June 17, 2026
The Ceiling
This post is part of my Medium blog.
Here's something that happens to FinOps leaders. You do the job well enough that you start getting invited to meetings with EVPs and SVPs. You're in the room where the biggest spending decisions get made. You're the person they turn to when the numbers matter. And you're not a VP.
You're never going to be a VP. Not for this job.
I know someone's going to show up and tell me they're the VP of FinOps. I've been to FinOpsX. I've met those people. Here's what I noticed: in certain industries, almost everyone is a VP. Banking, for instance — the title inflation is real and it doesn't mean what you think it means. And I talked to plenty of VPs at FinOpsX who do way more than FinOps. They were there because they're interested in FinOps. Their FinOps person was there with them. That person wasn't a VP.
VP of FinOps is not a job title you see a lot. If you're a VP, it's because you do more than that. The FinOps part is one slice of a broader role. The pure FinOps leader — the person whose entire job is to understand cloud spend, communicate it across the org, and drive accountability — that person hits a ceiling.
The ceiling isn't about competence. It's structural. FinOps is an in-between job. It sits between finance and engineering, and neither side fully claims it.
Finance doesn't view FinOps as finance. Finance values FinOps — the data, the visibility, the cost allocation — but it doesn't consider FinOps people to be finance people. They don't do forecasting the way FP&A does. They don't own the P&L. They're adjacent.
Engineering doesn't view FinOps as engineering either. Whether engineering even values FinOps is an open question. FinOps tells engineering they're spending too much. Engineering tells FinOps they don't understand the architecture. It's a relationship that works better when it's collaborative, but it's not a relationship that comes with a career path.
In-between work is never really rewarded. It's tolerated. It's depended on. But when promotion cycles come around, the people who get elevated are the ones who sit clearly inside a function. The in-between person is too ambiguous to champion.
There's another job like this: cloud capacity. The person who figures out whether you need another availability zone, whether your reserved instance coverage is right, whether you're about to run out of compute in us-east-1. That job has the same dynamic. You have to get along with everyone to do it well. You have to talk to platform engineering, to security, to the teams running workloads, to the people negotiating enterprise agreements. You build relationships across the org because the job demands it.
That's why it's hard to promote that person. The relationships are the job. Take them out of that role and the relationships go with them. The person becomes too embedded to elevate and too valuable to move. They get typecast.
You could combine FinOps and cloud capacity into a VP role. Some companies have tried. But the same problem applies — the person who's good at both is the person who's built deep relationships across every team, and those relationships are what make them effective where they are. Promoting them doesn't just change their title. It changes their position relative to everyone they need to work with.
In Redundant, Rob runs into this repeatedly. He's pulled into the same meetings over and over, but the colleagues around him keep getting promoted. The cast of characters evolves, but Rob stays. He's the one who knows where the bodies are buried in the cloud bill. He's the one who can translate between finance and engineering. He's essential and stationary.
The book doesn't solve this. I don't think it's solved yet. FinOps has a ceiling, and until the discipline figures out how to break through it, the pattern will keep repeating. The person who communicates across every function, who sits in the highest-level meetings, who drives some of the biggest financial decisions the company makes — that person will keep going home without the title that matches the access.
The access is real. The influence is real. The title isn't coming. And everyone in the room knows it.
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.