Most FinOps efforts follow the same arc: tagging campaign, showback report, one big savings win — then stagnation. The problem isn't the tooling. It's that teams optimise for visibility and miss accountability.

Naval has run FinOps programmes at a $50B energy company and seen the patterns that kill momentum. In this session he walks through the five failure modes — diffuse ownership, savings theatre, the RI trap, tagging as a substitute for governance, and treating FinOps as a finance function — and the operational model that prevents each one. He also introduces the FinOps Maturity Assessment used in his practice: a scored diagnostic that tells you exactly where the friction is.

Level: Intermediate | Tags: FinOps, Cloud Cost Optimisation, Cloud Governance, FinOps Foundation, Azure, AWS