I’ve long claimed you do not need to develop a “tech strategy” or “engineering strategy.” Instead, technology ought to take a central role in the company’s strategy—the real one. Just because you’ve implemented something in software doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a “moat” or a strategic differentiator. For many tech leaders, just hearing that is not enough and comes across as too abstract. If you’re wondering whether you’ve positioned tech correctly in your company, here are some examples of how technology can be a strategic factor.

Acceleration: As straightforward as it gets. Time has a lot of value, and being able to do things faster provides value. Can you create technology that finds proprietary ways of making costly operations faster? Examples range from allowing me to deposit checks with my phone instead of having to physically go to the bank or Tesla’s over-the-air updates that enable customers to get new capabilities immediately without having to take the car to be serviced.

Cost reduction: Who doesn’t like saving money? However, as a strategic factor, this shouldn’t be purely due to tech requiring less effort than having humans do something—that won’t distinguish you and will be easily replicable by others. Can you have an edge that means your lower costs are unique? Stripe’s moat, which makes it incredibly easy to use them instead of doing things yourself and that’s not trivial to set up, is a great example.

Risk reduction: There are myriad ways for technology to make things more certain and less risky. PayPal’s buyer protection is one, insurance startups that can offer better premiums because they can calculate a personalized assessment are another. It can even be AWS’s ability to guarantee uptime that might make it preferable to a cheaper solution that doesn’t have that SLA. Riskified is a great example that used cost reduction in its initial GTM.

Enabler: What I regularly refer to as “mini-superpowers.” Can you make something that previously required expertise possible for many more people? Canva and image generation AI models have allowed many people to solve their design needs by themselves. Wix lets anyone set up a website in minutes.

Provide autonomy: Similar to enablement, this provides users with the ability to do things freely. Duolingo makes it possible to learn languages at your own pace. Interactive Brokers make it much simpler to invest.

Bespoke experiences: Can you create ways to tailor a product to someone? Whereas usually, that would require professional services, if you can automate that, you get something unique. For example, the suggestions algorithms on many social networks and Netflix can tell what you’ll likely enjoy.

Leveling playing fields: This usually relies heavily on data, but data itself is not necessarily a technical edge per se. However, when you leverage that data to make things easier, like allowing me to assess whether an apartment is expensive or not or comparing flight tickets to average ones, you provide me with important context.

Deep tech: Obvious, yet I’ll mention it here for completeness. If your researchers have created a unique proprietary algorithm or model, that’s by itself a part of your moat. That’s partly why there are so many companies that rush to churn out patents.

Ecosystems and Platforms: The major difference between having to develop all features yourself in-house and creating an API that allows anyone to extend your system. App stores are probably the biggest success of this model.

Internal operations: Deciding to create internal software tooling that makes your business much better. For example, one of my clients was a property management startup that became the fastest property management company in the US and leveraged its technology to do things “old school” incumbents could never afford.

Without intending, I now see this list comprises exactly ten factors. There are likely more, but these are the ones that immediately came to mind when I surveyed recent clients. The important takeaway here is to realize that you can and should have at least one of these as your priorities and ensure they become an active part of your strategy. Otherwise, you won’t be a tech company but a company with some engineers.