You can build something brilliant and still watch it die because you can’t explain why anyone should care.
The best feature in the room loses to the clearest sentence in the room. Every time. A worse product with a sharper pitch takes the deal, wins the budget, closes the fundraise; while the better tool sits there, untouched.
Here’s the trap: most engineers spend 90% of their time talking about what they built. But the person holding the budget doesn’t buy what you built. They buy what it does for them.
I use a simple process to fix this, to help founders translate a technical feature into something an executive actually cares about. I call it the 5 Translations of TECH VALUE.
Every technical feature has four more levels of value stacked on top of it:
The 5 Translations: each rung turns what you built into something the reader values more.
How to use it
Say you’re building a platform for operational monitoring of AI systems, using logging and audit trails. Run it up the rungs:
1. Technical feature: what did you actually build? A tool providing comprehensive logging and audit trails.
2. Capability: what can it do? Track every system action and data access.
3. Advantage: why is that valuable? Instantly identify who did what, and when.
4. Benefit: how does it make life better? Prevent and investigate security incidents 10x faster.
5. Business Impact: what’s the dollar value? Save $1M a year in security response costs.
The engineer lives on rung one. The executive you’re pitching lives on rung five. Value is defined by their rung, not yours.
Customers don’t want a product. They want an outcome.
Which way do you move?
It depends on what you’re doing
- Building? Climb up. You start with the feature and have to earn your way to the impact.
- Selling? Start at the top. Lead with the impact and prove the feature only if they ask.
What you built
Here’s the part worth screenshotting. How high you can climb tells you what you actually made:
- Stuck at capability? You built a feature.
- Reached advantage? You built a solution.
- Reached benefit? You built a product.
- Reached business impact? You built a business.
How many of your features survive all four translations?
Happy Translating!
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