How Thinking Like a CEO Made Me a Better Engineer
You know that moment when your CEO or salesperson starts explaining some part of the product and you think to yourself:
“This guy is bullshitting again.”
This won’t be the usual post where I explain 73 ways to communicate your ideas better.
Instead, I want to show why learning to think like a CEO can make you a better engineer.
Because you actually know how things function. You know how everything is connected. You know the purpose of the product!
Or do you?
Recently, we had a meeting in our company where we were supposed to explain why we are migrating to a monorepo architecture.
I thought I was clever. I thought that telling them how we would be able to ship fixes and changes much faster was surely the correct way!
As I listed my brilliant 10x, 100x, and 1000x improvements, I still saw confused faces. But why? Wasn’t this the right way?
The problem was: I was communicating the outcome, not the purpose.
My colleague mentioned afterwards:
“We need to make a unified platform for all devices.”
At that moment, I saw a few clapping emojis appearing in Google Meet. Why tf?
Well, the context is that one of the top priorities in our company was going mobile-first, as our customer base uses mobile devices almost 99% of the time. This is why it clicked for them. The outcomes fit into the bigger picture.
And at this moment it clicked for me too! I am not making something 5x better and 2x cheaper; I am working on fulfilling the goal of the company.
“Moving to a monorepo would allow us to ship to all devices faster.” That was the correct framing.
The form is: Proposed change + How it relates to company goals.
This did two things for me:
1. It made me realise how to communicate and “sell” our work to non-tech people.
2. I started reshaping our product into something much greater.
Instead of being a cog in the wheel, just implementing and working on technical improvements, I was the person shaping the product!
I wasn’t just implementing features anymore. I was helping reshape our product from a presentation tool into a sales tool and changing how users experienced it.
Think about it: the CEO knows the market, the people, and the overall direction.
The CEO doesn’t have a feeling for what good UX is. He doesn’t know what being “mobile-first” is. He doesn’t know what makes a tech product good to use for your customer base.
The engineer knows this. This is what makes an engineer valuable in the age of AI.
You can tell AI to improve the performance of your app, and all frontier AI agents will succeed at that.
But tell AI to make your interface more pleasing for users to use, and watch what a shitshow it will produce.
In those terms, both AI and a CEO are way worse at shaping and improving a tech product than a software engineer.
After this, I started thinking more about what our clients in real estate need.
- I became much more excited about some “boring” fixes in our code because I was working toward a long-term goal.
- I started architecting and proposing solutions that would totally change the product direction in the practical sense.
We went from a visual presentation tool to an actual selling tool for real estate.
Obstacles
I know this might not apply to everybody, since they are not working in startups, but with this approach you can climb the ladder even in larger companies.
Start bringing ideas with detailed explanations of why they will improve the product, and watch how your career improves.
If people don’t recognise that, consider starting a search for another company…
How to apply CEO thinking
Research: specific and challenging goals can improve performance, while meaningful work increases motivation and engagement. In software organizations, alignment around shared values is also associated with greater effectiveness, trust, and job satisfaction (Locke & Latham, 2002; Hu & Hirsh, 2017; Lenberg et al., 2018).
The goal is not to turn engineers into passive executors of business strategy. It is to give them enough context to make better decisions independently.
From now on, when working on a new feature, think about “the bigger picture”.
What do users actually need?
What makes the experience better for users in the solution I am implementing?
What are our company goals?
This will make you come up with ideas and solutions you never even thought were possible, and it will make you a lot more motivated.
Your CEO will also give you a promotion!