From a money sink to a cash cow

This is how you turn a tech team into a growth engine that boosts revenue, saves costs, and enables product innovation.

Let’s start by looking at a scenario I’ve seen often.

You’ve built a B2C company, and after a few years, you’ve gotten solid traction. The sales are up yearly, and your team is growing.

But it becomes challenging to keep that growth up.

You built custom software, took a few shortcuts, and incurred tech debt to get to this point.

Because the departments have grown, they have a larger appetite for tech resources.

More customers also means more customer support and manual interventions to keep things running smoothly.

The result is a lot of pressure on the tech team, and things start to slide.

Product features are delayed, people are overworked, and as a lead, you can’t take a vacation without packing your laptop.

This results from a growing divide between what the business needs and the tech team does.

The tech team is the most expensive department, but it barely covers their salaries.

It may sound like a bad situation, but it is also an opportunity. Most companies go through this phase.

Successful companies figure out how to turn it around.

Here is the framework:

First, you must relieve the tech team from having to jump on “urgent” tasks. Cut, streamline, and let a few fires burn. 🔥

  1. **Get uber-efficient at customer support. **Document common issues and create blueprints. Add an on-duty rotation. Increase the tech team’s knowledge. Find bottlenecks between customer support and tech.
  2. **Align the tech team with the goals of other departments. **Marketing needs a landing page, a new campaign, and analytics exports. Find out what they need. How often. Create a process around it. Make it smooth. Do the same for accounting, logistics, etc.
  3. **Start managing your tech debt. **Tech debt is a tool. But too much of it can slash your progress. Manage it. No full rewrites. Be pragmatic about how to add new functionality.

If you do that well, you just **carved out time **for the tech team to work on strategically important initiatives.

  1. **Get good at CEO <> CTO alignment around business goals. **Those are your north stars and help you motivate the tech team by sharing them with the team.
  2. **Improve collaboration with the product team. **Now that you’ve carved out some time to work on strategic stuff, you need to find what is worth moving into development. Ideally, it is supported by numbers.
  3. **Start leaning on data. **The tech team has an incredible amount of data at their disposal. That is solid gold you can mine to boost CLTV or drive more sales. It’s tech’s job to enable other departments to tap into that resource.

If this sounds like a lot, it is. But it’s also an evolution over time as you slowly get better. I’ve seen big improvements in the company’s adoption of these practices.

The thing is…

It’s not just the tech team that needs to improve; it can also be a driver of change.

The role of the CTO is to translate from business to tech. Then, shape the tech team and define interfaces for other departments to work with them efficiently.

Plus, it’s time to break down the silos if your structure looks like this: all programmers in the same box, all marketers in the same box, and all product teams in the same box.

Creating cross-functional teams that can go from idea to production will run circles around the ping-ponging silo structure any day of the week.

Have a fantastic weekend,

Taj

P.S. Summer is a bit slow, so I’m giving away 5 free private calls with me to give you advice on a specific business challenge ($300 value**). All I ask in return is feedback and a testimonial for my website if I do a good job and you feel comfortable. Simply reply to this email with “I’m in!” and I’ll send you a Calendly invite.

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