Why Tech & Business Don't Speak the Same Language and How to Fix It

Many technical leaders receive feedback early in their careers that their inability to translate between technical and business contexts may be holding their organizations back from achieving full potential. As one of my mentors told me,

I've been reflecting on this theme of "lost in translation" while preparing for my panel at Super Return Berlin, considering tech's interactions across business, regulators, media, and academia. I've concluded that translation failures are a symptom of structural issues, and diagnosing these core structural components is the only way to address this gap meaningfully and actionably.

Across industries, tech plays widely different roles. Sometimes, it's tertiary—purely operational. Other times, its central product is tech, and tech is the business.

I see most archetypes of organizational dysfunction fall between two distinct, yet equally detrimental, extremes:

• Category 1: The Tech-Centric Strategic Misalignment. In these enterprises, where technology occupies a central strategic position, there's a discernible prioritization of internal "build metrics" within technical functions. Concurrently, revenue-generating teams frequently commit to external client features that deviate significantly from, or entirely predate, the established product roadmap. This invariably generates tension, manifesting as persistent disagreement between technical leadership and business units regarding strategic priorities and the very definitions of success.

• Category 2: The Under-Resourced Transformational Mandate. This category encompasses organizations where technology historically operated as a back-office utility. These previously support-oriented teams are now tasked with spearheading enterprise-level digital transformation initiatives, often without the requisite executive mandate, budgetary allocation, or seasoned leadership capacity.

  
  

On average, it takes 2.6 years for a tech company to reach $5 million in revenue since seed round. For deep tech companies, this is 35% longer and also requires 48% more investment over the same period. Even in established, well-resourced enterprises, over 70% of tech-driven transformations fail. Despite these hurdles, technology has an undeniable power to improve our lives. The technical and societal challenges are hard enough. If we can accelerate progress and reduce failure rates by addressing these preventable structural issues, it's in everyone's best interest to do so

In this note, I will focus on common organizational dysfunctions and effective solutions from my practice that could be of help in Category 1: The Tech-Centric Strategic Misalignment.

1. Homogeneous Decision-Making Groups

A high degree of homogeneity in an organization's decision-making groups is a recurring factor explaining why communication gaps persist between technical and business teams.

Consider Apple's Newton in the 90s. Designed as a new handheld device with handwriting recognition, it presented exciting technical challenges—Apple even solved major battery, size and architecture hurdles. Yet, the product failed because handwriting recognition simply didn't work in practice. Steve Jobs famously quipped, 'God gave us ten styluses.' In technically heavy leadership teams: the thrill of solving complex problems, can overshadow whether a solution genuinely addresses a problem, or if the problem even exists.

In business-heavy leadership teams, the fear of losing market share or over-optimism about revenue potential can lead to underweighting conflicting or cautionary data. When competitors launch fun features that get media attention and early user interest, it’s easy to make quick decisions that may not pan out. Twitter Fleets was an interesting feature that allowed users to post disappearing content, similar to Instagram Stories and Snapchat. But Twitter users didn’t engage with the platform that way, and the feature was retired within a year.

Both of these mindsets tend to trickle down to the respective organizations.

Practical approaches to consider:

In many contexts, especially at the point of scale, the ability to drive success cross-functionally can be more important than technical brilliance or pure business acumen.

Another tangent to explore is diversifying the leadership talent pool with leaders whose key strength is driving cross-functional alignment. I recommend looking for leadership talent in unusual places where technology and complexity commingle, such as public sector tech roles. Typically, successful leaders have had to wrangle an army of competing priorities and departments to drive results, often at a higher degree of complexity and scrutiny than private tech firms. A cross-functional leader also tends to level the playing field of decision-making, thus ensuring that tradeoffs are informed by historically underrepresented business functions (safety, security, compliance), minimizing long-term operational risks.

2. Misaligned Incentives

When technical teams are measured by features shipped or lines of code, and business teams are evaluated purely on revenue targets, a fundamental disconnect emerges. Especially in mid-size firms, I've worked with technical organizations that have built ad-hoc features that do not integrate well into the overall product or value proposition, simply because sales teams promised those features to close a deal. It's also at a mid-size scale that tech teams with aggressive velocity metrics prioritize hitting those without necessarily focusing on commercial impact. At this stage of growth, the overarching strategy and north stars are either undefined or defined but poorly communicated, resulting in a focus on output rather than outcome.

