annie gordon

Apptio Total Cost

Apptio Total Cost is a net-new product designed to give organizations real-time visibility into their cloud and infrastructure spend. Built from the ground up, it empowers finance, engineering, and leadership teams to allocate costs with precision, align spending to business value, and drive FinOps maturity at scale. By automating complex reporting and enabling interactive dashboards, Total Cost replaces manual processes with strategic insight—helping customers reduce waste, increase accountability, and forecast more effectively.

Company

Apptio An IBM Company

Industry

Cloud Services

Role

Senior Product Design Lead

Duration

Workshops, Stakeholder Interviews, Wireframes, Testing

Who We Designed For

We built Total Cost to serve cross-functional teams managing infrastructure and cloud spend:

Finance Leaders: Needed to allocate cloud spend accurately across BUs, apps, and environments for chargebacks and budgeting.
Engineering Managers: Needed to forecast usage, identify inefficiencies, and optimize infrastructure spend.
Executives & Business Leaders: Needed high-level, business-aligned views to support strategic investment decisions.

Our goal: unify cost data across the organization and make it accessible, actionable, and accountable for every team.

“When I review cloud costs, I want to see where money is going across services and teams, so I can pinpoint inefficiencies and recommend optimizations with confidence.” — FinOps Analyst

We built Total Cost to serve cross-functional teams managing infrastructure and cloud spend:

Finance Leaders: Needed to allocate cloud spend accurately across BUs, apps, and environments for chargebacks and budgeting.
Engineering Managers: Needed to forecast usage, identify inefficiencies, and optimize infrastructure spend.
Executives & Business Leaders: Needed high-level, business-aligned views to support strategic investment decisions.

Our goal: unify cost data across the organization and make it accessible, actionable, and accountable for every team.

“When I review cloud costs, I want to see where money is going across services and teams, so I can pinpoint inefficiencies and recommend optimizations with confidence.” — FinOps Analyst

We built Total Cost to serve cross-functional teams managing infrastructure and cloud spend:

Finance Leaders: Needed to allocate cloud spend accurately across BUs, apps, and environments for chargebacks and budgeting.
Engineering Managers: Needed to forecast usage, identify inefficiencies, and optimize infrastructure spend.
Executives & Business Leaders: Needed high-level, business-aligned views to support strategic investment decisions.

Our goal: unify cost data across the organization and make it accessible, actionable, and accountable for every team.

“When I review cloud costs, I want to see where money is going across services and teams, so I can pinpoint inefficiencies and recommend optimizations with confidence.” — FinOps Analyst

We built Total Cost to serve cross-functional teams managing infrastructure and cloud spend:

Finance Leaders: Needed to allocate cloud spend accurately across BUs, apps, and environments for chargebacks and budgeting.
Engineering Managers: Needed to forecast usage, identify inefficiencies, and optimize infrastructure spend.
Executives & Business Leaders: Needed high-level, business-aligned views to support strategic investment decisions.

Our goal: unify cost data across the organization and make it accessible, actionable, and accountable for every team.

“When I review cloud costs, I want to see where money is going across services and teams, so I can pinpoint inefficiencies and recommend optimizations with confidence.” — FinOps Analyst

Job To Be Done

Enable teams to confidently track, allocate, and act on cloud infrastructure costs by surfacing real-time, role-relevant insights that align spend with business value.

Why this mattered: Without a single source of truth for cloud cost data, organizations were forced to rely on fragmented tools and manual processes, leading to inefficiencies, missed optimization opportunities, and delayed decision-making.

Enable teams to confidently track, allocate, and act on cloud infrastructure costs by surfacing real-time, role-relevant insights that align spend with business value.

The Challenge

Cloud billing is complex and highly variable across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Manual reporting led to errors, lagging insights, and reactive decisions.
Cross-functional users needed tailored dashboards without creating version sprawl.
Visualizations failed to support multi-dimensional filtering and comparative analysis.

Cloud billing is complex and highly variable across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Manual reporting led to errors, lagging insights, and reactive decisions.
Cross-functional users needed tailored dashboards without creating version sprawl.
Visualizations failed to support multi-dimensional filtering and comparative analysis.

Cloud billing is complex and highly variable across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Manual reporting led to errors, lagging insights, and reactive decisions.
Cross-functional users needed tailored dashboards without creating version sprawl.
Visualizations failed to support multi-dimensional filtering and comparative analysis.

Cloud billing is complex and highly variable across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Manual reporting led to errors, lagging insights, and reactive decisions.
Cross-functional users needed tailored dashboards without creating version sprawl.
Visualizations failed to support multi-dimensional filtering and comparative analysis.

The Solution

View Figma Prototype

We built a new product experience from the ground up to deliver:

Automated, granular cost allocation by product, BU, and environment
Customizable, real-time dashboards tailored to user roles
Drill-down interactivity for root-cause analysis and optimization
Visual clarity and accessibility that supported CFO-level summaries and technical deep dives

View Figma Prototype

We built a new product experience from the ground up to deliver:

Automated, granular cost allocation by product, BU, and environment
Customizable, real-time dashboards tailored to user roles
Drill-down interactivity for root-cause analysis and optimization
Visual clarity and accessibility that supported CFO-level summaries and technical deep dives

View Figma Prototype

We built a new product experience from the ground up to deliver:

Automated, granular cost allocation by product, BU, and environment
Customizable, real-time dashboards tailored to user roles
Drill-down interactivity for root-cause analysis and optimization
Visual clarity and accessibility that supported CFO-level summaries and technical deep dives

View Figma Prototype

We built a new product experience from the ground up to deliver:

Automated, granular cost allocation by product, BU, and environment
Customizable, real-time dashboards tailored to user roles
Drill-down interactivity for root-cause analysis and optimization
Visual clarity and accessibility that supported CFO-level summaries and technical deep dives

UX Enhancements

Before vs. After

Before (Market Gaps)	After (Apptio Total Cost)
Disjointed third-party tools	Unified interactive dashboards
Manual reporting in spreadsheets	Forecasting tools with trend analysis
Limited transparency and trust	Accessible filtering and export options

Business Impact

92% of cloud costs allocated by business within the first 3 months, improving visibility and accountability
Increased decision confidence with consistent, real-time reporting
Faster forecasting and planning cycles across engineering and finance
Better cost accountability through role-based dashboards
Alignment with FinOps practices enabling greater visibility and cloud governance

“We’ve reduced hours of manual reconciliation and can now explain variances in minutes.” — Customer feedback from design validation session

My Role

As the Senior Product Design Lead, I collaborated closely with the product owner, engineering, and stakeholders across the organization to define and deliver this net-new product experience.

Co-defined product vision and strategy with the product owner
Led end-to-end design, from early discovery to final delivery
Facilitated workshops with finance, engineering, and executive stakeholders
Created scalable UI components aligned with the design system
Partnered with engineering on technical feasibility and implementation of data visualizations

Reflection

Creating Total Cost from scratch was a deep dive into how cloud cost data is used across an enterprise. By focusing on business-aligned cost views, we empowered teams to make faster, smarter decisions. The project deepened my appreciation for FinOps maturity and the value of designing for trust and clarity in data-rich environments.