Why This Matters
Engineers are told to “focus on business value,” but rarely taught what that actually means. Business value isn’t a vibe, it’s a set of levers that change depending on your company’s context, goals, and appetite for risk.
This framework offers a practical guide.
It helps you:
- Understand the different types of value businesses care about
- See how leverage plays out at different stages of company growth
- Pitch engineering projects with the same clarity product and sales teams use
- Avoid common failure modes when aligning too tightly, or too loosely, with business metrics
Let’s dive in.
Define the Business Game
What kind of company are you building? The business model and stage determine what kind of value matters most.
| Context | Primary Value Type | What Engineering Work Looks Like |
|---|---|---|
| Early-Stage Startup | Speed to validate | MVPs, shipping experiments fast, minimal abstraction |
| Scaling Company | Bottleneck removal | Infra refactors, platform tools, test automation, reliability |
| Enterprise / Regulated | Risk reduction | Observability, process controls, compliance automation |
| Cost-Conscious SaaS | Efficiency | DevX improvements, CI/CD time savings, infra cost optimization |
| What business game is your company playing right now? Has it shifted recently? |
Know the Six Types of Engineering Value
Business value isn’t just revenue. Here are six types engineers can impact.
| Value Type | Engineering Impact Example |
|---|---|
| Revenue Generation | New features that drive upsell, onboarding faster to activate users |
| Cost Savings | CI optimizations, infra changes, automation of manual workflows |
| Risk Reduction | Adding tests, failover, rollback systems, data access controls |
| Speed/Acceleration | Reducing build times, shipping faster, DX tools that remove friction |
| Enablement | Building shared tooling, reusable components, internal platforms |
| Strategic Learning | A/B frameworks, telemetry, MVPs for unknown markets |
| Which of these do you impact most often? Which ones are undervalued in your org? |
Leverage Multiplier Check
Leverage = Impact / Effort. High-leverage work creates durable, compounding gains.
3 Quick Tests for Leverage:
- Multiplication: Does this help many people do more?
- Acceleration: Does it speed up a key workflow?
- Resilience: Does it reduce future risk or fragility?
If this works, how many people benefit? How long does the benefit last?
Understand Risk Tolerance
You can’t sell value if you don’t understand what risks your business will or won’t accept.
| Risk Tolerance Level | Implications for Engineering |
|---|---|
| Low (e.g. fintech) | Need tight processes, heavy testing, slow change |
| Medium | Can tolerate technical debt short term, measured experiments |
| High (e.g. early-stage) | Can move fast and break things, accept short-term fragility |
| When has the business shown discomfort with risk? When has it embraced it? |
The Wild Card Bet: Selling the Risk of “It Might Work”
Some work isn’t clearly valuable upfront, but might be game-changing.
These are high-leverage, high-variance bets:
- Rewriting an internal tool that might halve onboarding time
- Building a self-service dashboard that might eliminate PM bottlenecks
- Spiking an AI assistant that might transform support ops
How to Pitch a Wild Card Project:
- Best Case:What does massive success look like?
- Expected Case: What’s the most likely outcome?
- Worst Case: What’s the cost of failure?
- Why Now: Why is this worth trying at this moment?
Do you have an idea like this? Can you pitch it in this format?
Framing Work in Business Terms
Translate engineering work into outcomes that resonate beyond engineering.
| Instead of... | Say... |
|---|---|
| “Improves test coverage” | “Reduces regressions and builds confidence to ship faster” |
| “Refactors messy code” | “Speeds up future work and cuts onboarding time” |
| “Builds a reusable component” | “Saves 6+ hours/week across teams shipping UI” |
| “Adds observability” | “Helps us catch and fix customer issues before they churn” |
| Can you reframe your last project in these terms? Would it land differently with product or execs? |
How to Measure Impact (Even When It’s Fuzzy)
Business value is easier to sell when you can track it.
Not every engineering outcome has a perfect metric, but you can often use proxies:
- Time saved: Dev hours reduced, deploy time shortened
- Speed gained: Cycle time, time-to-merge, mean time to recovery
- Risk mitigated: Incidents avoided, test coverage improved, audit readiness
- Revenue influenced: Faster onboarding, higher conversion from feature usage
Ask: What would break or slow down if this didn’t exist? That’s your anchor metric.
Don’t aim for precision. Aim for clarity. Ballpark numbers often unlock decision-making.
Watch Out for Failure Modes
Not all value framing is healthy. Beware of over-rotating.
Common Pitfalls:
- Optimizing too hard for metrics: Creates local maxima, gamification, or fragile hacks
- Undervaluing long-term investments: Some of the best work is invisible until it’s missing
- Selling only speed: Fast ≠ valuable if it adds rework, bugs, or burnout
- Confusing outputs with outcomes: More PRs ≠ more impact
Balance business alignment with engineering judgment. Value isn’t velocity alone.
When the Business Doesn’t See the Value
Sometimes, even great engineering work gets overlooked. What then?
Try these moves:
- Narrate the invisible: Explain what would have gone wrong without your work
- Frame value in their language: Business impact, customer trust, velocity, risk
- Find champions: Product, design, or CS leaders who benefit from your work
- Build a pattern: One high-ROI project can reset how engineering is perceived
You don’t always need louder work. Just clearer framing.
Case Study: The Internal Dashboard Rewrite
Let’s walk through the framework using a real-world example.
Scenario: Your team wants to rebuild a legacy internal dashboard used by Support, Sales, and Product to view user sessions. The current tool is slow, flaky, and painful to maintain.
1. Business Game: Scaling company, primary value type is bottleneck removal.
2. Type of Value:
- Speed: Support spends 3–5 mins loading a session view.
- Cost savings: Maintaining the legacy system consumes 2 dev days/month.
- Enablement: A new dashboard enables cross-team insights that don’t exist today.
3. Leverage:
- Multiplication: ~30 support and sales reps use the tool daily.
- Acceleration: New tool reduces triage time from 5 to 1 min.
- Resilience: New stack won’t break on Chrome updates like the old one.
4. Risk Tolerance:
- Medium: The business can tolerate a 2-week investment if the payoff is clear and it doesn’t delay roadmap features.
5. Wild Card Framing:
- Best case: 80% reduction in support handle time → faster customer resolution → higher NPS.
- Expected: Reclaims 16 dev days/year + internal praise.
- Worst case: Engineering learns from the rebuild, but usage patterns stay flat.
- Why now: The current system is breaking more often and slowing down onboarding.
6. Business Framing:
- “This reduces support time by 75%, reclaims 2 dev days/month, and creates a foundation for new insights in Q4.”
7. Impact Metrics:
- Time to load dashboard before/after
- Time saved by support per session (multiply by sessions/week)
- Internal usage metrics before/after
8. Failure Mode Guardrails:
- Don’t over-engineer: no full-featured rebuild unless usage warrants it.
- Measure as you go: build tracking into the MVP.
9. Org Alignment:
- Pitch directly to CX and Product leadership.
- Share usage wins in Slack and team reviews.
Using the framework helped position this as a smart, low-risk investment instead of a “nice-to-have refactor.”
How to Use This Framework
- Bring it to sprint planning or 1:1s to spark better tradeoff conversations
- Use it when proposing projects or roadmap items
- Run a team workshop to evaluate your backlog through the lens of value and leverage
Final Thought
The best engineers don’t just write good code, they help the business win.
This framework won’t turn you into a product manager. It will make you a more strategic engineer.
If this helped clarify how to think about value, risk, and leverage, share it with your team. Or try using the framework in your next sprint planning session.
Want a visual version of the guide or a printable one-pager? Let me know. I’m working on one.