Understanding and Speaking to Business Value

Introduction

Technical professionals often focus on how something works rather than why it matters. Speaking to business value means translating technical work into outcomes that business stakeholders care about—revenue, cost savings, competitive advantage, risk reduction, and customer satisfaction.

Why This Skill Matters

Technical explanations without business context make you seem disconnected from business goals. Business value framing demonstrates strategic thinking, justifies investments, secures buy-in, and positions you as a partner rather than a vendor.

Core Principles

1. Connect to business outcomes - Revenue, cost, risk, competitive position, customer value
2. Quantify when possible - Numbers are more compelling than adjectives
3. Speak their language - Business terms, not technical jargon
4. Focus on "so what?" - Why does this matter to the business?
5. Tie to strategic goals - How does this support what executives care about?

Good Examples

Technical: "We're implementing Redis caching to optimize database query performance."

Business Value: "This improvement will reduce page load time from 3 seconds to under 1 second. Research shows that each second of delay costs 7% in conversions, so this could increase revenue by approximately 14% on current traffic—roughly $280K annually based on your current conversion rates."

Technical: "We should refactor the authentication system."

Business Value: "Refactoring authentication will reduce our security vulnerability surface, lowering the risk of costly data breaches. Given that the average breach in our industry costs $4M, this investment of $20K to strengthen our security posture has strong ROI from a risk management perspective."

Tips

1. Always ask yourself: "So what? Why does this matter to the business?"
2. Learn key business metrics for your clients: revenue, CAC, LTV, churn, etc.
3. Quantify impact when possible—even rough estimates are better than none
4. Connect technical decisions to business outcomes
5. Use business language: competitive advantage, risk mitigation, cost savings, revenue growth
6. Understand client's business model—how do they make money?
7. Frame technical work in terms of customer value
8. Study how business leaders talk about initiatives

Connection to Other Skills

Foundational for executive communication, connecting decisions to ROI, justifying recommendations, understanding business context, bridging vision and reality, and building long-term relationships with business stakeholders.

Action Items

• For current project, write business value statement for each major feature
• Learn key business metrics for your client's industry
• Practice translation: technical → business value
• Before recommendations, ask: "What business outcome does this serve?"
• Study client's business model—how do they make money?