Many of us geeks need glasses—I know I do—but that’s not an excuse to let yourself be myopic also in your attitude. If all you do is manage the tech people, you’re not an executive—you’re a glorified team lead with a bigger paycheck. Like it or not, you’re part of a grander business.
Your organization, no matter how successful, senior, or masterful, is of no consequence if it cannot help the business achieve its objectives. Are you enabling business success, or sitting on your hands waiting to be told what to do?
Business Thinking Defined
We start by realizing that business thinking is about putting business outcomes before tech outputs. It doesn’t matter how clean your code is if clients are never using it. An amazing architecture that can scale 100x isn’t needed when the company’s suffering from 20% churn monthly.
Your efforts, planning, and goals should all be driven by understanding the company’s needs and put in that context. That will enable the utilization of your team in a manner that actually moves the needle. Rather than get hung up on tech for tech’s sake, think about the business momentum you can help achieve.
Wake-Up Calls Examples
To help you imagine what difference this can make, let’s share a couple of real examples. First, there was a CTO focusing on spinning up a new business initiative that relied entirely on innovative tech solutions that were not possible before. He was consumed entirely by thoughts about the right architecture, interesting solutions and approaches, and similar, all of which merit attention but cannot be the leading factors in your thinking.
When I asked him about the company’s general situation and what the board and stakeholders felt about this investment, it was clear to him that they were feeling agitated. Whereas he was thinking in terms of the “perfect solutions” to create within the span of the next 12 months or so, the business needed to show tangible progress ASAP.
Does that mean the team will do things with some “waste” because they will add intermediate milestones just to show progress? Yes and no. Yes, because theoretically, if they were guaranteed to know exactly the right thing to do, working on that heads down would be the best utilization of their time. But in reality, not conveying their progress just might frighten the business to decide to change direction before they ever reach their objectives (not to mention that they might be drifting astray and only find out too late).
That changed his attitude completely, and he changed the organization’s OKRs to be entirely business-oriented to ensure this connection doesn’t get lost. They got faster momentum and more long-term trust. The same is probably happening nowadays in many AI initiatives.
You Don’t Get to Win Alone
Another example that I’ve unfortunately seen quite a few times already is of the tech leadership that’s all content and smug about issues not being “in their court.” “We get all of our tasks done on time, the problem is $OTHER_PEOPLE.”
Here’s a little secret: if the marketing pipeline is collapsing, or product cannot validate the right direction forward, you’re irrelevant. No one needs a successful tech org inside a dying business. You’ll all be fired together.
When this happens, there are two things you can do. You can sit there twiddling your thumbs and hope that the business will get better. Or, you can realize that you’ve got agency and ownership here as well as an executive and start injecting your team’s capabilities wherever the issue is—even if it’s not purely about delivering new features.
Bottleneck-Injecting Thinking
Startups are often described as rollercoasters. But that’s not because you come upon the same problems again and again, causing the highs and lows (at least, I want to believe you’re not a startup version of Groundhog Day). Instead, you find new problems and have to tackle them.
Practically, startups are about tackling a series of different bottlenecks and growth issues one after the other until you reach escape velocity. Your business thinking applied to this means that you’re always on the hunt for the current bottleneck. Once spotted, ask yourself what’s the real choke point today, and whether tech can help relieve it somehow.
Yes, that’s not just creating a new feature faster, but can include things like automating marketing lead qualifications, giving customer success tools to handle clients faster and reduce churn, or generating more realistic demo data to convey the product’s value better. All things that rarely come up on pure “product roadmaps.” But you’re not “waiting for specs,” my friend. You’re actively looking for leverage points!
Recommendations for Tech Execs
- Reframe priorities in business terms. Stop obsessing over features; focus on value creation.
- Adopt bottleneck thinking. The company’s weakest link is your problem, too.
- Sit at the business table. Don’t wait for permission—inject yourself where the business needs you.
- Measure impact in business outcomes. Ship features only if they unlock momentum.
- Treat your org as a business partner, not a service provider. If you’re just a delivery factory, you’re replaceable.
Business thinking is not optional—it’s the only way to matter. If you don’t think like an executive, don’t be surprised when the board doesn’t treat you like one.