How to Get Your Tech Team Excited About Business Goals

Want your engineers to care about business outcomes, not just code? Here's how non-technical CEOs and founders can get their tech teams engaged with company goals and product impact.

Aligning your tech teams with the business goals is key to effective delivery

As a non-technical founder or CEO, you might feel like your engineering team is off doing its own thing. You’re thinking about growth, customer retention, and the next funding round, while they’re deep in tickets, pull requests, and infrastructure.

They’re smart, focused, and heads-down building your product, but as a founder or CEO, you might wonder:

“Am I the only one thinking about revenue, churn, and product-market fit?”

“How do I get them to care about what our customers actually want?”

“Do they even know why we’re building this feature?”

You’re not alone, and it's easier than you might think to bridge that gap.

Why Your Engineering Team Feels Disconnected from Business Goals

First off, you’re not imagining the gap, it's pretty common in companies of all sizes and the bigger the company, the bigger the risk of the gap appearing.

It’s easy for engineering teams to feel a bit removed from the rest of the business. They seem really busy and we don't want to disturb them. Or you know exactly what needs building and you don't have enough time to go through everything, so you give them a list of features to build with limited context.

Equally, the team may be under pressure to deliver, or just don't see the relevance, so they skip company wide meetings that would improve their knowledge of the business and connection to the goals.

When both sides get into this pattern, we're inadvertently behaving like we've outsourced our development and the disconnect between engineering teams and the business grows, leading to slow delivery and missed opportunities.

Here’s how to help your engineering team feel connected to your goals and excited about where you’re going as a business.

How to Help Engineers Understand Business Objectives

1. Share the “Why”, Not Just the What

One of the fastest ways to engage engineers is to give context, not just instructions.

Don't just say:

“We need this new dashboard by the end of the sprint.”

Try:

“We’re losing customers because they can’t see their progress, this dashboard helps us improve retention and drive referrals.”

Or even better:

“We’re losing customers because they can’t see their progress. How might we fix that?”

Engineers love solving problems and to do that, they need to understand whose problems they're solving and why it matters.

You know you're on the right track when you start getting alternative suggestions from the team for how to meet the goal that are quicker to implement and still strongly aligned to business priorities.

Here are some more good questions you can ask to improve team alignment with your goals.

2. Bring Business Goals Into Weekly Rituals

If OKRs or company goals only live in a deck shown once a quarter, they won’t shape daily decisions.

Try:

• Starting your weekly product/engineering sync with a brief update or check-in on business priorities

• Framing roadmap discussions in terms of customer or commercial impact

• Having your CTO or product lead echo the goals in sprint planning - every feature should have a clear business goal it's tied to.

  
  

Example: One startup founder I worked with added a “goal spotlight” slide at the top of their bi-weekly all-hands meeting. It took a few minutes to cover off the updates to the goals, and led to more questions, better decisions, and clearer product trade-offs across the board. Making sure to talk about how new features had impacted those goals kept the engineers engaged and showing up.

3. Show the impact of Tech Team work on Business Goals

Engineers rarely get to see the direct results of what they build as they're so focused on building the next features.

Whenever you can:

• Share customer feedback tied to new features

• Show metrics that moved (e.g. “This release reduced churn by 5%!”)

• Invite engineers to join customer interviews or product demos

Nothing builds motivation like knowing your work actually matters. This also creates a strong bond between the customer actions and the tech team work, prompting ideas and suggestions from the team.

4. Ask the Tech Team for their ideas

If your tech team is just taking tickets and executing specs, they’ll disconnect fast, presenting problems they can solve is a much better way to get engagement.

Instead of giving them features to build, given them customer problems and ask:

• “What’s the best way to solve this problem?”

• “Is there a simpler way to do this?”

• “What’s stopping us doing this sooner”

  
  

This not only builds ownership, it also leads to better solutions and ideas you may never have considered.

If the suggestions you get back are way off base, it's likely the team needs more context. Consider getting curious about why they've made a suggestion to uncover knowledge gaps and misunderstandings.

Final Thought

You don’t need to hype or hustle your engineers into caring about the business.

You just need to give them the context, visibility, and trust to connect their work to the bigger picture.

When you do, you’ll get more than just features delivered, faster you’ll get a team that’s genuinely invested in your company’s success.

📌 Need help making this shift in your team? I work with CEOs and Tech Teams to strengthen alignment, improve delivery, and bring product and engineering closer to the business.

👉 Let’s chat about what’s getting in the way.