1. Technology Is the Opening Act, Not the Show
If you’re an engineer, you probably feel this in your bones:
There’s a special kind of satisfaction in making something work.
That moment when the tests pass, the packets flow, the automation runs cleanly, or the dashboards finally light up the way you imagined… that’s our dopamine hit!
But here’s the uncomfortable truth most of us learn too late:
Technology is just the beginning. Value is the product. And value not communicated is value lost.
You can build the most elegant system in the world. You can refactor a legacy monster into a thing of beauty. You can reduce outages, improve performance, and slash toil. But if nobody understands what actually changed for the business, then as far as the company is concerned, not much happened.
The code is better, yes. The architecture is cleaner, yes.
But your career? Your reputation? The perception of your impact?
Flat.
This article is about closing that gap, not by dumbing down your work, not by turning you into a PowerPoint-only creature, but by teaching you how to translate your engineering into business language so decision-makers can see, in their own terms, why what you do matters.
Because if you fail to communicate value, you’re effectively donating it.
2. The Comfortable Lie: “If the Tech Is Good, People Will Notice”
Most of us start our careers with a quiet belief:
“If I build great things, people will see it. The work will speak for itself.”
On small teams with a hands-on manager, that sometimes works.
On larger teams, or in complex organizations, it almost never does.
I’ve seen brilliant engineers spend months designing fault-tolerant systems, tuning performance, and hardening infrastructure… only to watch someone else get promoted because they happened to be the one presenting at the review, or because their project aligned with a clearly articulated business goal.
The difference wasn’t talent. It was visibility and framing.
One engineer’s update sounded like this:
“We implemented a new deployment pipeline with better rollback and integrated testing. We migrated services from the old platform to the new one and improved reliability.”
All true and technically accurate.
But nobody outside the immediate team could understand what that meant in terms of business outcomes.
Another engineer, in a parallel org, described a similar piece of work like this:
“We cut deployment lead time from two weeks to two days for our top three revenue-generating services, and reduced change-related incidents by about 40%. That means we can ship features sooner and spend less time firefighting.”
Same basic technical story.
Very different perceived impact.
Here’s the painful lesson: great work does not automatically surface to the people who decide your growth and compensation. They’re not reading your git history. They’re not sitting next to you during incident calls. Their world is full of numbers, trade-offs, and competing priorities.
If you don’t connect your work to that world, it stays invisible.
Communicating value is not bragging.
It’s finishing the job.
3. What “Business Value” Actually Means (Beyond Buzzwords)
“Business value” gets thrown around so much that it starts to sound like a vague corporate spell. Let’s de-mystify it.
At the crudest level, business value boils down to a few things:
Money in – revenue gained or protected.
Money out – costs reduced or avoided.
Risk managed – catastrophic events prevented or made less likely.
Strategic positioning – making it easier/faster/cheaper to win future opportunities.
Everything else hangs off these.
When you ship a technical change, you are (directly or indirectly) affecting one or more of these levers. For example:
You reduce latency on a critical checkout path.
Customers complete purchases more often.
Revenue increases.
You automate a previously manual process that consumed 20 engineer-hours per week.
Those engineers can now ship new features instead of pulling levers by hand.
Operational cost goes down; capacity to innovate goes up.
You harden authentication and access controls.
You reduce the chance of a breach that could cost millions and destroy trust.
Risk is reduced—even if the payoff is that “nothing bad happens.”
Notice what’s not in that list:
“The system now uses Kubernetes 1.29,” or “We adopted gNMI,” or “We upgraded to Rust.”
Those are means. Business value lives in the ends.
You don’t need a finance degree to think this way. You just need to start asking consistently:
“If this works as intended, what changes for the customer, the business, or our cost structure?”
Once you have that answer, you’re halfway to communicating real value.
4. From “What I Built” to “What Changed Because of It”
Most engineers naturally describe their work in terms of implementation:
“I redesigned the routing policy to use BGP communities and RPKI validation.”
“I built an internal tool to orchestrate changes across network devices.”
“I migrated our service to a new database backend.”
That’s fine when you’re talking to other engineers. It’s incomplete when you’re talking to anyone else.
