Financial fluency

When I first stepped into senior leadership, I realised that my responsibilities had expanded well beyond technology. I was accountable not only for the performance of teams and platforms but also for the way those decisions showed up in the company’s financials. At first, the P&L felt abstract. It was presented in board meetings and discussed in executive reviews, but it took me time to understand how engineering influenced it in real and material ways. That shift in perspective changed the way I approached leadership, and it reshaped my relationship with our FP&A partners.

The largest line on any engineering budget is almost always headcount. Salaries are only the start. Fully loaded FTE costs include benefits, overhead, recruiting, and the infrastructure required to support each individual. Once you internalise that, hiring stops being a conversation about numbers on a spreadsheet and becomes a conversation about investment strategy. Asking for ten engineers is one thing. Explaining that those ten engineers represent a multi-million pound investment designed to accelerate time to market or enable a critical product launch is a very different discussion. That framing matters, and it earns trust with both finance and peers on the executive team.

The next area where engineering leaders need to engage deeply is infrastructure and vendor spend. Cloud costs, SaaS tools, and third-party contracts accumulate quickly, and while engineering leaders often focus on technical fit or operational needs, finance is looking at predictability and scalability of spend. They want to know whether costs are under control, whether they scale appropriately with revenue, and whether there is a clear plan to avoid unpleasant surprises. I found that when I brought transparency into this conversation through FinOps practices, cost attribution to products, bets or teams, and clear explanations of savings initiatives it transformed the dialogue entirely. Finance shifted from questioning every line item to partnering with me on how best to align investments with the company’s growth trajectory.

Over time I also learned that engineering does not only appear on the cost side of the P&L. Many of the choices we make directly improve margins and can enable revenue. When reliability improves, customer churn reduces and penalties for missed SLAs disappear. When we create self-service tooling, we cut down the need for operational support. When we optimise infrastructure usage, we improve unit economics. These impacts rarely show up in isolation as part of the financial model, which means that if engineering leaders do not tell this story, it risks going untold. I made it a point to connect major engineering initiatives with financial outcomes, not in technical jargon but in the language of the P&L. It was never about taking credit, but about ensuring that finance and the business understood how engineering was enabling growth rather than only consuming resources.

Budgeting itself also became a different exercise once I stopped framing it around line items and started framing it around outcomes. The less productive conversations were the ones where we debated why a particular vendor cost was what it was. The more productive ones were when I could say that this investment enabled expansion into a new market, reduced latency for millions of users, or accelerated delivery of a product that directly tied to commercial targets. Finance does not need the technical depth, but they do need to understand the connection between spend and business movement. That shift in framing completely changed the dynamic of my discussions with FP&A.

The final and perhaps most valuable lesson for me was learning to treat finance as a partner in scenario planning. In the early days I would come to budget reviews with a single plan and defend it. Later, I came to those meetings with options. What happens if we delay a hiring wave by a quarter. What happens if revenue growth slows and we need to tighten spend. What happens if we renegotiate a major vendor contract. Walking through those scenarios together with FP&A meant I was never caught off guard when reviewing with the wider business, and it showed that engineering was being managed with financial discipline.

Financial literacy as an engineering leader is not about becoming an accountant. It is about being able to read the P&L, understand which levers engineering influences most, and use that understanding to guide better decisions. For me, the turning point was recognising that budgets are not constraints. They are strategic tools. They tell you what the company values, where investment is expected to deliver return, and how you can shape the business beyond the boundaries of engineering. Code may build the product, but financial fluency builds the credibility to shape the company.