Opinion

How gamification can turn cloud cost battles into a team sport

Gamification can turn the combative relationship between finance and tech into a team sport that helps improve cloud cost management and financial results

By
  • Matt Pinter
Published: 06 Nov 2025

As financial operations (FinOps) adoption accelerates across Australian and Asia-Pacific (APAC) enterprises, the biggest challenge isn’t tooling – it’s people. Engineers are key to unlocking cloud cost savings, yet most remain disengaged from financial outcomes. With the skills gap only continuing to grow for cloud engineers, Australia’s cloud workforce is increasingly stretched to meet business priorities while challenged by the budget restraints handed down from the finance team.

These departmental tensions can significantly impact profit margins, with McKinsey estimating that most businesses overspend on cloud by 10-20%. Re-engaging engineers on their individual role in wider company workflow and profitability is critical to establishing a positive workplace culture, sustaining efficient workflow through departments, and maintaining profitability at a macro level.

To address these challenges, gamification is an emerging trend with scorecards, benchmarking, and team leaderboards used as a business strategy to motivate engineers, boost accountability, and turn cloud cost management into a shared goal to drive better financial results.  

Bridging the culture gap between finance and engineers

The tension between finance and engineering is not new. Finance needs predictability and control, while engineers require flexibility and speed. When it comes to cloud spend, these opposing mindsets often result in misaligned goals, with engineers feeling hindered by the finance team and finance trying to minimise wasteful tech spend.

Research has found that engineers attribute cloud overspend on the disconnect between the departments, with 52% blaming wasted spend on a lack of synergy and 55% stating that they ignore cost management, generally seeing cost optimisation as out of their job description.

Applying the fun elements of a game to real-world workplace productivity, gamification helps to reframe that dynamic. By giving engineers visibility into spend data and turning optimisation into a team challenge, organisations shift from combative to collaborative. Instead of finance issuing top-down cost mandates that get ignored, engineers are incentivised to own and act on the outcomes, because they can see the direct impact of their decisions in a way that’s beneficial as well as entertaining.

Culture change doesn’t happen overnight and without senior support even the best initiatives will struggle. But small, consistent incentives backed by the organisation’s leaders can go a long way in shaping behaviour, especially in engineering teams that thrive on continuous improvement.

Simple tools for big change

Simple tools, such as dashboards showing cost per service, team scorecards for budget adherence, and real-time leaderboards comparing optimisation performance make financial metrics tangible. They allow friendly competition and an element of sport. Instead of talking about dollars and percentages in isolation, teams compete to improve their efficiency score or reduce their cost-to-performance ratio. Leaders can use data to highlight top performers, celebrate creative optimisations, or even set up cloud cost hackathons to find the most innovative savings ideas.

These activities can be expanded to day-long or month-long game days where teams can take the time to integrate FinOps into their workflows in a way they’re interested in, rather than in a way they’re forced to. This leads engineers to approach cost savings with the same mindset they apply to performance tuning or code quality: something to measure, improve, and win at.

Importantly, gamification isn’t about creating winners and losers. The goal is to turn cost management into a shared responsibility across departments. When engineers feel included, and incentivised, they become better managers of spend. An Apptio customer who had found there was a surge in spending over the Christmas period implemented gamification and reported a 7% reduction in cloud costs over a one-month period.

Encouraging ‘FinOps as code’ mindset

One of the most effective ways to embed cost awareness is to treat it like code. When cost data becomes just another metric, rather than a separate target, engineers are more likely to engage with it. Gamification reinforces this by integrating cost metrics directly into the developer workflow, encouraging behaviours like deploying infrastructure-as-code with budget limits or cleaning up idle resources post-testing.

By creating these gamification use-cases, organisations are nudged toward adopting a FinOps as code mindset. The cultural shift driven by internal benchmarking often motivates teams to find new ways to stay competitive and cost-efficient design becomes second nature.

Organisations can further track and reward behaviours like proactive rightsizing, removing obsolete applications, or scheduling non-production workloads to shut down after hours. By embedding these habits into the development lifecycle, organisations can reduce waste without sacrificing agility. This helps bring optimisation to engineers in a way that resonates and is easier to take forward.

Efficiency without compromise

As organisations look to make the most of every cloud dollar, technical leaders must ask the question: are they using tools, or are they changing behaviours?

Gamification isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, and keeping an open feedback loop to make sure gamification is helping teams, not hindering them, is key to making it successful. When done well, it can be a powerful way to engage engineers, align teams, and turn cost savings into a more enjoyable job. After all, if they’re going to have to optimise anyway, teams may as well have fun while they’re doing it.

Matt Pinter is field chief technology officer for APAC at Apptio

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