Last month I heard about a SaaS startup. The engineering team spent six months building the perfect API. The architects were thrilled. The code was “beautiful.” Clean abstractions, 100% test coverage, microservices that would scale to millions.
One problem: Their biggest customer just cancelled because they never built the Salesforce integration that was actually requested.
This story plays out constantly across the industry. Engineering celebrates shipping elegant solutions while sales loses deals over missing features. Product builds what customers say they want, while engineering builds what they think customers need. Everyone’s working hard, nobody’s aligned, and 30-40% of your engineering capacity creates zero business value.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Your engineers aren’t the problem. They’re brilliant people responding rationally to broken incentives.
The Three Fatal Disconnects
After helping dozens of teams escape this trap, I’ve identified three core disconnects that guarantee misalignment:
1. The Translation Failure
Your CEO says “improve customer retention.” Product hears “add more features.” Engineering hears “reduce technical debt.” Nobody translates business needs into engineering language.
A fintech company recently spent three months optimizing database performance. Impressive work – queries ran 10x faster. The problem? Their customers were churning because onboarding took 14 steps, not because pages loaded slowly.
2. The Metrics Mismatch
Engineering gets rewarded for velocity, uptime, and code coverage. Business gets rewarded for revenue, growth, and market share. Nobody gets rewarded for actual customer outcomes.
Think about it: When was the last time your engineering team celebrated reducing customer churn? When did your sales team celebrate reducing technical debt? We’ve created competing scorecards and wonder why nobody’s playing the same game.
3. The Visibility Void
Business leaders don’t see the technical debt tsunami approaching. Engineers don’t see why that “simple” feature request matters for the million-dollar deal. Both sides make decisions in darkness.
One CTO discovered their main competitor had released a game-changing feature six months earlier. Their team had been optimizing their existing solution while customers were quietly jumping ship.
The Framework That Actually Works
Forget lengthy “digital transformation” initiatives. You need immediate alignment. Here’s the approach that reduces waste from 40% to under 10%:
Outcome-Based Engineering
Stop measuring outputs. Start measuring outcomes. Every engineering initiative must answer: “What business metric will this move?”
Transform your planning:
- ❌ “Implement new payment system”
-
✅ “Reduce checkout abandonment from 23% to 15%”
- ❌ “Refactor authentication service”
- ✅ “Cut customer support tickets by 30%”
When engineers understand the business problem, they often find better technical solutions than what product requested.
Embedded Accountability
Create shared destiny between engineering and business. At one B2B company, engineering leads started presenting at quarterly business reviews. The first presentation was painful – the engineering VP couldn’t connect any of their work to revenue impact.
By the third quarter, that same VP was showing how their platform improvements enabled 50% faster customer onboarding, directly supporting a 20% growth target.
Your 14-Day Alignment Sprint
Here’s exactly how to start fixing alignment today:
Week 1: Diagnose the Disconnect
- Survey your engineers: “What business metric does your current work impact?”
- Count how many answer “I don’t know” (prepare to be shocked)
- Map every active project to revenue, retention, or growth
- Calculate the percentage creating zero business value
Week 2: Pick One Team, One Metric
- Choose your highest-performing engineering team
- Assign them ONE business metric to own (e.g., user activation rate)
- Give them direct access to customer data and feedback
- Watch what happens when smart people understand the real goal
By day 14, you’ll have proof that alignment drives results. Scale from there.
The Bottom Line
Your competitors are figuring this out. While you’re building beautiful code that customers don’t care about, they’re shipping ugly code that drives revenue.
The gap between your engineering capability and business results isn’t a communication problem. It’s an incentive problem. And unlike communication, incentives can be systematically fixed.
Here’s my challenge to you: Tomorrow morning, ask your lead engineer what business metric their current sprint will impact. If they can’t answer in 10 seconds, you’re leaving money on the table.
What percentage of your engineering work creates zero business value? Hit me up on LinkedIn – I’d genuinely like to know.