Practical approaches to consider:

Pre-mortems: Bring the key business and tech talent into a room with the following scenario: "You have failed in achieving your goal metrics for the next 6 months." Brainstorm why this could happen. Since there is no actual failure on the horizon, this approach builds a high amount of psychological safety between the organizations in question, leading to thoughtful discussions and clarifications on each other's viewpoints before things have failed. In addition to aligning incentives, a well-run pre-mortem leads to practical, actionable understanding of each other’s worlds and the pressures they face.

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are a good way to track progress against a single organizational dashboard and work well for product and sales teams. Over 65% of employees in companies using OKRs agree they have a better understanding of their company's strategic goals, vision, and mission, compared to 46% without.

Classic mistakes I have seen here in using OKRs are:

• Business-heavy leadership teams defining OKRs so granularly that technical teams are not empowered to execute creatively. While company-level OKRs are set by business leadership, effective OKR adoption must involve significant bottom-up contribution (around 50-60%) where teams define their own OKRs aligned with the broader company goals

• Technical teams writing OKRs that don't translate into value to the end customer because OKRs are tied into performance measurement without appropriate context

• Insisting on OKRs for teams whose work is reactive in nature or has limited meaningful quantifiable markers that map to bimonthly/quarterly cycles. Using a product-centric view may not always be the right decision for the entire organization, especially for policy-esque functions.

• No meaningful cross functional org wide transparent check-ins on where OKRs stand once they are set or on the flip side too frequent check-ins

  
  

3. Wild West Organizational Structures

Even with a diverse leadership team, if departments operate in silos and information doesn’t flow freely, breakdowns occur.

Customer operations might know user pain points intimately, but that feedback never reaches the product team. Market research might surface clear needs, but those signals don’t make it into engineering priorities. The Engagement vs. User Safety debate in digital platforms is a classic example of misaligned incentives, often exacerbated by such structural issues.

Practical approaches to consider:

Ultimately, you will "ship your org structure," no matter what cross-functional organizational gymnastics you do. All org structures will come with problems. But what you can do is ensure that the structure is optimized for the primary metrics you, as a business, care about.

Based on the size, scale, and geographical footprint of the organization, it might also be worth considering building in a translation layer of technically aware business analysts who can bridge the gap between technical and business functions through strategic thinking, and helping all stakeholders achieve their goals through customer-focused analytical rigor. Historically, this translation layer has engaged in driving prioritization discussions, creating product requirement documents, and getting projects “pushed through.” With the opportunities now available to automate a chunk of rote admin work that entails this role (such as writing docs, running analytics for business cases), these roles can now play a strategic function, provided the long-term business, hiring, and talent strategy for the organization supports the need for such a function. The benefits are:

1. First-line tech talent is fully utilized on addressing tech challenges driven by business intent, without the added pressure of attending numerous cross-functional reviews or customer calls.

2. Creating scalability for the problem-solution-revenue chain as more product offerings are created.

3. This layer can eventually grow to fill in strategic leadership pipeline for the organization.

   
   
   
   

Why Aren’t These Dysfunctions Remedied or Prevented?

• Early-stage momentum often masks issues: Fast-growing companies see exponential growth, launch innovative features, and hit big numbers. Discussions are quick, momentum is high.

• Lack of incentive for structure: As long as top-line metrics soar, there's little reason to define roles, responsibilities, or processes. Who wants "admin" when you're crushing it with significant growth numbers quarter after quarter, launching innovative features that speak directly to customer needs. ?

• Maturation brings growing pains: Typically around 8 headcounts per function, roles like compliance, legal, and cybersecurity become crucial. This is when structure, cadence, and process are desperately needed.

When growth is great, process and documentation of goals' progress is often looked at as “admin.” Having spent a significant chunk of my career in tech, I can tell you how everyone hated having to fill in their mandatory OKRs and get sign-off for every smallest change from 4+ stakeholders—more if it touched on geopolitical or regulatory risks.

