Screaming in the Cloud - Presenting at re:Invent with Matt Berk and Bowen Wang

Episode Date: June 12, 2025

How do you wrangle the chaos of AWS cost tools and live presentations? In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn is joined by AWS’s Bowen Wang and Matt Berk to break down their re:Invent talk and everything that almost went off the rails. From surprise tsunami alerts to last-minute feature changes, they explore the anxiety and art behind presenting at scale. They also look at how power user feedback shapes tools like the AWS Pricing Calculator, why storytelling matters more than specs, and what it’s like co-presenting with notes that say “make the rabbit joke.” They also discuss AWS’s internal planning process, how customers can get involved in talks, and where to catch them next.Show Highlights(0:00) Intro(1:38) The Duckbill Group sponsor read(2:35) The importance of collecting feedback before launching a product (4:52) The difference between the intended use of a product and how it’s actually used(8:52) How Bowen and Matt were able to be so prepared for their presentation(13:01) What many people don’t realize goes into practicing for a presentation(17:14) How having a storyline helped Bowen and Matt facilitate better breakout sessions(18:26) The Duckbill Group sponsor read(21:02) The importance of being able to go with the flow during presentations(22:42) Why knowing your audience is essential for having a good presentation(24:32) Choosing between breadth and depth when giving presentations(25:05) Bowen and Matt’s advice for people who want to have their opportunity to give a talk with an AWS service team(34:22) How to keep up with Matt and BowenAbout Matt BerkMatt Berk is an AWS Principal Technical Account Manager at based in Brooklyn who's passionate about storytelling, cloud technologies, and FinOps. When he's not solving customer issues, Matt can be either be found in nature with his dog Ollie, at popular NYC restaurants, or at home planning his next trip to a theme park.About Bowen WangBowen Wang is a Principal Product Marketing Manager for AWS Billing and Cost Management Services, where she focuses on enabling finance and business leaders to better understand the value of the cloud and ways to optimize their cloud financial management. In her previous career, she helped a tech start-up enter the Chinese market. When she's not helping customers optimize their cloud costs, you can find her cheering for F1 races with her husband or juggling life as a mom to an energetic toddler and a playful poodle.LinksAWS Cloud Financial Management Blog Channel: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cloud-financial-management/AWS Twitch Channel: https://www.twitch.tv/awsAWS Tech Tales: https://community.aws/livestreams/aws-tech-talesThe authenticated AWS Pricing Calculator is now generally available: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cloud-financial-management/the-authenticated-aws-pricing-calculator-is-now-generally-available/

I often say to customers that are attending for the first time, even though the breakouts are the bright and shiny object, oftentimes if you go to something like our chalk talks or your workshops, you're going to 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 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 want to cover in the places that they do want to cover them in? 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 AWS CFM, 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 218, best practices and new tools for cost reporting and estimation,

which again is too many words, but there we have it. Matt, Fowen, great to see you again. Great to see you too, Corey. Yeah, thank you for having us. 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 DuckbillGroup.com. Remember, you can't duck the duck bill bill. And my CEO informs me that is absolutely not our slogan. Thank you for letting me participate in basically my good faith attempt not to ruin re-invent for everyone last year. And I think we succeeded. No one threw me out of the building afterwards.

So there was that. And we had excellent CSATs, which we'll talk about as one of the main reasons why we do these things. A very data-driven company. So we definitely look at customer feedback via the CSAT score. One of the reasons that we're having this conversation is after I did that, people were surprised

by a few different things. First, wow, they let you into 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're talking about things that haven't been released.

Clearly you know something about this in advance. Who in the world trusts you at AWS? I realize that my reputation sometimes gets ahead of me. I talk to you folks a lot about a lot of different things that the cost folks, the CFM team are working on. And I don't tell the people's secrets, it's not my place. Yeah, so it's definitely one of our approach to collect feedback from like customers or influencers

like yourself before we launch a product. 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 for customers. So yes, for this particular talk, we definitely had multiple we call pre-briefings with your query. So for us, it's definitely unkill two birds with one stone, just because pre-brief those products with you, we collect feedback, and at the same time, we can start to have some ideas for this talk for the breakout session.

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? I'm going to 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 am a customer of these tools. I use them constantly. Yeah, and that's the same thing.

As a technical account manager, a lot of times, we work with these large enterprise customers and the way that we help them is by seeing the same things that they see. So we can help look at their cost explorer and identify areas of opportunity. We can help see if there's budgets being set. And then once it goes through 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. I want to 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.

So I 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 people started using. So I 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. Yeah, I mean, 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 want to talk a little bit about that? Well, yeah, pricing calculator, it's definitely many years in the making for this tool. So we have pricing calculator for public accessibility. So you don't have to be AWS customers, you can use it and just to get a sense of what we might 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 a new regions, etc. Or if you want to make any changes to your purchase options, for example, you understand your predictable usage, I'm gonna add additional dollar here and there for my savings plans, and you get a bill estimate.

