Matt Berk: And I often say to like, customers that are attending for the first time to, uh, even though the, the breakouts are the bright and shiny object, oftentimes if you go to like something like our chalk talks or your workshops, you're gonna get a bit more out of the in-person experience where all the breakouts are recorded.

So you'll get pretty much the same experience watching the, the talk that Cory Bowen and I did on YouTube as you would be in the room, versus doing something that's more hands-on or being able to ask that question that's really burning when you're at these other sessions. So that's what we try to like.

When we program for the event, like how do we have a good spread of the topics that folks wanna cover in the places that they do wanna cover them in?

Corey Quinn: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn, and unlike my usual approach, I have two guests on this time. Now, the reason I often don't do that is because it's very hard to get the dynamic right. When you have multiple people who aren't used to working together, they'll talk over one another. It just becomes a very different kind of show.

I'm fine with it this time because of who my guests are. Bowen Wong is a principal product marketing manager for A-W-S-C-F-M. Wow. That's a lot of words. Ed Matt Burke is a principal technical account manager at AWS, slightly fewer words, and the three of us together gave a talk at reinvent COP two 18 best practices and new tools for cost reporting and estimation, which again is too many words, but there we have it.

Matt Bowen. Great to see you again. Great to see you too, Corey.

Bowen Wang: Yeah. Thank you for having us.

Corey Quinn: This episode is sponsored in part by my day job, the Duck bill group. Do you have a horrifying AWS bill? That can mean a lot of things. Predicting what it's going to be, determining what it should be, negotiating your next long-term contract with AWS, or just figuring out why it increasingly resembles a phone number, but nobody seems to quite know why that is.

To learn more, visit duck bill group.com. Remember, you can't duck the duck bill. Bill and my CEO informs me. That is absolutely not our slogan. Oh, thank you for letting me participate in basically my good faith attempt not to ruin, reinvent for everyone last year, and I think we succeeded. No one threw me out of the building afterwards, so there was that and

Matt Berk: we had excellent CSAT s, which we'll talk about is, is one of the main reasons why we do these things.

Yeah, we're a

Bowen Wang: very data-driven company, so we definitely look at customer feedback via the CS a score.

Corey Quinn: Yeah. One of the reasons that we're having this conversation is after I did that, people were surprised by a few different things. Uh, first like, wow, they let you to reinvent. Okay. Yes. They let you speak at reinvent.

And given that we were talking about things that had just been released that week, wait, you are talking about things that haven't been released. Clearly, you know, something about this in advance. Who in the world trusts you at AWS? It, I realize that my reputation sometimes gets ahead of me. I, I talk to you folks a lot about a lot of different things that the cost folks, uh, the CFM team are working on.

And I don't tell it to people's secrets. It's not my place.

Bowen Wang: Yeah. Um, so it's definitely one of our approach to collect feedback from like customers or influencers like yourself before we launch a product. Um, because we believe that if we showcase a product idea or any product demonstration to our power users.

We will be able to collect feedback before we finalize the experience with customers. Um, so yes, for this particular talk, we definitely had multiple, we call pre briefings with you qua. So for us it's definitely, um, kill two birds with one stone. Uh, just because pre brief, um, those products with you, we collect feedback and in the same time.

We can start to have some ideas for this talk for the breakout session.

Corey Quinn: I fix AWS bills for large complicated companies for a living, and I can never depend on any of these big companies having any particular third party tool in place. So since the very beginning, everything I do is. Predicated on, okay.

Are you using AWS in your environment? Gonna guess, yes. Okay. Let's use the native tooling that's offered, because that's the only thing I can ever consistently depend on being there. So from my perspective, I'm, I am a customer of these tools. I use them constantly.

Matt Berk: Yeah. And that's the same thing as a technical account manager.

A lot of times, you know, we work with these large enterprise customers and the way that we help them is by seeing the same things that they see. So, you know, we can help look at their cost explorer and identifiers of opportunity. We can help see if there's budgets being set, and then once it goes to a third party, it kind of becomes a black box to us.

So we try to at least walk the walk in the same place when we look at something like Cost Explorer.

