Your engineering team tracks DORA metrics. Your CFO doesn't know what they are.
That's the gap costing both of them trust and budget.
DORA in engineering's head:
→ Deployment frequency (how often we ship)
→ Lead time for changes (commit to prod)
→ Change failure rate (% of deploys that break something)
→ MTTR (mean time to recover)
DORA translated for the CFO:
→ Deployment frequency → how fast we can respond to a customer request, competitor move, or compliance requirement
→ Lead time → from "we have an idea" to "it's making money" — directly tied to revenue velocity
→ Change failure rate → % of your engineering hours spent fixing instead of building. A 15% CFR is 15% of your eng budget burned.
→ MTTR → per minute of downtime, your app is losing X% of hourly revenue. MTTR reduction = protected revenue.
When engineering says "MTTR is 4 hours" to a CFO, the CFO hears nothing.
When engineering says "Every incident over 60 minutes costs us ₹4L in SLA credits and ~₹2L in Monday-morning trust damage with enterprise accounts, and our MTTR is currently 4 hours," the CFO suddenly gives you two extra SRE headcount.
The translation layer is:
→ Every DORA metric gets a currency column
→ CFR: % × engineering hours × fully-loaded cost
→ MTTR: median incident × estimated revenue/hour × frequency
→ Lead time: feature velocity × average deal-size uplift
→ Deployment frequency: time-to-respond × competitive advantage score
You don't need a new tool. You need a spreadsheet that maps your DORA trendline to rupee impact, updated monthly, and shown to the CFO in the same deck as the cloud bill.
When DORA becomes part of financial planning instead of a DevOps KPI, two things happen:
- Finance stops asking "why is engineering so slow" (they can see it's structurally, not culturally slow)
- Engineering stops begging for investment (the numbers justify themselves)
If you're an eng leader whose CFO doesn't speak DORA, this is how you fix it.
Repost for the VP Engineering reading board-deck prep at 11pm right now.
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