Leaders, product managers, and finance folks care less about what you built and much more about what changed because you built it.
Let’s take a simple example.
Engineer A – Tech-centric narrative
“We refactored the CI/CD pipeline, integrated additional tests, and consolidated multiple YAML files into a shared schema. We also added parallel stages to speed up builds.”
Engineer B – Value-centric narrative
“We reduced average deploy time from 45 minutes to 10 minutes, and we can now deploy multiple times per day instead of once or twice a week. Change-related incidents dropped from 8% to around 3%. That means we deliver features faster and spend fewer evenings rolling back broken releases.”
Same project. Completely different lens.
Notice Engineer B still respects the technology; those improvements were real. But the story is anchored in:
Time saved.
Risk reduced.
Capability unlocked.
A useful mental template here is:
Problem → Stakes → Action → Result
What was broken or limiting? (Problem)
What did it cost us? (Stakes)
What did you do? (Action)
What changed? (Result)
Start using that structure, and your updates will begin to sound like decisions, not just patch notes.
5. Deep Dive vs Business Clarity: The “Two Lenses” Mindset
Here’s where many engineers get stuck:
“If I simplify too much, I’ll lose the important technical nuance.”
That fear is valid. Nuance matters when you’re debugging, designing architectures, or making trade-offs. You need to go deep to do good work.
The mistake is believing you must use the same depth with everyone.
Think of it as having two lenses:
The engineering lens – high resolution, detailed, full of acronyms and diagrams.
The business lens – zoomed out, focused on outcomes, simple enough that someone outside your specialty can follow.
When you talk to another engineer about why your new routing design works, the engineering lens is perfect. You’ll discuss convergence, route reflectors, failure modes, and telemetry feeds. That’s the right level.
But when a director asks, “What’s the impact of this routing redesign?” and you answer with:
“We’re moving from per-box configuration to a controller-driven FC-BGP architecture with ASPA and RPKI validation in the loop…”
…you lose them in the first sentence.
They’re really asking things like:
“Does this reduce outages?”
“Does this improve scalability and speed of change?”
“Are we safer from hijacks or leaks?”
“What does this enable us to do that we couldn’t before?”
You don’t abandon technical truth. You add a layer above it:
“We’re centralizing route validation and automation so we can push changes more safely and catch bad routes before they hit production. That should cut the likelihood of routing incidents and make onboarding new sites significantly faster.”
If they want more detail, they’ll ask. Then you can switch lenses.
Great engineers don’t just know the details; they know how to dial the detail up or down based on who’s in the room.
6. Framing the Problem: “What Business Challenge Did You Resolve?”
Let’s start at the beginning of the story: the problem.
Many engineers describe starting conditions like this:
“Our logs were a mess.”
“The network design was legacy and brittle.”
“The deployment process was manual and slow.”
All true, but it doesn’t yet say why anyone outside your team should care.
A good problem framing answers three questions:
Who is affected?
Customers, support teams, operations, finance, sales… who feels the pain?What is the pain?
Slow? Error-prone? Expensive? Confusing? Risky?What does it cost us?
Time, money, lost deals, churn, regulatory risk, reputation.
For example:
“Our incident response relied on engineers manually grepping logs across multiple systems. On average, it took 90 minutes to identify the root cause of a major production issue. Each hour of downtime on this service costs us roughly $X in lost transactions, not counting the on-call fatigue and customer frustration.”
Now the stakes are visible.
Or:
“Our BGP policies were manually managed on each edge router. That meant any change required touching many devices by hand. We limited ourselves to a small number of changes per month because the blast radius of a mistake was huge. As we added more POPs, this became the bottleneck preventing us from expanding into new regions quickly.”
Now you’ve set up a meaningful problem: your routing design isn’t just “old”; it’s constraining business growth.
Once your problem statement includes who, pain, and cost, every listener can follow why the next part of your story matters.
7. Quantifying Impact: From Intuition to Numbers
This is where a lot of engineers freeze:
“But I don’t know the exact dollar impact… what if my estimates are wrong?”
You’re not writing audited financial statements. You’re trying to distinguish “we think this helps” from “we have no idea.”