Corey Quinn: I, I wanna be very clear that you have an impossible job when it comes to getting these things right. I used to think that it wasn't that hard, and then I started building tools that other people started using.

It's like, great, here's this finely crafted, tightly honed instrument, and people would pick it up and like, wow, this is a crappy hammer that you've sold me. I don't understand it. It's the way that people use things and interact with them is never quite what you think it's going to be when you're sitting there designing it on day one.

Matt Berk: Yeah, I mean Boeing, one of the things that we launched at Reinvent in that talk was pricing calculator. And there's been so many conversations of what that product would look like, how we would present it. Do you wanna talk a little bit about that?

Bowen Wang: Well, yeah. Pricing calculator, it's definitely many years in the making, uh, for this tool.

So we have pricing calculator for, um, public accessibility. So you don't have to be a Ws customers, you can use it. And just to get a sense of. What will be my cost for the specific applications, but for that pricing calculator, we call this as a authenticated experience. So you'll be able to log in with your AWS account and get all the information, meaning your historical usage, import this, and make any workload modifications such as moving to your new regions, et cetera.

Or if you wanna make any changes to your purchase options, for example, you understand your predictable usage. Um, add additional dollar here and there. For my savings plans. Um, and you get a bill estimate.

Corey Quinn: I, I was using this my, at a client, uh, conversation I was having three weeks ago, and it got to the last step and it just sat there and spun.

I. And spun. And spun. So I texted the two of you and the answer was, is once again, 'cause I am super lucky like this, I went blundering into the middle of an update to a service that the team was rolling out. Now when I say I'm lucky like this, I'm not talking with necessarily the cloud financial management group.

I'm talking across the board at AWS or even the industry. Whenever I'm trying to use something, I have this knack for timing it perfectly wrong. I, I basically a walking disaster.

Bowen Wang: No, no, no. I remember that day, um, I was getting my son ready for daycare and then I saw message from Corey. It was, that seems to be urgent.

I look at it, it's like, that doesn't be good experience. So I tested my team who are based in New York, and they let me know they're actually doing a testing right as we speak. So you call that it's like 6:00 AM or something?

Corey Quinn: Yeah, it was because I was talking to a client that is not based in the US normally a perfect.

Time to do it. I'm sitting here basically trying to do the song and dance of Yeah, it should be working. I, I told everyone it worked well at Reinvent on stage. Oh God. Tell me. I didn't just lie to everyone, but yeah, it was, that was exciting. But it was fun too. It, it was a useful tool and I liked it because what I was modeling out at that point was, okay, uh, I even remember the regions.

You had built everything in US West One for this workload, Northern California. It is more expensive than Oregon. What would it cost to have run this in Oregon instead? And super useful at highlighting that. The downside, of course, was that it didn't work at the time, so I had to basically just. Guess and make numbers by speaking with my hands as I went.

It. It's, it's show business. Just like anything else, like our talk, you stumble over your words, keep going. People don't know what you're supposed to have said.

Matt Berk: What is interesting about reinvent that a lot of people don't know, uh, and I'm assuming a lot of your listeners probably either go or they, they look at, at least they YouTube content from reinvent, uh, is that we start planning it super early.

Like I didn't realize until I started to, to help run the track that we are already, like when reinforce is happening, which happens in June, June, we're already at that point saying, okay, we have to start figuring out what the content is going to be, what our allocations are from the, the high above.

Mm-hmm. To start to build the track out. And so folks will reach out around August, September. Mm-hmm. Either both internally and then customers and be like. It's, we already, we already have it locked and loaded at this point because the

Bowen Wang: presentation is due September slash October. Yeah. So is,

Corey Quinn: yeah. Can we get your final slides two months in advance?

And when I'm working with you folks, like they tell, they tell all of us as this, and my default response as a speaker is, ha ha ha. No. And you actually have to say yes 'cause you work with these people and, oh no, this is, this is not at all how I'm used to writing slides, which is the morning before on the plane ride out there while crying.

This was actually planned well in advance.

Bowen Wang: Yeah. We did a few rehearsals even, right?

