5 FinOps best practices for cloud innovation

For engineering leaders, cloud savings used to be the finish line. Today, they’re just the starting point.

The most forward-thinking teams—from startups to scaled tech companies—aren’t just using FinOps to reduce spend. They’re using it to unlock headroom for growth: funding new workloads, accelerating research and development (R&D), and improving margins across the board.

In a recent webinar, North.Cloud’s CEO Matt Biringer spoke with FinOps experts Nadeem Husain, Cloud Economist at CircleCI, and Dieter Matzion, Sr. Cloud Governance Engineer at Roku, to unpack how they’re applying FinOps best practices to drive real business impact—not just cleaner invoices.

Below are the most valuable takeaways for technical leaders.

1. Reinvest your savings. That’s the whole point.

At CircleCI, FinOps isn’t just about trimming cloud bills. It’s about unlocking growth. 

“We’re reinvesting those savings into the company… into product, into R&D, trying to decrease our COGS,” says Nadeem.

For a VC-backed, growth-stage company, that reinvestment is critical. Cloud optimization becomes a way to fuel innovation and strengthen financial performance. 

It reflects a broader shift: FinOps isn’t just a finance function. It’s a strategic lever for the entire business.

2. Use optimization as a funding mechanism for new workloads

At Roku, FinOps is built into how the company plans and grows. “If there is a new workload, it has to be funded through existing workloads being optimized,” says Dieter.

He describes how his team uses cost optimization as a gating mechanism: new cloud workloads must be offset by savings elsewhere. It’s about keeping costs flat while ensuring every engineering decision has a cost-aware tradeoff. 

That mindset starts at the top. Roku’s leadership explicitly set cost-per-streaming-hour as a key performance indicator, and FinOps is core to hitting that target.

This is one of the clearest FinOps best practices: tie optimization work directly to business KPIs.

3. Align engineering, finance, and infrastructure teams early

A mature FinOps practice isn’t siloed. At CircleCI, the Cloud Economics team works in lockstep with both finance and engineering leadership.

“We're having syncs almost every week to understand the implications of the technology that’s moving forward,” said Nadeem.

This tight integration ensures that infrastructure planning is guided by margin goals, not just technical feasibility. It also helps the FinOps team identify when savings opportunities align with broader business priorities, like freeing up budgets for hiring or rebalancing infrastructure usage.

4. Don’t overthink tooling. Start with the basics

"You don’t need a 100% Full-Time Equivalent (FTE), maybe even 20% FTE or 30% FTE,” says Hussain. Start with a part-time team lead and triage your environment.

Smaller or earlier-stage companies often assume they need to adopt complex tooling or hire a full FinOps team to get started. Not true. 

Both Nadeem and Dieter emphasized that the best way to begin is by identifying low-hanging fruit, including unused volumes, misfit instance types, commitments that no longer match usage. Even basic tools like AWS Trusted Advisor or billing exports can reveal actionable insights. 

Best practice: Assign someone—even just 20% of an engineer’s time—to own cost visibility and act as a connector between dev and finance. That’s also why platforms like North.Cloud exist: to help teams get cost visibility and savings without hiring a full team or building a custom stack.

5. Use FinOps to ask better questions, not just deliver answers

FinOps maturity means being proactive, not reactive. At companies like Roku and CircleCI, cloud economics teams aren’t just reporting costs, they’re influencing architecture.

As Dieter puts it, “Every engineering decision is now a purchasing decision.” That means FinOps is in the room early, helping teams weigh tradeoffs: serverless vs. EC2, ARM vs. Intel. 

Or as Nadeem asked, “Why aren’t we looking at serverless? Why aren’t we looking at ARM (Advanced RISC Machine)? What about our technology can’t work on ARMs?” This is what FinOps best practices look like: cost awareness baked into technical decisions before they become expensive to unwind.

FinOps maturity means momentum, not just metrics

FinOps best practices aren’t just about getting your RI coverage to 90% or your Effective Savings Rate to 30%. They’re about making cloud savings a growth lever, not just a line item.

Whether you’re a five-person team just starting your optimization journey or a scaled platform managing thousands of workloads, the takeaway is the same: Don’t stop at savings. Start with them.

If your team is spending too much time in spreadsheets, or struggling to balance savings with flexibility, North.Cloud can help. We automate cloud savings without lock-in, overcommitment, or complexity. Visit our website to learn more.