How do you align technology with business strategy?

Question

Accepted Answer

Alignment means **every significant technical investment can be traced to a business goal**, and the business understands the technical constraints shaping what is possible. It is a two-way translation, not a one-way order.

## How to think about it

```text
MECHANISMS FOR ALIGNMENT
- Start tech planning from business goals, not the reverse
- Translate goals into technical capabilities and bets
- Translate technical reality back (constraints, debt, trade-offs)
- Shared metrics that both sides care about
- A seat at the strategy table for engineering leadership
```

The CTO's job is to be the **bidirectional translator** between business intent and technical reality.

## Concrete example

When the business sets a goal to cut customer churn, the CTO connects it to investments in reliability and faster onboarding flows, and pushes back on a sales-driven custom-build request by showing its cost in delayed roadmap items.

## Trade-offs and pitfalls

- **Pitfall:** engineering optimizing for technical elegance disconnected from business value.
- **Pitfall:** the business treating engineering as an order-taker, ignoring constraints.
- Saying yes to everything is misalignment in disguise; trade-offs must surface.

## Why it matters

Misalignment wastes the company's scarcest resource, engineering effort, on work that does not move the business.

When technology and business strategy are tightly linked, engineering becomes a driver of growth rather than a cost center.

Creating and sustaining that link is the essence of the CTO role.