Why engineers who can name the business outcome make better calls, and how technology leaders build that knowledge An engineer who knows what the company is trying to do, and who the work reaches, makes better decisions without being told. Strategy decks don’t build that knowledge. Stories do, along with a few habits that keep the business in front of the team. It matters more now that AI writes a growing share of the code, because judgment about what matters is the part of t

What a CEO gets from the technology organization once AI decisions move to the top AI decisions have moved to the CEO’s desk, and in most companies the technology organization hasn’t moved with them. The result is one of three outcomes: fast and ungoverned, governed and slow, or fast and governed. Only fast and governed holds up at scale, and it depends on one condition: technology leaders who know what the company is trying to do well enough to shape AI decisions before the

Why cost alone no longer decides build vs. buy, and the five questions that do AI coding tools made building software cheaper, and that tempts companies to treat build vs. buy as a cost comparison that building now wins. A cost comparison leaves out what decides most of these calls: what one bad output costs, how long a qualified person needs to review AI-generated code, and whether the vendor’s price will last. Make the call one capability at a time, and most systems come ou