Corey Quinn: Yeah. We did a few in person rehearsals and I still remember the, we did this on a Thursday and I think it was the, that week, uh, right. I think on a Monday where we were talking about something that was going to be released, uh, custom billing view.

And you folks said, ah, yeah, surprise that that's. Getting held back because it's not ready yet, which is like, okay, I'm talking about uh, with new tools, like do we have to change the title to be new tool and best practice all singular as these things start getting paired down. Uh, and it was, we had to go through with a fine tooth comb to make sure we weren't mentioning anything, uh, inadvertently that hadn't been released yet.

So I'm curious, I have to ask. Why did it get held back? Because it came out a few weeks later. This was not one of those Back to the drawing board things.

Bowen Wang: Yeah, we was supposed to be having a perfect score, 10 out of 10, but in reality we launched nine service slash features at Last Ring, invent, and we held back.

I. Customer billing view. Um, it was because during the final QA process, um, our product team and engineering leads, when they look at this whole process, so again, customer billing view is the ability for you to have a delegated admin with your organization. So that person without having the access of a payer account, can access cost explorer view for multiple member accounts.

So basically a few steps, right? You create that. Um, we call scope down view. You can use cost allocation tags or account IDs. You can create that view, um, and then share that with a delegated admin. But that sharing process during that QE process is you have to go to Resource Access Manager. So it's a kind of a separate page.

You learn about resource access manager, then you share a billing view. Uh, we believe that is not a. Perfect experience. We believe that for anyone who is creating or sharing the customer billing view should be able to accomplish that within one landing page. So we push back on that experience and we looped in that same sharing experience on the same landing page in the console.

And that requires another two to three weeks of, um, engineering time. So we decide not to launch it at reinvent. But before Christmas.

Corey Quinn: That is amazing. 'cause I still remember the battle days when you would set things up in parts of the console. It's like, would you like to get an email to be notified when a thing happens effectively?

Sure. Great. Put in the R for the SNS topic that you've set up elsewhere that will then drop into your inbox. This weird JSON object. Uh, this was. To be clear, 15 years ago or so, it, it doesn't do that anymore. I think because someone tried to use it once and realized how terrible the experience was. But even now, bouncing to another service like that now, trying to smooth off that rough edge, it was the right call.

Matt Berk: Yeah. But what was funny is that I was so excited about this use case in this service because I work with a lot of enterprise customers that kind of bang their head against the wall of this. This idea that I don't want to give access to the payer account. I don't want, I don't want folks to have that cross view, but I do want.

Uh, a group of account specific access or a business unit specific access, which this then now provides. So I was like, this is awesome. I'm so excited. And, and we peppered it through the talk and then it's like, Nope, pull it all out. And so what you don't realize when you're doing a what's new or a launch heavy thing like this is the, it's always a moving target.

We're always, things are coming in and sliding out. Yeah, and we're, we're literally editing things that week to make sure that we're saying what was the right thing or, or that the, the verbiage is, is right on point with what Boen has. Because that's the funny thing too, is that we don't wanna over promise something that it can, if it can, uh, toast bread and it could slice eggs, I should say both.

But if it can't, then I should only say a toast bread.

Corey Quinn: One of the things that I also think that folks who don't do a lot of speaking themselves might not realize is it's not just the slides 'cause okay, great. Children can look at that and make sure they're not referencing a particular topic, but so much of it is presenter notes and given the way that we all use presenter notes somewhat differently.

It's not a verbatim copy of the words we're going to say. I mean, by the time I get ready to give a talk, a non-trivial amount of my own presenter notes are, don't say this thing usually because I'm going to make that same observation three slides later, and then I just stand there and it lands with a thud if I do it twice in a 32nd window.

But in this case, it's like, don't do this, or you've just broken NDA. Don't do that. So it was. Great. Let's make very clear that I know where the lines are here between one service offering and another. 'cause a lot of these things touch each other in very similar ways.

Matt Berk: Yeah, yeah. And you don't even, I think what was funny for folks that do, look at the recording, you'll see we're on this.

Stage and we did not know what that was going to look like beforehand, the three of us. 'cause there's, you're normally going to be in some sort of ballroom or some sort of partitioned room. And we go out there, we're like, oh, okay, where do we stand? How do, like, can we see the notes from here? Yeah.

