How to Present DevOps to a Non-Technical CFO?

It's a tough challenge! I recommend demonstrating two key points: minimizing lead time and minimizing recovery time. For lead time, you could ask the CFO for a simple change to a product UI and then show how quickly you can implement and deploy that change in real time. For recovery time, intentionally take down a service in a controlled environment and show how quickly your monitoring alerts you to the issue and how fast you can fix it. This illustrates your team's role in keeping the product available and responsive.

This session is a great chance to secure future investment, so consider framing the discussion with a FinOps perspective. Start by emphasizing the CFO's priorities—cost, risk, and time. Use analogies to explain how software development is like a factory assembly line, where platform engineering builds the systems that eliminate downtime and errors. Highlight how reducing setup time leads to better productivity and cost efficiency while embedding security reduces compliance risks. Show how faster, reliable releases enhance revenue potential. Remember, CFOs love metrics, so provide numbers wherever possible! Good luck!

Focus on business use cases that the DevOps team supports. For instance, talk about how you help deploy new features, keep applications running with monitoring, and manage cloud costs. You can mention that you use standard templates to save time and ensure collaboration with development teams. You might want to demo a new feature deployment to highlight that DevOps and Platform Engineering are essential for business growth and revenue management. Ending the discussion by asking the CFO what he can do to help improve platform engineering could really resonate with him.

Just keep it simple! Most CFOs don’t care about the nitty-gritty of technology. They’re likely to question costs, so be prepared for that. A podcast or video might help too, like one featuring Azuros Cloudapi Sr., which explains it in digestible pieces.