Why People Skills Matter More Than Dashboards in FinOps ft. Zach Johnson, Splunk | Ep #46

How do you turn FinOps from a reporting function into part of the company’s operating system?

In this episode of FinOps in Action, I sit down with Zach Johnson, Head of FinOps & Cloud Platforms at Splunk to unpack why world-class FinOps isn’t about dashboards or reports, it’s about business value, executive alignment, and proactive decision-making.

Zach shares how one of his earliest lessons in FinOps was realizing that “presenting data isn’t the same as solving the problem.” That insight shaped the way he approaches communication with engineering, finance, and the C-suite and why the right metric depends entirely on who’s in the room. He explains why executives care more about unit economics and unallocated spend than tagging compliance, and how connecting cloud usage to business outcomes changes how organizations prioritize optimization.

We also dive into why rate optimization drives the biggest impact at scale, how Zach’s team uses AI-generated insights and Slack automation to make FinOps proactive rather than reactive, and why people skills often matter more than technical depth when driving adoption. From building monthly business reviews to modeling commitment purchases with data science, Zach offers a transparent look into how Splunk achieves over $100M in annual cloud savings.

Here’s what we talked about:

• Why “more dashboards” is not a FinOps strategy and why presenting data is not the same as solving the problem
• The metrics executives actually care about (and why tagging compliance usually isn’t one of them)
• How business context, margin goals, and unit economics shape every FinOps decision Splunk makes
• Why proactive FinOps beats reactive FinOps and how Slack automation + AI insights help teams get ahead of cost changes
• How to communicate cloud spend in a way that Finance, Product, and Engineering all understand
• Why rate optimization drives the biggest financial impact in large-scale SaaS environments
• How Zach’s monthly business review framework aligns engineering, product, finance, and FinOps around shared priorities

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Quote of the Show:

• “A terrible engineer with fantastic people skills can oftentimes make a lot more progress than a fantastic engineer with horrific business skills or people skills.” - Zach Johnson

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zach-johnson-86581342/
• Website: https://www.splunk.com/

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