July 27, 2026
I Finally Published the Book
This post is part of my Medium blog.
I’ve been working on Redundant for several years, which is a polite way of saying that I kept finding reasons not to publish it.
I could propose it to a publisher. I could find an agent. I could spend another year preparing a query letter, revising the opening chapters, and explaining why this particular novel is different from the other novels about technology and organizations that are already sitting on somebody’s desk.
Or I could publish the book.
So that’s what I did. Redundant, the first book in The Condition Set trilogy, is available now.
Before I say anything else about it, let me get a few things out of the way.
I am not writing about a particular company. The companies in the book are fictional. The characters are fictional. This is not a disguised account of a client, an employer, or a company whose name I changed because I thought a thin disguise would protect me from a lawsuit.
It isn’t an autobiography, either. Rob Coleman is not me. He is not an idealized version of me, or the version of me who makes better decisions, or the version of me who gets to deliver the perfect line in the meeting after I thought of it in the car. Rob is a character.
The book comes from somewhere real, though.
I’ve worked with hundreds of people across hundreds of companies doing FinOps. Over six or seven years, you see enough organizations to stop treating every problem as unique. The names change. The cloud providers change. The org charts change. The same problems keep appearing in different clothes.
People are asked to explain costs they don’t control. Teams are given responsibility without authority. The person who understands the numbers is invited into the meeting after the decision has already been made. FinOps is expected to be accurate, useful, diplomatic, and quiet, usually all at once.
Those are not stories about one company. They’re patterns I’ve seen across the industry.
Redundant contains some of those patterns, but it isn’t a business book with the nouns changed to fictional ones. I hate those books. The corporate novella where every character exists to explain a job title, and every conflict resolves into a management lesson, is one of the fastest ways to make me stop reading.
I wanted to write something more interesting than that.
The book opens with Rob being summoned to a meeting of the company’s vice presidents. He is the director of FinOps, and he’s reached the point in his career where he knows he’s good at the job. He can find the cost hidden inside the architecture. He can explain the number to people who don’t want to hear it. He can tell when a forecast is real and when it’s just a slide that has learned to stand upright.
He has also learned that being good at FinOps does not necessarily get you promoted.
FinOps is important. It is also a job that a lot of people still don’t fully understand. It sits between finance and engineering, which means both sides depend on it and neither side completely claims it. You’re asked to translate between functions, explain the consequences of decisions, and tell people when the numbers don’t support the story they want to tell.
That last part is the problem.
The meeting Rob is summoned to contains a hint that something is happening inside the company. He knows enough to recognize that he is being kept outside the real conversation, but not enough to know what the conversation is. The intrigue develops from there.
I’m not going to explain what happens next. You’ll have to read the book.
The important part is why I needed to write it.
I no longer work in FinOps as my day job. That gives me some distance from the work, but it also removes the excuse that I’m writing this to make a point about my current employer or to win an argument with somebody in the industry. I’m not writing from inside a particular company anymore. I’m writing about what I saw across a field of work, and about what those patterns reveal when you put them into a story.
FinOps people are often very good at getting to the bottom of complicated problems. They have to be. Cloud costs don’t arrive with a neat explanation attached. The answer is usually spread across architecture, contracts, usage patterns, organizational decisions, and somebody’s optimistic assumption from eighteen months earlier. You have to investigate. You have to ask inconvenient questions. You have to find a creative way through a problem that somebody else has already declared too complicated to explain.
That kind of work matters more than ever.
Not because every company needs another dashboard. The world has enough dashboards. We need people who are willing to keep pulling at the thread after the first explanation sounds plausible. We need people who can find the connection between a technical decision and the human consequences that arrive later. We need people who can look at a clean number and ask what had to be hidden to make it clean.
That was the person I wanted Rob to be.
Redundant begins with FinOps, but it doesn’t stay there. The trilogy follows what happens when the work of understanding cost, risk, and responsibility starts to move into other parts of the organization. The first book is about who gets cut. The later books ask who gets used and who gets protected. I’m not going to give away the ending of Redundant, but the story does not remain a corporate drama about cloud spend.
It becomes something else.
I wanted someone who knows nothing about FinOps, AI, or cloud architecture to be able to read this book and find a story there. The technical details are part of the setting, not a membership test. The real subject is how companies make decisions, how responsibility moves around an organization, and what happens to the person who keeps finding the truth after everyone else has decided what they want the truth to be.
You can buy Redundant as an EPUB from Amazon and other online booksellers. You can also buy it directly from The Condition Set website. I recommend buying it there. The trilogy is finished, but I expect to make light wording changes and corrections as I find them. The direct edition is the one that will receive those updates.
I spent several years getting the book ready. At some point, getting it ready became another way of not publishing it.
It’s published now.
Start with Redundant. You can read the foreword or Chapter 1 for free before you decide whether you want to spend the price of a latte on the rest of it.
I think you should.
image: /blog/images/redundant-is-out.jpg image_alt: "I Finally Published the Book"
In Redundant, the first book in The Condition Set trilogy, Rob Coleman runs the FinOps review that names the waste nobody wants to hear about. The numbers don't change. The question is who they get used against.