Nobody will act on my recommendations, even though they identify 10s/100s of thousands of savings per month. How do I motivate engineers to take action?
You could incorporate optimisation metrics into KPIs that are part of performance reviews. That should ‘motivate’ teams to take action in your recommendations. Or you could launch gamification initiatives that challenge engineers to achieve specific optimisation goals.
I agree that adding some form of cost-efficiency metrics as part of an application quality criteria would help. Engineers would dig deep in the understanding of cost.
The work for the FinOps practitioner, in collaboration with the product team and the business, is to identify what good looks like and give the capability for engineers to measure in a way that is immediate and part of implementation; CI/CD is already too late in my opinion.