Bowen Wang: If you don't speak, do you step back or do you stay at the same place?

Yes.

Corey Quinn: One thing that was, that was new for me on this talk was about an hour before we gave it my, my watch buzzed, and there was a notification from my weather app that there was a tsunami warning in San Francisco and where I live and we're standing in Las Vegas. At the time, it was, Hmm. It, it was quickly canceled, fortunately, but I, I ha part, it went through my mind as a dark thought that Okay, if.

If it hadn't been and I wasn't able to get in touch with my family, like how would that have gone on? Like, I'm on stage or hi, uh, my family is missing. But now to make jokes about cloud money, uh, it seems like that would not have gone super well. I have to imagine there are contingency plans on the backend for, for tragedies like that happening, but I'm super glad if we didn't get to find out.

It,

Matt Berk: it happened to us. It, this happened to us actually. So the first time that Bowen and I did a talk at Reinvent, we had two different people that were gonna come on from there. And one of them actually had a family emergency the day before we were supposed to see the night before. Yeah. And so we, we thankfully had a backup.

We were resilient that we had an his boss that was there, give the rest of the talk for us.

Bowen Wang: So yes, things can happen. Yeah, definitely. Families comes first. Yeah.

Corey Quinn: At least that was a day's notice, not 40 minutes beforehand. I, I, I don't know how that would've played out, but I'm super glad we didn't get to find out.

Me too.

Matt Berk: I I, one of us would ha had to have read your presenter notes and it would not have gone well for either of us

Bowen Wang: or all the promises or your fans in the audience seats. That too. That too. I feel that's a big Oma promise under deliver

Corey Quinn: other people's material fits about as well as other people's shoes.

And my presenter notes are not the most helpful thing in the world. Like make the rabbit joke. Like, great, what, what are you supposed to do with that as you're giving someone else's talk and that's what you would encounter. You're probably not gonna mention rabbits.

Matt Berk: Yeah. That was the funny thing about rehearsing too.

'cause we're all like using the same PowerPoint slide and then I would look at your slides and be like, what is, what is he going to say at this point? So it was a lot of trust falling that we did. Yeah.

Corey Quinn: And that was the best part because people ask me, what are you going to say here? It's like, I don't know.

We're gonna find out together as the words come out of my mouth on stage.

Matt Berk: And I do wanna tell all the listeners that, that this is not, we're not recommending that you do this when you present with your AWS counterparts.

Corey Quinn: Yeah. I ought be very clear. I knew where the high points were. I know the direction of the conversation had to go and what.

Material I had to cover. But the ad, the ad-libbing, the jokes, the, the way I talk about it in reference to what was just said or the inflection that went through that stuff, I always change dynamically as I give a talk. In fact, during the pandemic, I gave a number of video talks that were very wooden, specifically because on the teleprompter I would wind up writing out my entire script.

I need to have it condensed into bullet points so I stay engaged. That's that. That gave a much better talk when I started doing that.

Bowen Wang: Yeah, for us is once we have a good storyline, like we understand how we kind of engage with customers. 'cause personally we have very high bar of how a breakout session looks like.

Like you can't just have like product feature number one, product feature number two. Um, so I think for that talk we designed kind of the funnel view. Of how we believe. When you do cost analysis, you, you start from the top of the funnel, which is cloud service provider, and then go to organizations and business unit and resources level.

And that's how we plug in each of the product announcements. And when you do cost planning, you probably will do bottom up just to make sure it involve all the stakeholders. And I just, I just realized that for the top of the funnel, you announced the, the focus. Um, data exports for focus. Yes, that's definitely another thing.

We're working kind of very closely with, uh, finops Foundations and to make sure we target our customers who understands deeply of how a finops use case looks like. Um, so again, that I feel like if, if, if you have a good storyline and customer understand, you kind of talk to them, um, with the context of their workflow, um, that's a better experience for breakout session at least.

Um, when we design a talk.

