Should your business be connected to the delivery?

A comment under one of my posts last week, about the importance of connecting delivery to business outcomes and metrics, raised a very fair question: What about the business? Shouldn’t it also be connected to delivery?

Absolutely. It should.

This is exactly why the CTO role is crucial for any organization. Even a small business has the same fundamental requirement as a multi-billion-dollar company listed on the NYSE. The scale may differ. The frequency may differ. But the depth of the question and the importance of getting it right do not.

Yes, business must be connected to delivery. However, it may surprise some of my engineering colleagues: not in the way they expect.

Technology exists to serve and support business purposes. Business should not be constrained by delivery. But that does not mean engineering must magically implement every stakeholder wish. It means business expectations must be realistic. Planning must be based on proven information, validated capacity, and known constraints, not on assumptions or optimistic promises.

That is what technology and delivery leadership are for.

Every mature delivery approach, from PMBoK to DevOps’s CALMS, places responsibility on engineering to manage expectations and provide clarity, transparency, and guardrails around what is feasible. Scrum goes even further by explicitly naming courage, focus, and respect as essential traits. These are not soft values. They are operational requirements if engineering is to serve the business responsibly.

In my experience, “business disconnected from delivery” rarely starts with business ignoring engineers. More often, it begins when engineering skips the hard steps: managing expectations, making constraints visible, and establishing accountability across stakeholders.

That work is not easy. It requires maturity and courage.

And this is precisely where the CTO role becomes relevant. Every business, even the smallest one, needs an engineering team that can clearly define what is realistic under current conditions, manage expectations where it is not, and provide grounded input into business planning, the input based on capacity, constraints, and reality. A team brave enough to speak openly and stay focused on outcomes.

And every business needs leadership that deliberately builds that capability.

If this approach to building an engineering team that truly collaborates on business outcomes resonates with you, feel free to get in touch. That’s what I’ve been helping companies do for the past 25 years.