Up, out, and down: communicating real-world impact

Before diving into the dollar figures, it's worth acknowledging that effective OSPO communication operates on multiple levels simultaneously. Each audience needs to hear about the OSPO's positive impact in terms that matter to them.

When you communicate “up” to senior leadership, you're translating technical contributions into strategic outcomes: faster time-to-market, reduced technical debt, improved talent retention. Executives need to understand that your OSPO isn't just "doing open source" philanthropically, it's simultaneously unlocking capabilities that directly affect the metrics they care about.

Communicating “out” to engineering management means speaking in terms like team velocity, code quality, and reduced maintenance burden. These are the people who feel the day-to-day benefits of your work most directly, and they can become valuable internal advocates for the OSPO. But first, they must understand what you're actually doing for them.

Communicating “down” to individual engineers often means getting specific. It could be showing them how your upstream contributions eliminated a workaround they hated, or how your dependency management saved them hours of debugging. Engineers tend to be skeptical of corporate messaging, but they respond to concrete technical proof.

The key insight here is that communicating value isn't a single or annual event. It's an ongoing practice that starts with measuring actual results across your organization. The same contribution might signify "strategic risk reduction" to a CFO, "improved sprint velocity" to an engineering director, and "finally fixing that awful API" to a senior developer. Your job is to tell all three stories authentically, which will require making alliances across the organization and collaborating with those people to meaningfully measure the benefits.

When it comes to securing the OSPO's actual budget, the communication channel that matters most is with your executive team. We'll focus on this aspect of communicating value for the rest of the article.

Projecting the dollar value upward

As critical as communication is, generally, to the sustainability of your OSPO, we want to highlight the importance of calculating and conveying the dollar value itself. It's not easy work, and you’ll need a few different stakeholders on your side:

• Product owners — or key members — of the internal projects you support
• Someone in Finance
• C-level/VP-level/board-level stakeholders

You'll have to dig in with the product teams to find out how much time the OSPO has saved them by calculating how much money that project has generated and working backwards from there. This is an in-depth process that takes time and commitment, but it's a huge portion of the work that an OSPO needs to do to be sustainable. When that hard foundational work demonstrates financial contribution to the company, it will be a lot easier to justify (and expand) its budget moving forward.

For us, a typical process with just one of our OSPO department heads required 10-12 product or engineering managers and about 2-3 months of conversations and investigations. Here's a high-level breakdown of that process:

1. Interviewed 12+ project leaders who received open source team support over the past year
2. Calculated dollar-value attribution through estimation and validation
• Projects ranged from $50K to $100M in value
• We pegged the open source team's contribution at 2-25% of project success
• Example: A $100M project with 10% attribution = $10M in value generated
3. Rounded down, just to be conservative
4. Validated the dollar values with the Finance department for credibility

Ancillary benefits

• This process, especially after it's done a few times, creates an understanding within the executive team that the value of the OSPO is non-zero
• Even if the measurement methodologies are rough, the broader organization begins to recognize and buy into the benefits of open source
• The process itself builds stakeholder buy-in by clearly communicating the value to all teams involved

One of the reasons this can be so challenging is that those financial figures are often shrouded in mystery. You’ll need an ally (or 20) to get some useful numbers. In one of our recent FOSS Funders meetings, we discussed just how many software companies use abstractions to try to steer people from the actual finances of a project. Getting to the bottom of what a project costs, or how much it makes, or how much it is valued by the company, is often a very complicated process - sometimes one that you're not even supposed to know about.

Because of this mindset, it's essential to make some friends in Finance and work with them to try to come to some conclusions, even if you don't get the most exact numbers on the first try. The important thing is that you’re building a framework with Finance and coming up with non-zero numbers, even if the numbers are discounted to be extremely conservative.

Since an OSPO is a strategic company decision, it's also essential to get buy-in from well-placed people at the top of the organization. In all likelihood, this is a prerequisite for an OSPO starting in the first place, but for its continuing success, you'll need to continue to garner that support. It's imperative to talk with this important group on at least a quarterly basis to share the numbers from Finance and highlight the support from your key product stakeholders.

What we hope you take away from this article:

1. You do produce value
2. You need to prove that it's greater than zero if you want to sustainably fund your OSPO

Feel free to reach out if you have questions about how to do this for your organization.