Corey Quinn: This episode is sponsored by my own company, the Duck Bill Group, having trouble with your AWS bill. Perhaps it's time to renegotiate a contract with them. Maybe you're just wondering how to predict what's going on in the wide world of AWS. Well, that's where the Duck Bill group comes in to help.

Remember, you can't duck the duck bill. Bill, which I am reliably informed by my business partner is absolutely not our motto. You two have given talks together a number of times. In fact, I think you have one coming up. Uh, it's late April, as we're having this conversation at the beginning of June. Is finops X in San Diego?

All of us are going to be there. I'm not speaking at this one just because I, uh, I'm viewed as a vendor and the, that tends to be a bit more of a, uh, of a bit of a needle. Eye that you have to thread. So I'm just gonna sit there and clap in the front row. But, so yeah, I'll just be on blue sky. Live skiing.

Anything you have to say. No pressure. But I, I imagine you're, uh, how far along are you on building that talk out? Given that we're about six weeks out,

Bowen Wang: um, we actually just about to finalize the agenda for different talks, and some of the talks will include customer speakers or, um, product announcements or workshops.

I. Um, so starting probably next week or two, um, every speaker will start to put together the actual content. Um, and because we're platinum sponsored, uh, we actually can use our template so there's no actual Okay. Transport our content to a different, um, slide. And with Platinum sponsor, we also have a dedicated room called a Ws stage.

So within AWS stage, we literally can just. Design content throughout the day.

Matt Berk: I'll be running a workshop, probably on the first day we're gonna do something called an AWS Game Day. For those of you that haven't participated in one of those before, it's a gamified workshop. We have a, a sort of leaderboard, and so the one that we have on offer that we'll be doing at x.

But if you ask, if you've got an account team, you wanna ask them to run this, you're super interested in cost optimization. We have something called Frugality Fest. So you can optimize in real time, compete against other teams to see who can find the most savings and prove their ROI within a two to four hour workshop

Corey Quinn: challenge accepted.

Matt Berk: Yeah. So we'll see you there.

Bowen Wang: Yeah, so day two will be, uh, focused on product announcements. So again, you probably will be pre briefed again, Corey already with a few services. But we have a few product enhancements to be announced again at the day, two keynote slash breakout sessions.

Corey Quinn: And I'm awaiting that with bated breath.

Uh, I. I'm excited to see what you folks come out with when all said and done. I, I just get to sit in the cheap seats and clap. Uh, it's exciting. You don't have to use the official template for this stuff. Uh, I, I gave a talk at a leadership track talk. I gave a part of one on the first reinforce when it came out, and they did that same thing where you have to use the slide template and I used my own for part of it and I got it approved because as I said.

Look, you want it to be exquisitely explicitly clear that I do not work for AWS in any way, shape or form. And then they reviewed my slides like, yeah, you're right. We definitely want to make sure no one is confused on that point. Holy god. So yeah, big silly platypus right up on the screen and that worked out.

But. Often when, especially when you're giving talks, the way that we gave that talk at reinvent where it isn't, and now it's my section and now it's your section and then we're closing out. It's interleave throughout the entire thing. You have to go with the flow. Yeah. And

Matt Berk: I often say to like, customers that are attending for the first time to, uh, even though the, the.

Breakouts or the bright and shiny object. Oftentimes if you go to like something like our chalk talks or your workshops, you're gonna get a bit more out of the in-person experience where all the breakouts are recorded. So you'll get pretty much the same experience watching the the talk that Cory Bowen and I did on YouTube as you would be in the room, versus doing something that's more hands-on or being able to ask that question that's really burning when you're at these other sessions.

So that's what we try to like. When we program for the event, like how do we have a good spread of the topics that folks wanna cover in the places that they do wanna cover them in?

Corey Quinn: Yeah. That's, that's always the hard part is trying to understand who the audience is. I, I got it hilariously wrong. At an AWS Community Day, a few years back, I'd forgotten that I'd been giving a whole lot of.

Talks at places like reinvent and whatnot. But a community day is where you have folks who are brand new to the industry are showing up, and it was a security theme. So yeah, I can sit here and make fun of CloudTrail great. But for that audience, I needed to explain first what CloudTrail was, and I didn't do that.