I was using this at a client conversation I was having three weeks ago, and it got to the last step, and it just sat there and spun, 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 basically a walking disaster. No, no, no, I remember that day.

I was getting my son ready for daycare. And then I saw a message from Corey. It was, that seems to be urgent. I look at it, it's like that doesn't seem to be a 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 is like 6 a.m. or something. 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 told everyone it worked well at re-invent 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 was a useful tool and I liked it because what I was modeling out at that point was, okay, 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'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. What is interesting about re-invent that a lot of people don't know, and I'm assuming a lot of your listeners probably either go or they look at at least the YouTube content from re-invent, is that we start planning it super early. I didn't realize until I started to help run the track that we are already, when reinforce is happening, which happens in 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 high above to start to build the track out. And so folks will reach out around August, September, either both internally and then customers and we're like, we already have it locked and loaded at this point. Because the presentation is due September slash October.

Yeah, yeah. Can we get your final slides two months in advance? And when I'm working with you folks, like 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, because you work with these people and oh no,

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. Yeah, we did a few rehearsals even, right? Yeah, we did a few in-person rehearsals. And I still remember, we did this on a Thursday, and I think it was that week, right on a Monday,

where we were talking about something that was going to be released 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, OK, I'm talking about with new tools like we have to change the title to be new tool and best practice all singular as these things start getting pared down. And it was we had to go through with atooth comb to make sure we weren't mentioning anything 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. Yeah, we were supposed to be having a perfect score, 10 out of 10. But in reality, we launched nine service slash features at last reinvent and we held back customer billing view. It was because during the final QA process, 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, we call scope down view. You can use cost allocation tags or account IDs.

You can create that view 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 billing view. 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 pushed 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 engineering time. So we decided not to launch it at Ruinment, but before Christmas.

That is amazing because I still remember the bad old 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 arm for the SNS topic that you've set up elsewhere that will then drop into your inbox. This weird JSON object. This was to be clear, 15 years ago or so. It doesn't do that anymore, I think, because someone tried to use it once and realize how terrible the experience was. But even now bouncing to another service like that, trying to smooth off that rough edge, it was the right

call. 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 pay your account. I don't want folks to have that cross view, but I do want a group of accounts 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 we peppered it through the talk. And then it's like, no, 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 that it's always a moving target. We're always, things are coming in and sliding out and we're literally editing things that week

to make sure that we're saying what was the right thing or that the verbiage is right on point with what Bowen has, because that's the funny thing too, is that we don't wanna over-promise something. If it can toast bread and it can slice eggs, I should say both, but if it can't, then I should only say it toast bread. 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, because okay because 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 30-second 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 because a lot of these things touch each other in very similar ways. 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, because you're normally going to be in some sort of ballroom or some sort of partitioned room. And we go out there like, oh, okay, where do we stand? Like, can we see the notes from here? Yeah, if you don't speak, do you step back

or do you stay at the same place? Yes. One thing that was new for me on this talk was about an hour before we gave it, 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 and it was quickly cancelled fortunately but I 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 where hi uh my family, like how would that have gone on? Like I'm on stage where, hi, my family is missing. But now to make jokes about cloud money, it seems like that would not have gone super well. I have to imagine there are contingency plans on the back end for tragedies like that happening, but I'm super glad we didn't get to find out. It happened to us. This happened to us actually.

So the first time that Boa and I did a talk at re.invent, 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 speak. The night before. Yeah. And so we thankfully had a backup.

We were resilient. But we had his boss that was there give the rest of the talk for us. So yes, things can happen. Yeah, definitely families comes first. Yeah. At least that was a day's notice, not 40 minutes beforehand. I don't know how that would have played out, but I'm super glad we didn't get to find out. Me too. I, I, one of us would have had to have read your presenter notes and it would not have

gone well for either of us. Or the promises or your fans in audience seats. That too, that too. That's a big promise under deliver. 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 are you supposed to do with that?

If you're giving someone else's talk and that's what you encounter, you're probably not going to mention and that's what you would count? You're probably not going to mention rabbits. Yeah. That was the funny thing about rehearsing too because we're all using the same PowerPoint slide and then I would look at your slides and be like, what is he going to say at this point? So there was a lot of trust falling that we did.

Well, 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 going to find out together as the words come out of my mouth on stage. And I do want to tell the listeners that this is not, we're not recommending that you do this when you present with your AWS counterparts. Yeah. I want to 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 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, I gave a much better talk when I started doing that. Yeah, for us is once we have a good storyline, like we understand how we kind of engage with customers. Because personally we have very high bar of how a breakout session looks like.