These corrections happen because (among many other factors):

1. There is a need for continuous improvement as growth slows.

2. There are public relations nightmares requiring tectonic changes to operations.

3. There is a crisis point in the business due to something failing.

   
   

This maturation of the technical function does not have to be without joy. This can be diagnosed early and intervention checkpoints built in.

So What Can Private Equity Firms Do?

Accurate due diligence data and performance diagnostics are often elusive, especially in deep tech. This necessitates a strategic approach grounded in experimentation, particularly given the rarity and cost of truly hybrid technical and business leaders who fit the mission, and help close the gap between tech and business.

Here's how Private Equity firms can proactively drive value:

1. Focus on Holistic Diagnosis, Not Limited to Changing Leadership and Tech Due Diligence Checklists

Before deploying capital, conduct an objective diagnostic of the technical assets and organisation, ideally in parallel to tech due diligence. This diagnostic should operate in two modes:

1. Outside-in (using only public information, conversations with entities with historic relationships with the entity/organisation in question). This can be kickstarted early in the process.

2. Inside-out (leveraging internal, non-public data)

Assess the technical organization across three critical dimensions:

• People: Do tech leaders own value outcomes, or just projects?

• Process: Is there a structured way to align tech delivery with commercial goals?

• Product: Is the architecture scalable, secure, and adaptable for future growth?

  
  

Two critical contextual variables complete this assessment:

• Investment Requirement: How much capability-building and resource allocation is truly needed to bridge current gaps?

• Change Appetite: Is the existing leadership willing and able to drive the necessary shifts,?

  
  

Relying primarily on a new leader without prior structural diagnosis often extends the time to impact, as they're forced to dedicate significant effort to diagnosis rather than immediate execution. This can be quantified by the number of reorganizations the new leader instigates, each change causing friction and churn.

2. A holistic diagnostic integrates commercial due diligence and technical insights, revealing critical interdependencies often overlooked in isolated assessments.

2. This insight reframed the value-creation focus: rationalizing the technical architecture and implementing targeted talent retention strategies for high-risk segments.

   This also presented an opportunity: risks translate to discounted prices, and risks that are easily fixed represent unlocked value.

3. Furthermore, a holistic assessment of technical capabilities yields additional value beyond immediate problem-solving. By proactively examining areas like cybersecurity and product safety (a strategic step beyond compliance) as part of tech due diligence, PE firms can uncover insights into previously unconsidered opportunities and risks, significantly enhancing overall portfolio value and resilience.

   
   

2. Assess Organizational Appetite for Change.

By combining the outside-in mode and inside-out mode of the diagnostic, ideally at due diligence, the sponsor starts off with a strong foundation to move to the next step -- organizational appetite for change. Traditional staff performance reviews often provide a noisy signal with limited relevance to a value creation strategy. Instead, building a robust measurement of change appetite is a valuable tool, using multi-pronged approaches that can include (context dependent):

• Organizational Network Analysis (ONA): To identify informal structures that influence how information, trust, and influence flow within the organization.

• Structured Interviews: Conduct targeted interviews with key stakeholders across functions and levels.

• Digital Twin Simulation: Employ modeling to understand the potential impact of proposed changes before full implementation.

  
  

3. Define Clear Intervention Points and Success Metrics

Integrate these triggers directly into the management strategy from the outset.

These precise inputs create a clear operating map for intervention, based on success metrics defined together with the leadership team:

• Low appetite, high investment: Signals a need for major changes in the technical talent pool across levels. Revisit timelines for operational realism

• High appetite, low investment: Suggests upskilling and governance support.

• High appetite, high investment: Requires proceeding with caution and oversight.

• Low appetite, low investment: Demands containing transformation scope or reassessing the investment thesis.

  
  

  
  

Ultimately, the ability to effectively sell technology's value across the enterprise is an organizational imperative. The "lost in translation" phenomenon is a symptom of solvable structural problems which should be diagnosed proactively and early during/in parallel to tech due diligence, not an inherent flaw in technical or business thinking.

For private equity firms, this translates to more robust due diligence and value creation. For growing companies, it means a smoother, more sustainable path to scale.

And for all of us, it means ensuring that technology's immense power for good is fully realized.