So I. I would make the joke that I thought was hilarious, and they just sort of stared at me in a, in a very understandable question of what is wrong with that man? And honestly, lots of people would like to know, but I was, I was certainly, uh, challenged by that. So you have to know who your audience is and we can meet them where they are.

Just like customers.

Bowen Wang: Yeah. It took us a few trials and errors to understand, um, how to write a good abstract, how to decide the right technical levels. So you set up the right expectation for your audience, right? It's a 200 slash 300, 400 level. Do you, um, promise a hands-on experience like demonstration or it's introductory level con, um, session and what.

Terminologies or maybe how can you set up the stage for your talk? It's just the right amount of mix.

Matt Berk: Yeah. Honestly, I talked a little bit about CSAT right at the top, but like that is the, the really powerful tool that we use when we go and, and think about reinvent next year. So if you're the person that's in the seat.

This December and you were like, eh, I don't wanna really wanna fill out the survey. That is what this is how we improve and what we do. And so there's funny trends that we find over time when we look at the data year over year and how to improve. One of them is that if we do something that's a 300 level or even 400 level expert talk.

Generally, those actually get better CSAT scores than running it as a 200. Now, when we did our talk, we thought, okay, could we make this 300? But we couldn't.

Corey Quinn: We originally started as a 400 level talk, and as we talked about this, it's like, I don't know that there is a great 400 level talk. In this direction just because by the time you get to that level, you are so into the weeds of a specific configuration and environment that it'll be super handy if everyone works at the same company or alternately the seven people on the planet with this specific problem in this specific point in time.

But everyone else is gonna wonder why they wasted their time.

Matt Berk: Yeah, it's the breadth versus depth. Yeah.

Corey Quinn: Honestly, the support group with the 400 level talk about costing and cloud generally is meets at the bar. That's, that's my experience. Like, oh God, what have I seen this week? But it was an awful lot of fun.

Now, what advice do you folks have for folks who want to have their opportunity to give a talk with an AWS service team? How should they go about doing it? 'cause I'm honestly not entirely sure how I wound up in that place, but, uh, results not typical. Consult your, uh, span your account manager for details.

How does that work?

Matt Berk: You, you give one at first, then I'll give

Bowen Wang: one. Yeah. Yeah. I, I think from the product team perspective, um, a lot of times when we collect feedback from our power users, we also know for specific customers or organizations, they're extremely good. For example, in cost planning or reporting or governance.

So if you are known to the product teams about a specific. Place you are an expert of. And when they design those talk, they probably have a few shortlisted customers and they can reach out to those customers to even invite them to, to speak with them. So I think just be very proactive if you, if there's something you wanna do.

With the product leaders and just be very generous of your time providing feedback and even maybe creating any customer success stories over the years so they understand, okay, that person is extremely good at this. We understand they can contribute a lot to the session because you can't just have over high level, um, content.

You need be able to dive deeper into, uh, specifics.

Matt Berk: Uh, that's funny. I thought, I thought we would have different answers. I kind of have the same answers, but, but I'll, I'll, I'll. Phrase it slightly differently as someone that that directly interacts with, with the customer in the field all the time, which is that like a lot of times as a customer you see something with a service and you say, okay, this is a feature request, and we log that as a feature request, it goes into the pile.

Corey Quinn: Yes. PFR is the term I've heard bandi about, which seems like an internal term of arb. I'm not entirely sure what it stands for, but yeah,

Matt Berk: there's no, no, no secret sauce on that front, but, but then it goes in the pile of pfr, right? And what is better is RPMs are really customer obsessed, right? That's, that's the phrase that gets thrown about, but it is true.

So if you have, I have this use case that you are not serving, then you wind up in a meeting with them. You have your account team broker that meeting, and then it becomes, hey, a couple months later, I wrote a doc based on your feedback and other customer's feedback to build the thing that you want. Can, can you help, can you help provide a quote for that or can you help like make sure that we're going in the right direction now.

Mm-hmm. And then over time, that partnership evolves to the point where then you're potentially beta testing a feature. You're on a, a private preview for a feature, and then that allows it to kind of go to, to the space of Yes, we want you to be the customer to talk about it. On the flip side, then there's always the success stories where a product's been out for a while and you found a new way to use it, or you, you.

