Why Technical Leaders Need to Think Like Marketers

Summary: Your code is elegant. Your architecture is sound. So why is nobody funding your project?

Key Takeaways:

• Technical excellence without storytelling equals unfunded projects
• Business stakeholders speak ROI, not microservices
• Internal selling is harder than external because you can’t just leave
• The best engineers are translators, not just builders

Why Your Brilliant Technical Solution is Gathering Dust

Built a beautiful event-sourcing system that would solve our scaling problems forever. Spent three months on the proof of concept. Performance improved 10x. Latency dropped 90%.

Project killed in one meeting.

Why? I explained it like this: “We’ll implement CQRS with event sourcing using Kafka streams to ensure eventual consistency across our distributed microservices.”

What they heard: “Blah blah expensive blah blah risky blah blah complicated.”

Meanwhile, Bob from Product got $2M approved for his “Customer Success Platform.” It was literally a Salesforce integration. But Bob spoke their language.

The Art of Technical Storytelling for Business Stakeholders

Here’s what I learned after losing three straight budget battles to Bob:

Lead with the problem, not the solution

• Wrong: “We need to refactor our monolith into microservices”
• Right: “We’re losing $50k/month because our system can’t handle Black Friday traffic”

Translate technical wins into business outcomes

• Wrong: “This reduces latency by 200ms”
• Right: “This improves checkout conversion by 3%, worth $1.2M annually”

Use their vocabulary

• They say “agility” not “CI/CD”
• They say “scalability” not “horizontal pod autoscaling”
• They say “reliability” not “five nines uptime”

Show, don’t tell

• Live demo > architecture diagram
• Customer testimonial > performance benchmark
• Revenue graph > GitHub stars

The painful truth: your stakeholders don’t care about technical elegance. They care about business impact. Your job is translation.

Building Internal Buy-in for Engineering Initiatives

Internal selling is harder than external because you can’t just find better customers. Here’s the playbook that actually works:

Start with allies, not decision makers

• Find the PM who’s tired of customer complaints
• Partner with the sales engineer who keeps losing deals
• Get the support team who deals with the fallout

Create inevitability through small wins

• Don’t ask for six months to rebuild everything
• Ship visible improvements weekly
• Let success compound

Make heroes of early adopters

• “Sarah’s team shipped 50% faster using the new platform”
• “Mike reduced incidents 90% with the new monitoring”
• People want to be like Sarah and Mike

Frame everything as experiments

• “Let’s try this for one team for one sprint”
• Lower stakes = lower resistance
• Failure is learning, not career suicide

I once got an entire infrastructure migration approved by calling it a “performance experiment.” Same work, different framing, 100% different reception.

Measuring and Communicating Technical Success in Business Terms

The metrics that matter to you don’t matter to them. Here’s the translation guide:

Engineering Metrics → Business Metrics

• Deployment frequency → Feature velocity → Time to market
• Mean time to recovery → Customer impact → Revenue protection
• Code coverage → Quality → Support cost reduction
• Performance improvements → User experience → Retention

Create dashboards they’ll actually look at

• Big numbers they care about at the top
• Trends that show progress
• Red/yellow/green they can grasp instantly
• Technical details hidden but accessible

Tell stories with data

• “Remember the outage that cost us the Johnson account?”
• “This would have prevented it”
• “Here’s how we know” [show simple graph]
• “Here’s what it’s worth” [show dollar signs]

Example: How Stripe Engineering Pitches Internally

Stripe’s engineering team are masters at internal marketing. Example from their migration to Ruby typing:

What they could have said: “We’re adding Sorbet type checking to improve our Ruby codebase’s type safety and developer productivity.”

What they actually said: “We’re making it impossible to ship billing bugs that cost millions in revenue.”

They showed:

• Actual bugs caught in staging (with dollar amounts)
• Developer velocity improvements (in features shipped)
• Hiring advantages (in candidate feedback)

Result: Full company buy-in, resources allocated, success celebrated.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Technical Leadership

The best code I ever wrote was for a project nobody wanted. Spent six months building it. It was architecturally perfect. Used all the right patterns. Had 100% test coverage.

Nobody cared.

The worst code I ever wrote was a 500-line bash script that saved the sales team 10 hours per week. Held together with duct tape and prayers. Probably violated every principle in Clean Code.

Got promoted for it.

Your technical skills get you in the room. Your communication skills get you the resources. Your translation skills get you the promotion.

The Bottom Line

Every technical leader eventually learns this lesson: building great technology is table stakes. Selling it internally is the actual job.

You can resent this reality or master it. The engineers who master it become CTOs. The ones who resent it write angry blog posts about “politics.”

The irony? The better you get at marketing your work internally, the more resources you get to build technically excellent solutions. It’s not selling out - it’s buying in.

Stop expecting the work to speak for itself. It doesn’t have a mouth. You do. Use it.