Rough numbers, clearly labeled as estimates, are far better than no numbers at all.
Start with what you know:
Incident frequency before and after.
Average resolution times.
Request latency, throughput.
Deployment lead times.
Hours of manual work removed.
Support tickets reduced.
Then map that to cost or benefit:
If on-call engineers spend 30 fewer hours per month resolving incidents, that’s not just quality-of-life—it’s also capacity that can go into feature work.
If you reduce page load time on a high-traffic flow and see conversion tick up by 2%, and the business knows that flow is worth $X/month, you can estimate incremental revenue.
If your change avoids a category of failure that typically led to hours of downtime a few times a year, you can quantify the “risk reduction” as avoided incidents × cost per incident.
Example:
“By automating customer provisioning in the network, we removed about 25 hours of manual work per week across the ops team and eliminated an entire class of fat-finger provisioning errors. That’s roughly one full-time engineer’s worth of effort freed up, plus fewer incidents for the support team.”
Or:
“Our new telemetry-based routing validation caught three misconfigurations in staging that would previously have made it to production. Historically, errors like those caused at least 30 minutes of partial outage. That’s around 1.5 hours of avoided downtime so far, at an estimated cost of $X per hour.”
Will these numbers be perfect? No.
Are they honest, directional, and useful? Yes.
That’s what matters.
8. Communicating Value: How to Tell the Story So It Lands
Now you have all the ingredients: problem, stakes, action, results.
The last step is to package them into a story that humans can absorb.
Here’s a simple pattern you can drop into status updates, performance reviews, or interviews:
Context – who and what this work touched.
Problem – why it was a problem in business terms.
Action – what you (and your team) did, in plain language.
Result – what changed; include numbers.
Next – what this unlocks going forward.
Let’s run a concrete example:
Context:
Our edge network connects customers in multiple regions to our platform. Each new POP we bring online lets us reduce latency and serve more traffic locally.
Problem:
Our BGP routing policies were manually maintained on each edge device. Any change required logging into dozens of routers. That limited how many changes we could safely perform and slowed down onboarding of new POPs. It also increased the risk of inconsistent policy, which could lead to outages or traffic leaks.
Action:
I led the design and implementation of a controller-based route policy system. We modeled desired policy centrally, validated it against RPKI/IRR data, and generated per-device configurations automatically. We added pre-deployment checks and dry-runs to catch mistakes before they hit the network.
Result:
We reduced the time to roll out a global routing policy change from ~3 days to under 2 hours and cut change-related routing incidents from about one per month to near zero over the last two quarters. This allowed the expansion team to bring new POPs online faster and with a much smaller operations overhead.
Next:
With this foundation, we can now safely support more customer-specific routing policies and region-specific optimizations without multiplying operational risk.
That’s a story almost anyone in the org can follow.
It still respects the technical work, but it stays anchored in business impact.
Practice this pattern until it feels natural. It’s one of the highest-leverage communication skills you can develop.
9. Common Traps: How Engineers Accidentally Hide Their Own Value
Even when they do great work, engineers often bury the lead. A few patterns to watch out for:
Trap 1 – Tool worship
“We migrated everything to Kubernetes / SRv6 / Rust / $LATEST.”
Cool. Why?
Corrected version:
“We migrated to Kubernetes so we could standardize deployments, scale horizontally without manual intervention, and use built-in primitives for resilience. As a result, we cut average time-to-recover from node failures from 15 minutes to 2 minutes and reduced manual ops work by X hours per week.”
Trap 2 – Hero narratives
“Production went down at 3 AM and I logged in and fixed it in 10 minutes.”
Short-term hero, long-term hostage.
Better version:
“We had a 3 AM incident. I fixed the immediate issue, then the next day I drove a change to add better telemetry and guardrails so the same class of issue can be automatically detected and mitigated without a human waking up.”
Trap 3 – Shrinking your own work
We all know this one:
“Oh, I just wrote a small script to automate this.”
That “small script” might have removed an entire manual task that wasted hours every week. Don’t oversell, but don’t erase your impact either.
