Your engineering team is likely obsessing over DevEx, sprint efficiency, and engineering velocity—at least, you’d better hope they are. But here’s the harsh truth: focusing exclusively on engineering velocity means missing out on potentially 10x the impact elsewhere in your company. It’s not just about speeding up your developers; it’s about spreading internal superpowers everywhere.

Enter Tech Capital: usage of tech not for feature development, and not to minimize “tech debt,” but to generate tangible internal value. Engineering velocity is a common “gateway drug” to realizing the dramatic improvements you can achieve with an internal arsenal of tools, automation, and processes developed in-house, transforming every department from average to exceptional. Companies that strategically build and leverage Tech Capital consistently outperform competitors who see technology only as a cost center.

But why should engineering have all the fun?

Real-World Examples

When I first started talking about tech capital, it wasn’t as easy to spin up these small improvements, yet they already completely changed some organizations. Here are real examples, some mentioned in The Tech Executive Operating System, which I published in 2021, pre-LLMs:

• Marketing Velocity: A marketing team was constantly being bottlenecked by engineering, because they wanted to experiment with their emails, yet personalization required coding. The team increased experiment speed significantly after gaining autonomy through a self-service system, allowing them to independently modify email campaigns without waiting for technical assistance for the majority of their needs.
• Sales Velocity: A sales team reduced POC setup time by 80% through automation, enabling faster deal closures. Whereas previously sales engineers spent literally days tailoring the system to the client’s specific use case, automation made that effort trivial.
• Customer Success Velocity: Customer Success representatives improved responsiveness using an AI copilot that automatically suggested responses and noticed repeating issues that should be escalated.
  

Implementing Organizational Velocity

Achieving broader organizational velocity involves clear, actionable steps:

1. Explicit Permission to Innovate

Grant teams explicit permission to perform this type of work. For most startups, any work that’s not feature work is rarely prioritized, except through contorted mechanisms like “allocated engineering time.” You should collaborate with Product to make the case for the very likely ROI of these initiatives and work to find the right balance between this innovation, the feature roadmap, and the rest of the things that need to get done. Without this effort to prioritize tech capital, good teams are not likely to ever innovate (because good people tend to align with company goals).

In addition, give them permission to experiment and fail safely. Whatever the team decides to do should be a smart bet, and the first few times you’ll probably have a lot of low-hanging fruit in front of you with very low risk. Nevertheless, not all of these experiments and investments in capital will work—that has to be expected or no one would try anything novel.

2. Cross-Company Insights

Take off your “tech leader” hat and put on your “organizational engineer” hat. Look beyond your team and observe how work actually gets done across the company—not how people say it happens in status meetings, but how it really flows (or doesn’t). Where do people copy-paste the same data three times? Where does a customer request bounce between five Slack channels before getting answered? Where do people complain, “I have to wait for X before I can do Y”?

Your goal is to systematically map these friction points. Create a lightweight, living backlog—not a 6-month digital transformation roadmap, but a running list of tiny, annoying, dumb things that slow people down every day. Prioritize ruthlessly. You’re not trying to automate the entire marketing department overnight. Instead, you want to find the low-hanging fruit with high leverage. A process that can be sped up by 10 minutes but happens 30 times a week? That’s gold.

And here’s the kicker many miss: Friction in other departments compounds back into Engineering. When Sales is stuck waiting for a demo environment, that’s a burden on engineers. When Marketing has to open a Jira ticket just to change website copy, that’s R&D slowing down without even knowing it. The more you reduce friction outside R&D, the more you’re buying back time for your own team.

3. Deploy Advanced Tools

Use these velocity initiatives as Trojan horses for innovation.

Every tech leader loves to talk about “innovation,” but too often, that word is carried in vain. Here’s your chance to unleash it across the entire company—and get actual ROI instead of just shiny toys.

When you start attacking these friction points, don’t just fix them. Treat every small velocity initiative as a sandbox to experiment with new technology that would otherwise stay buried in engineering demos and AI hackathons. This is your excuse to bring AI copilots, no-code automation platforms (I personally like tools like Lovable and Base44), and whatever new release is probably out in the five minutes since I’ve typed this sentence.

You don’t need to wait for “big” AI strategy decks. This is how you implement AI and automation without an 18-month initiative. Real, incremental innovation doesn’t need a task force; it needs empowered teams who see that their manual work can be eliminated tomorrow—not next quarter.

4. Metric-Driven (But Not Metric-Obsessed)

To make these velocity initiatives visible and valuable, you need clear metrics. Track things like reduced costs from automation, faster deal closure rates because Sales isn’t stuck waiting, or improved ticket response times thanks to AI copilots. These are concrete signals that your investments in internal superpowers are paying off.

But here’s the trap most leaders fall into: they demand immediate, linear ROI from every single initiative. That mindset will kill innovation before it even starts. Not every experiment will move the needle in month one. Some will create second-order effects that compound over time—unlocking faster collaboration, more autonomy, and a culture that removes its own bottlenecks without waiting for permission.

So yes, measure—but leave space to play. Treat these projects like strategic bets, not procurement checklists. The real payoff is not just in the numbers—it’s in the shift from being a company that tolerates friction to one that systematically eliminates it.

Tech Capital isn’t just about software; it’s about strategically leveraging technology across your organization to accelerate growth and agility. Organizations ignoring this reality risk being left behind by competitors who embrace it.