You can't just have like product feature number one, product feature number two. So I think for that talk we we designed kind of the funnel view of how we believe when you do cost analysis, 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 involves all the stakeholders. And I just realized that for the top of the funnel, you announced the data exports for Focus. That's another thing we're working very closely with Phenops Foundations and to make sure we target our customers who understand deeply of how a Phenops use case looks like. So again, I feel like if you have a good storyline

and customers understand, you kind of talk to them with the context of their workflow. That's a better experience for breakout session, at least when we design a talk. This episode is sponsored by my own company, the Duckbill 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. It's late April as we're having this conversation. The beginning of June is FinOpsX in San Diego. All of us are going to be there. I'm not speaking at this one just because I'm viewed as a vendor and that tends to be a bit more of a of a bit of a needle eye that you have to thread. So I'm viewed as a vendor and that tends to be a bit more of a, of a bit of a needle eye that you have to thread.

So I'm just going to sit there and clap in the front row. But so yeah, I'll just be on blue sky live skeeting, anything you have to say, no pressure. But I imagine you're a, how far along are you on building that talk out given that we're about six weeks out? We actually just about to finalize the agenda for different talks and some of the talks will include customer speakers,

or product announcements, or workshops. So starting probably next week or two, every speaker will start to put together the actual content. And because we're a platinum sponsor, we actually can use our templates. So there's no pressure to transport our content to a different slide. And with Platinum sponsor, we also have a dedicated room called AWS Stage. So within AWS Stage, we literally can just design content throughout the day.

I'll be running a workshop probably on the first day. We're going to 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 sort of leader board. And so the one that we have on offer that we'll be doing at X. But 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, improve against other teams to see who can find the most savings, improve their ROI within a two to four hour workshop.

Challenge accepted. Yeah, so we'll see you there. Yeah, so day two will be focused on product announcements. So again, you probably will be pre-briefed again, Corey already with a few services, but we have a few products enhancements to be announced again at the day two keynote slash breakout sessions. And I'm awaiting that with bated breath. I'm excited to see what you

folks come out with when all is said and done. I just get to sit in the cheap seats and clap. It's exciting you don't have to use the official template for this stuff. I gave 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 wanna 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, 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 interleaved throughout the entire thing.

You have to go with the flow. Yeah. And I often say to customers that are attending for the first time, even though the breakouts are the bright and shiny object, oftentimes if you go to 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 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 want to cover in the topics that folks wanna cover in the places that they do wanna cover them in? Yeah, that's always the hard part,

is trying to understand who the audience is. I got 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 would make the joke that I thought was hilarious and they just sort of stared at me in a very understandable question of what is wrong with that man? And honestly lots of people would like to know but I was certainly challenged by that so you have to know who your audience is and we have to meet them where they are just like customers. Yeah it took us a few trials and errors to understand how to write a good abstract, how to decide the right technical levels. So you set up the right expectation for your audience. It's a 200-300-400 level. Do you promise a hands-on experience,

live demonstration, or it's introductory level session? In what terminologies or maybe how can you set up the stage for your talk? It's just the right amount of mix. Yeah. I say I talked a little bit about CSATs right at the top, but that is the really powerful tool that we use when we go and think about re-invent next year. So if you're the person that's in the seat this December, and you were like, I don't really want to fill out the survey, 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. 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 going to wonder why they wasted their time. Yeah, it's the breadth versus depth. Yeah. Honestly, the support group with a 400 level talk about costing and cloud generally meets at the bar. That's my experience. Oh God, what have I seen this week?

But it was an awful lot of fun. 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? Because I'm honestly not entirely sure how I wound up in that place, but results not typical. Consult your spec or account manager for details.

How does that work? You give one first and I'll give five. Yeah, yeah, I think from the product team perspective, 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 talks, they probably have a few shortlisted customers, and they can reach out to those customers to even invite them to speak with them. So I think just be very proactive 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 content, you're going to be able to dive deeper into specifics. I thought you would have different answers. I kind of have the same answers, but I'll phrase it slightly differently as someone that directly interacts with the customer in the field all the time, which is that 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.

Yes. PFR is the term I've heard bandied about, which seems like an internal term of art. I'm not entirely sure what it stands for, but yeah. There's no secret sauce on that front. But then it goes in the pile of PFRs, right? And what is better is RPMs are really customer-obsessed, right? That's the phrase that gets thrown about. But it is true.

So if you have, I have this use case that you're 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 customers feedback to build the thing that you want. Can you help provide a quote for that? Or can you help make sure that we're going in the right direction now? And then over time, that partnership evolves to the point where then you're potentially beta testing a feature, you're on a private preview for a feature, and then that allows it to kind of go 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 had some great success and your account team is probably going to be partnering with you to bubble that up. But I think 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. I have first-person experience, 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 Route 53 as a database at one point. I made that reference like, this is terrible. I can barely query it across table at all. And someone from the product team reached out with, I'm interested in your use case, can you tell me more? Which is a terrific question if you don't understand something, but I had to clarify, no, no,

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. Yeah, I have a bunch of PFRs that you logged, Corey, about paying your AWS bill in pennies.