Add one more sentence:
“It only took a few hours to build, but it eliminates about 5 hours of repetitive work per week for the ops team and has already prevented a few manual errors.”
Trap 4 – Jargon walls
When speaking to non-technical folks, saying:
“We added EVPN-based multi-tenancy and implemented gNMI-based telemetry with BMP export for global validation…”
…is the fastest way to end a conversation.
Say instead:
“We separated customer traffic more cleanly and added real-time visibility into routing behavior, which reduces the risk of cross-tenant issues and speeds up debugging.”
You can always go deeper if they ask.
10. Practical Habits: Building a Personal “Impact Log”
Communication gets much easier if you’re not trying to reconstruct twelve months of work from memory the night before your performance review.
One of the simplest, most powerful habits you can build is an impact log.
Once a week, or at least once a month, write down:
What problem you worked on.
Why it mattered (who it affected, what it cost).
What you actually did.
Any measurable or observed outcomes so far.
It doesn’t need to be fancy. A Notion page, Google Doc, or Markdown file works fine.
Entry example:
Date: March 2025
Project: Network provisioning automation
Problem: Manual provisioning of customer VLANs took ~2 days and involved 3 teams. Frequent misconfigurations led to ~2 incidents/month.
Action: Designed and implemented an automated workflow using templates and validations, integrated with the CRM.
Outcome (so far): Provisioning time reduced to ~2 hours. Zero incidents in the last 6 weeks. Ops team reports ~8 hours/week freed up.
This log becomes:
Raw material for performance reviews and promotion packets.
A trove of stories for interviews.
A map of your evolving strengths; what kinds of problems you consistently solve.
Most importantly, it forces you to think in terms of impact while you work, not as an afterthought.
11. The Career-Level Insight: This Is the Difference Between Senior and Principal
At junior levels, most companies evaluate you primarily on technical output:
Did your code work?
Did you fix the bug?
Did you close the tickets?
At mid-level, they start asking:
Did you design the right solution?
Did you work well with the team?
Did you deliver on time?
By the time you’re reaching senior, staff, principal, or similar levels, the question shifts:
“How does this person move the business?”
High-level engineers are expected to:
Pick problems that matter.
See the connection between system behavior and customer outcomes.
Justify investments in engineering work in terms of risk, revenue, cost, or strategic advantage.
Influence other teams and leadership through clear, grounded explanations.
If you can’t explain your work in business terms, you’re stuck arguing for resources with:
“Because it’s the right thing architecturally.”
“Because it’s more elegant.”
“Because the current system is ugly.”
Those arguments might be valid, but they rarely win budget or trust on their own.
Engineers who rise to principal-level influence are the ones who can say:
“Here’s the risk we’re carrying if we don’t fix this.”
“Here’s the upside we unlock if we invest here.”
“Here’s how we know it’s working.”
They don’t stop being deeply technical. They add this layer on top.
And that’s the shift: from mastering technology to mastering impact.
12. Master the Tech. Deliver the Impact. Tell the Story.
Let’s bring this back to where we started.
You already know how hard it is to make good technology:
Building resilient systems, debugging nasty failures, tuning performance, automated tests, and clean architectures. That work matters. It will always matter.
But in the world you’re operating in, it’s not enough.
Technology is just the beginning. Value is the product.
Value not communicated is value lost.
Your job doesn’t end when the code merges, the packets flow, or the pipeline turns green. Your job ends when:
A real business problem is measurably better, and
The people who make decisions understand that connection.
That’s neither marketing nor politics. That’s responsible engineering.
So for your next project, try this:
Before you start, write one paragraph about the business problem.
As you design, write one paragraph about the outcome you want to deliver and how you’ll measure it.
When you finish, write one paragraph about what changed and how you know.
That’s it. Three small paragraphs.
Do that consistently and you’ll start to notice something:
Your updates become clearer.
Your impact becomes easier to see.
Your career conversations become less about “proving you worked hard” and more about “deciding where you can create the most value next.”
Master the tech.
Deliver the impact.
Tell the story.
If you can do all three, you’re not just an engineer anymore.
You’re an engineer the business can’t afford to ignore.
See you in the next episode!
Leonardo Furtado