Had some great success and your account team is probably going to be partnering with you to, to bubble that up. But I think that that folks don't realize there's this other avenue, this longer term partnership that I think most, if not all of our PMs are always searching for.

Corey Quinn: I have first person experience in first party experience in this, where I had learned pretty early on that I have to be much.

Clearer when I'm making a joke. I think it was around using, uh, route 53 as a database. At one point I made that reference, like, this is terrible. I could barely query it across table at all. And someone from the product team reached out with, I'm interested in your use case. Could you tell me more? It's, which is a terrific question if you don't understand something, but I had to clarify.

No, no, I, I'm just trying to be intentionally ridiculous. For God's sake, please don't. Actually do this. This leads to madness. You have a bunch of other services, way better suited for actual database use. That was the painful piece.

Matt Berk: Yeah. I have a bunch of pfr that you logged Cory about paying your AWS bill and pennies and I didn't really understand whether that was a joke or that you actually won

Corey Quinn: Wheelbarrow full of nickels was my line and.

Felt, I actually used that in the talk where you can start breaking down bills into individual invoices to start charging different orgs and have them responsible for it, which is great because you know that the data engineers pay for their, pay their own way and stop having people yell at me about it.

Matt Berk: Yeah. Sometimes you need that official PDF to know that you have to pay something.

Corey Quinn: You know, you'd be surprised the power of a logo and enough fine print that says scary words.

Bowen Wang: Yeah, you just mentioned the doc. I have so many docs circling around right now for any product ideas. Our product managers for so many docs.

Matt Berk: Yeah, I mean, maybe folks, it is funny like having been here, Bo and I have been here for a while. You've been way here longer than me, years, years. But I, I'm almost at six years. And so we throw it on like docs, but like for folks that don't know or on the outside of Amazon, like everything is a, is a document driven culture.

Mm-hmm. And so whenever I have an idea, it's, oh, did you write a doc? But whenever the product team is writing idea, it's, it's a working backwards document that. Presupposes, what is the pro press release for the thing that you're building look like? And we do that. We do this. Like if you have, you know, our account team, again, like the, we do work, we do these sessions with customers too, to, to teach them on the culture, on, on how to do what we call a working backwards.

Yeah. And it's, it's really powerful. Like it, it's, I know we're saying this while we're talking about doing a reinvent talk where there's a PowerPoint, but it's very easy to build the PowerPoint. To kind of get a point across, it's much harder to write it down and then have to sift through everyone's comments and hundreds of, of comments of feedback to then actually get to the, the crystal or the idea that you're, you're trying to build.

And it, it's, it's a really powerful tool.

Bowen Wang: And also the fun part is after you build the pure FAQ. You can also put the product owner hat on. You can also write a pricing document to understand all underlying infrastructure costs to decide a pricing point. Well, in this case, most of the CFM services are free of charge.

Then you need to make sure there's enough, you know, adoption to cover the cost. And then you can also play the naming games. What kind of name you wanna put. Don't get. Corey

Matt Berk: started on naming,

Bowen Wang: so it's like PFAQ pricing. Naming documents are something a product manager have to complete before we even start this whole engineering process.

Corey Quinn: I heard read years ago that I think some executives said that, oh, we sometimes even get PF FAQs from customers. At which point my response was. That's genius. So I wrote one and inflicted it on a few people a day, Ws, and four years later it became a product. You can probably guess which one it was, and I'll tell you if you're right in my memoirs,

Matt Berk: I don't even know what it could be.

Corey Quinn: What was amazing was I was read in on it before it launched, and I mentioned that story to the general manager, the person who's owning that product, and their response was the polite corporate version of, yeah, bullshit. Ding, it's in your inbox. Let me know how close I got to the final product. It was a wild conversation.

Bowen Wang: I'm curious to know what category, like identity storage computes.

Corey Quinn: Hey, if I get officially those permission to tell the story, I certainly will, but I, it's, it's, it's true when customers articulate painful parts of the story, it gets addressed if the customer's right.

