Introduction

If you’ve read the 2025 Annual State of FinOps report, you probably noticed that workload optimization and waste reduction again tops the list of priorities for FinOps teams. At first glance, this might seem like a shift from the early days of the report when “empowering engineers” dominated. In reality, they’re two sides of the same coin: reducing waste has always been the ultimate goal, and “empowering engineers” was a way to get there.

Early FinOps efforts focused on visibility. After teams begin to understand their spend, the conversation often turns to identifying optimization opportunities and enabling engineers to take action.  But in recent years, we’ve seen FinOps mature. Many organizations now have dashboards, spreadsheets, and some engineering buy-in. But, identifying optimization opportunities and driving action can still be a very manual process. 

The question evolved from “How do we get engineers involved?” to “How do we drive ongoing action and, more importantly, results?” Spreadsheets are great for organizing data but not the best for driving action.

As FinOps and engineering converge, it becomes possible to implement processes that not only find and alert on waste but also fix it, track it, and confirm savings. The State of FinOps findings in recent years reflect this maturity curve. Once you can see your waste and implement basic remediation, the next step is implementing systems and processes for continuous improvement.

In fact, if we look deeper into this year’s results, we see that governance and policy are predicted to become top priorities in the coming year. Why? Because once you’ve tackled low-hanging fruit, the next step is implementing processes to address waste, old and new.

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The Real Barrier: Lack of a Built-In Process

Even with dashboards, many FinOps practitioners run into the same bottleneck: no structured workflow for addressing inefficiencies. There’s a recurring story across large, distributed organizations:

1. FinOps teams identify idle resources and unoptimized services.
2. An engineer receives a lengthy spreadsheet or email.
3. A few items get fixed, but most tasks fade into the backlog.
4. Potential savings remain unrealized or untracked (you may be saving, but if no one knows about it…)

The FinOps to engineering handoff often fails without a clear process. Visibility is table stakes; action–alerting, verifying, remediating, and measuring ROI–is where the real work happens. In large, distributed teams, this becomes even more unsustainable if there’s no ongoing education mechanism on building more efficiently. Without a repeatable workflow that ensures fixes and learning happen, you’re not solving the problem–only temporarily patching it.

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A Maturing Practice: Closer to Engineering

In the early days of FinOps, practitioners were often siloed, focusing on finance or cost allocation. The idea of empowering engineers was a revelation: “Wait, if we involve dev teams in the cost equation, we can fix inefficiencies at the source!” The data now shows that we’ve largely moved past that initial culture shock. FinOps has evolved and moved closer to engineering, and the team often tackles waste more proactively.

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Now, the conversation is less about “please fix this” and more about “how do we integrate fixes into daily workflows?” That’s why workload optimization and waste reduction remain top objectives: we finally have the alignment we need, so we need processes to drive continuous improvement next.

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Why Governance & Policy Are the Next Frontier

Once an organization has matured to having consistent engineering engagement, you notice another pattern: some inefficiencies keep reappearing. It’s rarely enough to fix them once; you need tools and processes that teach best practices at scale.

The State of FinOps underscores this shift by highlighting governance and policy as top future priorities. Automation, guardrails, and self-service checks help keep teams on track, ensuring issues don’t just disappear but remain solved in the long run. That’s why so many practitioners looking ahead see governance as the logical “next” step: after you address the waste backlog, you put structure in place to avoid making the same mistakes repeatedly.

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A POV on the Future: Action as Culture

The real story here is that FinOps was always about action. “Empowering engineers” was simply an earlier chapter, when many teams struggled with alignment and buy-in. Now that alignment is here, the next step is ensuring these insights become a daily habit–part of how teams plan, build, and run workloads.

1. Visibility → Who Cares?
   Early on, “we can’t reduce waste if we don’t see it.”
2. Visibility + Engineer Engagement → How Do We Fix It?
   Once dev teams are looped in, you realize that saying “it’s underutilized” isn’t enough. They need clear context, ownership details, and risk assessments.
3. Structured Workflow → Let’s Make It Stick
   Finally, as FinOps aligns with engineering, the conversation shifts to “we have the data, we have team buy-in–now let’s implement an ongoing process so waste is tracked from detection to verification, fix, and ROI measurement.”

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Our Perspective: Turning Insights into Remediation

This is where PointFive comes in. The biggest bottlenecks we see are:

1. No Built-In Workflow:
   After finding waste, verifying, assigning, and fixing it often ends up in scattered email chains or spreadsheets. Without a structured, repeatable process, tasks slip through the cracks, and teams lose track of what’s fixed, what’s pending, and the ROI of their efforts.
2. Lack of Context & Ownership:
   Engineers need more than raw cost data—they need actionable context. Manually correlating each spike with usage is time-consuming, and it’s not always clear if the savings justify the effort. By providing all relevant details and recommended fixes in one place, teams can quickly verify issues and decide which optimizations matter.
3. Identifying inefficiencies at scale:
   We often see small-dollar inefficiencies that don’t seem worth remediating on their own. Some inefficiencies only waste ~$50 a week, so paying an engineer ~$100 per hour to fix them is inefficient. PointFive uncovers issues like these each time they appear across your cloud footprint, turning small savings into big results. 

PointFive closes the loop by integrating directly into engineering workflows–Jira, Slack, or wherever devs already work. It provides relevant context with each ticket so engineers can see what’s wrong, why it matters, and how to fix it. That way, they don’t just get alerts about inefficiencies–they fix them, measure the results, and build a track record of savings.