Date & time
17:00
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Engineering leaders know the work that matters: modernizing CI, retiring legacy systems, improving test reliability, investing in developer productivity. Yet many of these initiatives stall at the executive table. Not because the ideas are wrong, but because they’re presented in the wrong language.
Executives evaluate decisions through business lenses – risk, opportunity cost, customer impact, and strategic fit. Engineers typically present through a technical one. The result is a translation gap where strong ideas fail to gain traction and technical debt quietly grows.
In this interactive workshop, CircleCI CTO Rob Zuber shares how executives actually evaluate engineering proposals and how to frame your initiatives in terms leadership understands.
Through real-world examples and exercises, you’ll learn how to turn technical priorities into clear, compelling business cases that move forward.
By the end of this session, you’ll be able to:
- Translate engineering priorities into executive language
Frame initiatives like improving CI reliability or adopting AI tooling in terms of risk, opportunity cost, and customer impact. - Reduce perceived risk using decision frameworks
Use the one-way vs two-way door decision model to clarify reversibility and accelerate approvals. - Pitch technical initiatives with confidence
Structure proposals that anticipate executive concerns and position experimentation as low-risk progress.
