Business Thinking for Tech Executives

Tech executives need to stop treating technology as an end in itself and start measuring success by business results. The article argues that clean code or scalable architecture is meaningless if customers don't use the product or the company suffers churn. By aligning goals with the company's needs, tech leaders can turn their teams into a lever that moves the needle.

Real examples illustrate the shift: a CTO obsessed with perfect architecture learned that the board needed visible progress now, not a flawless system months later. He rewrote OKRs around business outcomes, gaining faster momentum and trust. Another leader who blamed external teams realized that if marketing or product falters, the tech org becomes irrelevant, and he began injecting engineering capabilities wherever the business bottleneck appeared.

The core practice the piece recommends is "bottleneck-injecting thinking." In a startup or any fast-moving company, identify the current choke point-whether it's churn, slow lead qualification, or lack of demo data-and ask how tech can relieve it. This may mean building automation for marketing, creating tools for customer success, or delivering rapid prototypes that prove value.

The final checklist tells executives to reframe priorities in business terms, adopt bottleneck thinking, sit at the business table, measure impact in outcomes, and treat the engineering org as a partner, not a service factory. The result is a tech function that is indispensable to the company's growth.