it's going to take a little bit longer. So if there is a billing issue going on, then that's going to be a little bit more of my day. I kind of relate it to when I was in college where you had syllabus week where maybe it was smooth sailing, you got to spend a lot more time doing what you wanted to do, working on what you wanted to work on. Then there's finals week and billing. Billing goes wrong is finals week for us. Then a typical day-to-day of what I try to do or week-to-week I try to is check in with my counterparts in our different segments, understanding what they're doing, what their priorities are, how we can better support them, what's not working for them, checking in with our vendors beyond just cloud.

Guest: Alee

I help and support in our tooling as well as other areas. So I help with a lot of contracts in other spaces and help to think about the whole place of theirs. So there are a lot of times I'm working with vendors. I'd say they're very seldom weak and I have not talked to a vendor, whether it be a cloud vendor or another vendor, and making sure that we're leveling what our team's needs are. And then I think most importantly, every day I'm trying to challenge myself to what can I be doing to look for what's next for our teams. And so I try to spend at least 30 minutes a day just staying relevant in the space. And I know that's not always something that directly adds value to my teams at the current state, but I think it keeps us relevant. It makes sure that what we're doing from an organizational standpoint is in the right direction.

Guest: Alee

So even if it's just reading what's new and happening in our industry, what's new and happening in the #FinOps world, what's happening in the world, and how does that kind of impact the trends that we're looking to? So I know a lot of people talk about AI, just reading up on what's going on there, what's happening in the space, and how different folks are using it in their industry. I try to make sure I'm staying relevant there, but at the end of the day, everything I'm doing is to make sure that our customers can run efficiently. So everything I look at has to add value to our customers.

Host: Jon

Do you feel that maybe AI might be impacting or contributing to your current role or #FinOps in general?

Guest: Alee

It has to be how it's going to be. I don't know exactly, but it's going to. It's just too easy of a space for it not to fit in. Think about what we're doing, it's imagine if you were able to, those teams that I talked about were just moving to the cloud, what if they were able to ask a chat tool, how should I provision this workload? Here's what I need to do, what's the best way to do it? And they were able to spit out options or this won't work for us or assess our whole organization's workload structure and say, what could I be doing differently? Where are the trends that we're seeing? What are all the different areas there? It's essentially another resource to help our teams have the different tools that they have, but I also think there are so many unknowns there that I don't fully have trust in it yet to make decisions for our team.

Host: Jon

I agree with you. I think AI, just like everybody's in the crawl stage right now with it and we're all trying to understand the benefits, the value, and to kind of validate the data that's being generated from it and be able to handle things. I know we were talking about automation and AI is not the automation factor. It may contribute to it, but AI is just here to help you get to data faster, to understand the data in general while automation can help you achieve those tasks. Going back to your challenges, you were talking about staying relevant with all the data out there and cloud and staying up to date on that, do you find that as one of your biggest challenges, or is there a bigger challenge for you?

Guest: Alee

I'd say for me, that might be one of my biggest challenges. And I think the reason for this is it has become an area where I need to prioritize my time. There are only so many hours in the day and I can't be everywhere. So if I don't stay relevant and understand what's going on, how am I prioritizing my time efficiently, there are a lot of areas that our teams are looking into across our organization that I haven't been able to dedicate the amount of time I wished I could to it, but what I'm doing is understanding how people in the industry are using it, how my teams are using it. So when I do have that time, I'm able to jump in and support them where they're at on their journey. If I were to just take a step back and have tunnel vision to what I'm working on and not understand, hey, here are some different ways that teams are using it, sending the resources, being still along the journey with our teams, I would lose them, but I'd also lose myself trying to stay up with it if I was everywhere. And so I think the hardest piece for me is just making sure that I'm staying relevant, but I'm also not overextending myself because I'm trying to stay relevant. And so it's a balance of staying relevant of just my knowledge base, not what I'm always actioning or doing

Host: Jon

Well. Just like you talked about analysis by paralysis, staying relevant but not overwhelming you with so much data that you're not consuming it or retaining the data is kind of having a happy medium between them.

Guest: Alee

Yep, definitely.

Host: Jon

Alee, you have been dealing with the #FinOps within your organization for the last year, year and a half. What is some advice that you would give to those who are looking to try to implement it within their organization?

Guest: Alee

I would say the biggest piece of advice I'd have is to go to your leaders first. Go to the leaders that you need support from and walk them through what you're trying to do and get their buy-in feedback because if you don't have their buy-in and you're trying to do this, you will not be successful.

Host: Jon

What advice would you give to those who already have a sound #FinOps practice implemented though?

Guest: Alee

For the ones that already have the Sound #FinOps practice implemented? It would be to decide what your priorities are and review them with your teams. And I think this is an area as we're coming up on the end of the year, our fiscal year is different than a calendar year, but it also is coming up on the end of the calendar year too. What are your priorities for the next year and are they aligned with the priorities of the teams that you support? If your priorities don't help them achieve their priorities, it's time to reassess and or re-look at how can you better make sure that your priorities will add value. Because a priority is only as good as a team that can use it.

Host: Jon

That's very true in sound advice. Okay, Ali, you know what? Now it's time to have a little fun and ask you some interesting questions. A completely off-ops topic. What do you say?

Guest: Alee

I love it.

Host: Jon

All right, let's have a little bit of fun. Okay. Do you remember what the iPod was or what it looked like? Did you ever have one?