Bowen Wang: Yeah. We definitely include customer influence. During our operational planning process, that's another document everybody participate, we call OP one OP two Process.

You are definitely need to justify why do you even ask for resources to build this feature because all the PFR and customer influences behind this and we believe this will make meaningful impact. To customers experience.

Corey Quinn: It's a target rich environment too. 'cause when every, and you can say yes to a bunch of stuff and get nowhere, how do you decide what to say no to so you can focus on the good parts.

And it feels like AWS is honing its focus a fair bit lately. In good ways. In good ways. I, I want to be clear, like there have been some deprecation of services that were basically unloved and unused and it's. It's long past time for that to happen. I, I don't disagree with any of the deprecations that have come across my desk with the single exception of I, I will miss Chime when it's gone.

I think I'm the only person who will, well,

Matt Berk: uh, I, yeah, I think you, you are the only person that will, I, I'm, for anyone that's, that's going to do an interview with Amazon, we are still using Chime right now, but one day it'll be something different. But I feel bad for everyone that has to, to sign in and, and all my customers that try to do it.

Bowen Wang: Yeah. Because I think. Corey is still one of the only few people use Chime to Chime us. Oh, yeah.

Matt Berk: Corey messaged us on our on Chime, and it feels like now it's like, I'm about to say our internal messaging platform. It's a public, it was a public product. It's still public.

Corey Quinn: I, I never misrepresented myself to be clear, but people have open security tickets on that because, oh God, he broke into the internal system.

It's like, no, no, no Chime does that. Just, no one uses it. Like, mm.

Matt Berk: There's, there's little, um. Uh, like, like something, there's like a what brackets that come up with your external Oh, just like anything. So it was fair. I'm why, yeah.

Corey Quinn: Not that I ever misrepresented myself, but it scared the heck out of people.

Uh, that that was a, yeah, that was a fun era. We'll see what happens going forward. Uh, if people wanna learn more about what you folks are up to and. Ideally think it wrote into you at finops X, but in the event they can't, where's the best place for them to stay current.

Bowen Wang: I will make a plug for AWS Cloud Financial Management Block Channel.

'cause we do post all of this upcoming events, activities, news, announcements. I. Best practices solutions there. Um, if you are interested either in our teams or the solutions we're building, that's definitely place you should go check out regularly.

Matt Berk: Yeah. And then my shameless book is I helped do a Twitch show on the AWS Twitch Channel.

On Mondays at 5:00 PM Eastern, 2:00 PM uh, Pacific every week, uh, we, it's called AWS Tech Tales, and we try to highlight real life customer problems, what you can do to solve them. We try to troubleshoot in real time and help folks in the chat, like it's not necessarily finops or CFM because we have the great keys to a s opt optimization show.

But, um, yeah, I'm, I'm on that every week, so that's like the best way to get. The name. Oh, it's AWS Tech Tales Tails. That's, that's Tech Tails.

Corey Quinn: I didn't realize that existed. I should really spend more time watching videos instead of working.

Matt Berk: I know, that's the thing. I have to plug it 'cause there's just so, there's so much content that comes on live on our Twitch channel and, uh, but we have a, a, a pretty cute following of, of folks that tune in every week.

So that's, that's, if you wanna reach out to me, you can always find me. Uh, you always chat in on the show and I will respond. Yep. And both on LinkedIn.

Corey Quinn: And we'll put links to all of this and our talk, of course, into the show notes. Thank you both so much for taking the time to speak with me as well as including me in giving that talk last year.

That was phenomenal.

Matt Berk: Yep. Thank you,

Corey Quinn: Corey. It's fun. Thank you, Corey. It was,

Matt Berk: uh, it was a great collaboration and I really enjoyed it.

Corey Quinn: Absolutely. More to come on this Bowen Wong Principle product marketing manager for AWS's Cloud Financial Management Unit. Matt Burke is a principal technical account manager.

Also at AWS, and I'm cloud economist, Cory Quinn. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five star review on your podcast platform of choice. Whereas if you hated this podcast, please leave a five star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry, insulting comment that basically says, whatever the presenter notes tell you, you should say, maybe the rabbit joke.