Early in my career I walked into a leadership meeting proud of a number. We had hit 99.95 percent uptime. I said it like it should earn applause. What I got was a polite nod and a follow-up question I could not answer well: "so did that change anything for the customers or the revenue." I had brought a technical fact to a business conversation, and it landed like a foreign language.
That moment reshaped how I communicate up the chain. Executives are not being dismissive when your metrics do not move them. They are simply responsible for a different set of outcomes, and uptime, latency, and error rates are inputs they cannot act on directly. Their currency is revenue, risk, cost, and customer trust. If you cannot connect your work to one of those, you will keep losing arguments to people who can, even when you are technically right.
So now I translate. Instead of "we reduced p99 latency by 200 milliseconds," I say "checkout is fast enough now that we stopped losing the customers who were abandoning slow carts." Instead of "we have technical debt in the billing system," I say "the billing system is fragile enough that a single bad deploy could stop us invoicing for a day, and here is what that costs." Same facts, but framed in the language the decision-maker actually uses to decide.
This is not dumbing things down, and it is not spin. It is respecting that a CFO's job is not to understand your architecture, and your job includes making the stakes legible to them. The engineers who get budget and support are rarely the most brilliant ones. They are the ones who can explain why a brilliant technical decision is also a good business decision, in terms a non-engineer can defend to their own boss.
The flip side matters too. When I learned to speak in business terms, I also started hearing the business better. Half the "irrational" priorities from above turned out to be perfectly rational once I understood the risk or the deadline driving them. The translation goes both ways, and the people who do it fluently are the ones who stop feeling like IT is at war with the rest of the company.
– Serguey Shinder
