Technical Skills Alone Won't Make You Invaluable: Why Business Acumen Is a Software Engineer's Secret Weapon
Why KPI might be the hottest programming language to learn
I just read Matthias Endler's article on the traits of the best programmers he knows. It's a great article from an open source vet and he covers important points about reading documentation, continuous learning, and breaking down problems. But in my opinion, he missed something crucial: great programmers understand business problems, not just technical ones.
1. Think Like a Product Manager
Great engineers have product management skills because product management is fundamentally about understanding users.
They don't rely on secondhand remarks from a PM. They pore over the analytics, observe real users, conduct their own interviews, and build empathy for customer problems. The engineer who spends an afternoon watching five users struggle with a feature will make better decisions than one who spends a month refactoring code nobody complains about. The Amazon team that built the one-click purchase button didn't do it because it was an interesting programming challenge. They did it because they measured how many sales were lost in a multi-step checkout and understood the business impact of reducing friction.
Engineers without product sense build solutions nobody wants. Even worse, they overengineer code that nobody asked for.
2. Learn What Drives Revenue
Smart engineers know which metrics pay their salary.
If you don't understand CAC, LTV, and conversion rates, you're just a cost center. When you propose a new feature, frame it in terms of business impact, not technical interest. At Twitch, engineers who understood viewer engagement metrics built features that directly increased watch time and ad revenue. Their colleagues who didn't were relegated to maintenance work.
Companies optimize for profit, not code elegance.
3. Ship Beats Perfect
A flawed product that earns money today beats a perfect one that ships next year.
Recognize when to accumulate technical debt strategically. Instagram launched with a fraction of the features they planned because they knew market timing mattered more than completeness. Startups that wait for perfect die while messy competitors capture the market. Facebooks' early code certainly wasn't pretty. But it worked when it needed to.
The market doesn't reward what you could have built.
4. Align With Company Strategy
Engineers who understand business strategy get resources and recognition.
If you know the three-year plan, you'll make technical choices that support it rather than fight it. The most successful engineers I've known don't just attend strategy meetings—they shape them. They connect technical possibilities to business opportunities in ways non-technical executives can't. Their value isn't in writing code that works, but in writing code that matters.
Strategic engineers build moats, not monuments.
5. More important than ever in an AI-Assisted World
Technical coding skills alone are becoming commoditized.
When AI assistants can generate functional code quickly, you need additional differentiators to remain valuable. Understanding business problems and translating them into technical solutions becomes your competitive advantage. Engineers who combine technical competence with business acumen can direct AI tools toward meaningful outcomes while others merely produce code without purpose. The most successful engineers today use AI to handle routine tasks like documentation and unit tests, freeing their mental bandwidth to focus on product strategy and user value creation.
Don't get me wrong, deep understanding of code and architecture is still highly valuable and necessary, maybe now more than ever in this landscape of vibe coders and AI app builders like Replit. But there is a ton of value in knowing which code matters to the business.
Technical skills are incredibly important. But they cannot be the only lens through which to view things because as an engineer you are always constrained by time and cost. Too many engineers sacrifice shipping at the altar of Clean Code and Clean Architecture. Business acumen gets you to the next level of your career, or even better - unlocks the ability to build and launch your own product.