Guest: Alee

I did. I don't think I had the original. I had a Green iPod mini. It was that light green color,

Host: Jon

The little one or the nano? Not

Guest: Alee

The nano. The nano was the mini. The nano was the little one. It was the iPod Mini. I still have it somewhere. I should dig that out.

Host: Jon

My wife has one and I always put music on it when I would take to the gym. It was very nice. It was like one of the Apple remotes. Actually. That's very interesting that they did that. Okay, so think of having your iPod in hand and you're on an island. What music do you have on there?

Guest: Alee

Oh gosh. My music back in the day was questionable. My parents put me in dance classes. I was not a good dancer, so a lot of them were the dances that we were working on. I think when the iPod first came out, one of the dances I was in was Survivor, the song Survivor. So I had that probably on repeat, but I also grew up going to our family's cabin up in the mountains. And so the songs back in the day that our parents would have us listen to would probably drop a Jupiter and different songs around there. A lot of the oldies too, which my parents listened to always came on repeat. So we had a cabin playlist, so I definitely always made my playlist and I still burned CDs back when the iPod came out. So we had the CDs too.

Host: Jon

Well, for those who don't remember, we burned music to CDs. These CDs were these little disks they used to be able to put 'em in. Yeah, who knows. I don't have those anymore.

Guest: Alee

I still have all my old CDs and used to keep 'em in your car. And I know people talk about how you're distracted driving, but I look back and I'm like, it was more distracted driving back in the day when you'd be going through to try and pick the next CD that you're trying to listen to. You had 'em organized in little CD padfolios. I don't even know what those were called

Host: Jon

Actually. That's probably what it was called, where you were digging through and trying to, oh yeah, this works, and put it in. Oh, I got to take one out.

Guest: Alee

Yep.

Host: Jon

All right. Let me ask you the last question. Let's just imagine. Nope, I'm going to switch gears. I was going to ask you on your next vacation, but I already asked that before. Let's see, actually, here's one. So Ali, let me ask you the last question. What was the last book that you read and that stuck with you?

Guest: Alee

So I'm actually in a book club with some of my closest friends and whoever is hosting next gets to pick the book. And so my friend is hosting, and I think the one unique thing about book clubs is you read books that you might not have picked up. So there's a lot of book club books that I've read that you guys would cringe at, but there's a new book I just started. I'm not far enough along to tell you what stuck with me yet, but it's called The Court of Thorns and Roses, and it's something that I would not have picked coming off the shelf. But so far it's been one of those that I haven't been able to set it down. I won't give any spoilers, but if you're looking for just a book that is outside of the realm that you normally read, not anything to do with the workspace, not anything to do with your typical day-to-day. A Cord of Thrones and Roses is interesting. And one that by just reading the bio of it, I probably would've not started, but because it's for a book club book, I started it and it's not letting me get a lot of sleep at night. Let's say that I'm almost done. I will be almost done with it probably by the end of Wednesday.

Host: Jon

That's pretty good that you've picked up a book or you recommended a book that you normally wouldn't and it's sticking with you. And now you might find a new series or something you're interested in for the book club. Curious question, do you have to read it by a certain time and get it done? And do you guys sit there and discuss it or are you just exchanging books?

Guest: Alee

So we do have a monthly book club meeting where we're supposed to have it done by there. There's been a lot of books where they just didn't sit well with me. I just couldn't finish. So I didn't always finish every book that happens to all of us. We discussed the book a little bit, but I think it's just more of a good excuse to get together. These folks that I'm in the book club with, I've known some of the day I was born. And so it's just a good way to be able to have that checkpoint to catch up, forget about what's going on in your day too day and have that time to get together and discuss something that we might have different opinions on, but we all respect each other's opinion there.

Host: Jon

Nice. So Alee, as I wrap things up, who are some of the most influential practitioners in #FinOps?

Guest: Alee

This one's easy for me and the reason why I say this is she taught me a lot of what I know today and probably most of how I do what I'm doing today. Her name's Alex said she leads a team called Optics at AWS, but she took a chance on me when I first got started. And the one thing you'll know about Alex is she's the biggest person to advise on how she thinks about #FinOps and also what scares her. She talks a lot about imposter syndrome and I struggled a lot with that, but having her as my leader as I was going through this made it so I felt like I could find my point of reference where I needed to succeed. And I think Alex's whole space is she can take any person and I've seen her do this with her whole team and make them feel as though they are changing the industry and look at how she can help them change the industry. And I think that's super cool because there are so many different personalities in this space. And having someone like Alex there to identify where your skill sets are and help you elevate them up and help you fill the gaps on maybe areas you're not as good at is huge. So I'd say Alex Head is easily the most influential person I've met in #FinOps.

Host: Jon

That's weird that you say that because I know Alex Head, she's been on my podcast. She'll be talking about being a vulnerable leader. Great person to get to know, and have a conversation with. I'm friends with our, usually reach out to her every once in a while. I know she just got back to work. So huge. Shout out to Alex and all the stuff that you're doing.

Guest: Alee

Yes, big shout out. And if you don't know Alex, get to know her.

Host: Jon

I agree. Alright, everybody, it's time to wrap up the Faces in the #FinOps podcast. Today's guest was Alee Whitman, a senior staff product engineer at a Fortune 500 media and entertainment company. Alee, thank you so much for joining us.

Guest: Alee

Thanks for having me,

Host: Jon

Everybody. This has been another awesome episode in discussion around the Faces and #FinOps podcast by our good friends at Prosper Ops. Be sure to hit the subscribe and notify and make sure to check out the Prosper Ops blog because guess what, we're out of here.