Why most FinOps savings barely register in the boardroom
FinOps often celebrates savings that look big from engineering but invisible to executives. The “splash in the ocean” fallacy shows why bottom-up efforts fail. Only top-down intent turns scattered optimisations into meaningful, strategic impact.
The Splash in the Ocean Fallacy
Why most FinOps savings barely register in the boardroom
FinOps loves to celebrate savings. A team trims £50,000 here, cuts a cluster by twenty per cent there, and everyone feels victorious. From the team’s perspective, it is a huge splash.
But this confidence hides a fundamental misunderstanding about scale. A saving may look enormous from the perspective of the engineer who delivered it. At the executive level, it may barely register.
It is like throwing a ton of water into the ocean. Up close, the splash looks magnificent. Thirty metres away, you see almost nothing. From altitude, you see nothing at all.
FinOps often operates from the shoreline. Executives operate from altitude. This mismatch is why bottom-up FinOps struggles to gain sponsorship.
In the rest of the article, we unpack why your hard-won savings often disappear once they leave the engineering floor, and what changes when FinOps shifts from tactical tasks to strategic impact. If you want your work to matter higher up, this is the part you shouldn’t miss. Subscribe, it is free.