And I didn't really understand whether that was a joke or you actually won. Wheelbarrow full of nickels was my line. And I 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. Yeah, sometimes you need that official PDF to know that you have to pay something.

You know, you'd be surprised the power of a logo and enough fine print that says scary words. Yeah, you just mentioned a doc. I have so many docs circling around right now for any product ideas or product managers for so many docs. Yeah, I mean, maybe folks, it's funny, like having been here, Bo and I have been here for a while. You've been way longer than me, you're over 10 years.

But I'm almost at six years. And so we throw around like docs, but like for folks that don't know or are on the outside of Amazon, like everything is a document driven culture. And so whenever I have an idea, it's, oh, did you write a doc? But whenever the product team is writing an idea, it's a working backwards document that presupposes, what does the press release for the thing that you're building look like?

And we do this, like if you have our account team again, like we do these sessions with customers, too, to teach them on the culture and on how to do what we call working backwards. And it's really powerful. I know we're saying this while we're talking about doing a re-invent 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 comments of feedback to then actually get to the crystal or the idea that you're trying to build. And it's a really powerful tool.

And also the fun part is after you build the PR FAQ, you can also put the product owner hat on. You can also write a pricing document to understand all the 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 adoption to cover the cost. And then you can also play the naming games. What kind of name you want to put?

Don't get Corey started on naming. So it's like PRFAQ pricing naming documents are something a product manager has to complete before we even start this whole engineering process. I heard, read years ago, that, I think some executives said that, oh, we sometimes even get PRFAQs from customers, at which point my response was, that's genius.

So I wrote one and inflicted it on a few people at AWS, 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. I don't even know what it could be. What was amazing was I was read in on it before it launched and I mentioned that story to the general manager. The person was 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. I'm curious to know what category,

like identity, storage, compute, artificial intelligence. Yeah. Yeah. If I get official AWS permission to tell the story, I certainly will. But it's true. When customers articulate painful parts of the story, it gets addressed if the

customer is right. Yeah, we do definitely include customer influence during our operational planning process. That's another document. Everybody participates. We call it OP1, OP2 process. You definitely need to justify why do you even ask for resources to build this feature because all the PFRs and customer influences behind this and we believe this will make meaningful impact to customers experience.

It's a target rich environment too, because when everything 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. Okay. In good ways, in good ways.

I want to be clear, like there have been some deprecations of services that were basically unloved and unused and it's long past time for that to happen. I don't disagree with any of the deprecations that have come across my desk with the single exception of I will miss Chime when it's gone. I think I'm the only person who will. Yeah, I think you are the only person that will. For anyone 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 sign in and all my customers that try to do it. Yeah, because I think Cory is still one of the only few people who use Chime to chime us. Oh, yeah. Cory messaged us on Chime, and it feels like now it's like, I'm about to say our internal messaging platform. It was a public product, it's still public.

I never misrepresented myself to be clear, but people have opened 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, mmm. There's like, no, no, no, chime does that. Just no one uses it. Like, mmm. There's a, there's a little, um, uh, like, like something, there's like a, uh, what brackets that come up with your external, just like anything. So it was fair. I'm why. Yeah. Not that I ever misrepresented myself, but it scared the heck out of people. Oh, that of people. That was a fun era.

We'll see what happens going forward. If people want to learn more about what you folks are up to, and I do think it wrote into you at FinOpsX, but in the event they can't, where's the best place for them to stay current? I will make a plug for AWS Cloud Financial Management blog channel, because we do post all of this upcoming events, activities, news announcements, best practices solutions there.

If you're interested either in our teams or the solutions we're building, that's definitely a place you should go check out regularly. Yeah, and then my shameless plug is I helped do a Twitch show on the AWS Twitch channel on Mondays at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific. Every week, 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 AWS optimization show. But yeah, I'm on that every week. That's like the best way to get. What's the name? Oh, it's AWS tech tales. Tech tales. That's tech tales. I didn't realize that existed.

I should really spend more time watching videos instead of working. I know. That's the thing. I have to plug it because there's so much content that comes on live on our Twitch channel. But we have a pretty cute following of folks that tune in every week. So that's that's if you want to reach out to me, you can always find me. You always chat in on the show and I will respond. Yeah, and both on LinkedIn.

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. Yeah. Thank you, Corey. 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. Yep. Thank you, Corey. Thank you, Corey. It was a great collaboration.

I really enjoyed it. Absolutely. More to come on this. Bowen Wong, Principal 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 Corey Quinn.

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