Not All Business Value Is Customer Value
Some of my most experienced engineers hate it when I talk about continuous business value.
They start listing off all the ways that kind of thinking has led to shoddy decisions in the past: rushed features, broken systems, half-baked ideas that never had time to mature. To them, "business value" smells like short-termism. It feels like a disdain for strategy, for product health, for long-term bets that matter.
I get it. I’ve seen the same messes.
But I also think we need to have a deeper conversation. Because when I ask for business value, I’m not asking teams to ship low-quality work fast. I’m asking them to hold themselves to a higher bar: to understand and articulate why the work matters, and to ensure that we’re delivering that value continuously, even when the value isn’t a shiny new feature.
For me, business value means anything that moves us forward in a meaningful, demonstrable way. That includes features. But it also includes de-risking work, internal efficiency improvements, and visibility that helps others operate more effectively. The trick is seeing it, and prioritizing well.
Three Cases That Challenge the Frame
Here are three scenarios where business value feels ambiguous:
1. Internal inefficiencies.
These include developer friction, brittle data models, unreliable environments. But they also show up across the business: finance teams struggling with inaccurate revenue attribution, GTM teams stuck with outdated dashboards, or support teams lacking tools to resolve issues quickly. These inefficiencies don’t ship features, but they cost us time, morale, and momentum.
2. Big long-term projects.
Some work is clearly valuable but takes months or years to deliver. The team might have a vision, but nothing to show for a while. That disconnect can create anxiety, misalignment, and missed opportunities.
3. Experimental or uncertain work.
Research, data science, and first-time explorations often have ambiguous timelines and outcomes. It’s hard to promise deliverables—and harder to tie them to value.
Two Reframes That Help
When teams struggle to show value, I lean on two principles:
Efficiency is business value.
Internal teams are customers too. When leaders can’t see progress, when support has to build manual workarounds, when GTM can’t iterate quickly—that’s a business cost.
Developer friction, data issues, inefficient workflows—all of these create invisible drag. If fixing the platform saves hundreds of hours or improves quality in a measurable way, that’s business value. It just doesn’t always look like a launch.
De-risking is business value.
Uncertainty is expensive. If no one knows whether a project will take three weeks or three years, product can’t plan, sales can’t commit, and leadership can’t align.
But if you say, “In four weeks, we can validate the direction or eliminate the biggest unknown,” you’re delivering something powerful: clarity.
There are levels to this:
Best de-risking: Deliver real value that creates feedback on the riskiest part of the work—direction, feasibility, or viability.
Second-best: Deliver adjacent value that increases confidence, even if not central.
Third: Deliver a working vertical slice that proves integration and flow.
At Kard, we recently did some ML analysis on our transaction data. The long-term vision is customer-facing, but uncertainty was high. So we delivered early results to our GTM team. They used it for sales and reporting, and gave us expert feedback that sharpened our direction. It moved the business directly forward—GTM had a powerful new tool—and indirectly, by shaping our path to the future. That’s business value.
And not all de-risking delivers equally. If de-risking is your framing, then you need to prioritize accordingly: Is the end goal worth the effort? Is this the best way to reduce uncertainty? Will it generate reliable feedback on the most critical path? If not, the value might not justify the investment.
(I talk about how I approach this in a previous post: Face the Risks First.)
Closing Thoughts: Still a Pain (With Purpose)
This is why I push for business value at least every few weeks. And in many cases—especially in customer-facing work—I expect to see it much faster. Some teams deliver value in days. Sometimes even hours. That’s not always possible, but it’s a worthy target.
If you’re doing customer-facing work, deliver something useful sooner. If it’s internal work, show how it removes friction. If it’s experimental, prove it helps us see more clearly.
The worst case is work that delivers neither value nor learning. That’s churn, not progress.
But when every team can say, “Here’s what we delivered, here’s who it helped, and here’s what it unlocked next”—that’s when R&D hums.
I’ll always be a pain about incremental customer value. That’s where the deepest leverage is. But I’m also ready to back off—if the team shows that it’s delivering real efficiency or clarity.
Business value is bigger than features. But it still has to be real. If we can see it clearly and deliver it intentionally, then even in uncertainty, we’re building momentum, confidence, and trust.
That’s value worth shipping every time.
