Tagging — the 20% that drives 80% of cost allocation

The most common FinOps mistake I see: over-engineered tagging strategy. A Series B SaaS team spent 3 months designing a 47-field tag taxonomy. Environment. Service. Owner. Business unit. Cost center. Data classification. Compliance zone. Criticality. Expiry. PII flag. Migration source. CI pipeline ID. Then they realized: they can't enforce it. Their Terraform had 80 modules. Half the resources were provisioned before the taxonomy existed. The rollout plan estimated 6 months. They gave up at mont