How to Communicate Software Development Costs

If you’re in engineering or development, communicating about cloud infrastructure and other software development costs with your finance department is tricky. For one thing, those costs are almost certainly rising.
Also, you are in different roles with different priorities. This naturally creates barriers of communication. You may think your development costs are perfectly reasonable while your CFO thinks there’s a problem – or you may be focused on different parts of the bill than your colleagues in finance are.
Here are some ways to break down that communication barrier and make your software development costs sound a little less scary.
Use the CFO’s Language
Engineering and finance use different language to talk about the same things – which means there’s going to be an element of translation involved. Before meeting with someone who lives in a different day-to-day world than you do, consider how they may talk about cost areas in a way that’s meaningful to their role. For example:
Dev-speak: “Non-production workloads” – or dev or test or stage
Finance-speak: R