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Many CTOs and tech leaders still believe the purpose of an engineering team is simply to deliver the product roadmap. That view is not only wrong, it’s dangerous: it relegates engineering to a mere supplier role—with Product and Business as the “internal clients”—and therefore to a cost center. Yet engineering can and should be a profit center, able to deliver value directly to the company, provided tech leaders focus on its true purpose.
To understand that role, start from the fundamental purpose of a company: to generate profit. A company may have a vision, ambition, and mission, but its purpose remains to generate profit. Otherwise it will go out of business. There are two levers to achieve profit: increase revenue and/or reduce (or control) costs. For a software vendor, that means acquiring new customers (new features, infrastructure scalability), selling more to existing customers (functional extensions, upsell)*, and reducing churn (greater stability, better experience). On the cost side, the challenge is to produce more value with the same number of developers, rather than growing headcount indefinitely**.
In that context, the purpose of an engineering team is clear:
In other words, an engineering team’s performance rests on three essential pillars: Quality, Velocity, Added Value.
How Engineering directly impacts profitability
By shipping high-quality features quickly and driving strong user engagement, the engineering team directly contributes to both levers of profitability: revenue growth and cost efficiency.
- Increase revenue through new features: every well-designed feature delivered on time can either help acquire new customers (e.g., a missing integration that opens a new market segment) or increase ARPU through upsells and additional sales to existing customers.
- Reduce churn by improving quality: a stable, high-performing, and intuitive platform reduces customer frustration and increases retention. In a SaaS model, reducing churn by just one or two percentage points often has a greater impact on profitability than new sales.
- Accelerate velocity to build a competitive edge: a team that ships faster than its competitors shortens its time to market and captures market share sooner. Moreover, higher velocity allows faster experimentation and iteration, increasing the likelihood of building features that achieve true commercial success.
- Control development costs: producing more value with the same team means generating growth without linearly increasing headcount. Engineering becomes a margin lever—better productivity per developer means every euro (or dollar) invested in R&D yields more return.
In short: quality, velocity, and user engagement aren’t just internal technical metrics—they’re direct levers of profitability for the company, and thus the true north stars for setting engineering objectives.
Escaping the roadmap trap
Many engineering teams don’t set clear objectives for themselves. They assume that the stories or tickets on the roadmap are their objectives. This confusion is problematic because it traps engineering in a purely executional role — “deliver what’s been asked.” The roadmap becomes a shopping list, and the team a mere supplier.
In reality, the roadmap is not an objective — it’s the flow that moves through the system. The real performance metrics of an engineering team lie elsewhere: in its ability to produce quality, sustain high velocity, and generate meaningful value for users.
By focusing on these three pillars, a team can define goals that are decoupled from the roadmap’s content. For example:
- Improving automated test coverage to strengthen quality,
- Reducing lead time to production to increase velocity,
- Increasing the adoption rate of new features to maximise user value.
These objectives don’t depend on which features are in the roadmap; they address the performance of the system itself. The CTO or tech leader’s role then becomes that of a performance architect — someone who tunes the system so that the roadmap’s flow moves faster, cleaner, and with greater impact. In other words: the roadmap defines the what, but the three pillars define the how. And by optimising the how, engineering stops being seen as a cost center and becomes a true engine of value and profit.
Added Value: the forgotten pillar of engineeringng
If you’ve followed along so far, you might be wondering: why include “added value” in the purpose of an engineering team when it’s usually considered the product team’s responsibility? Yet ignoring this third pillar is a strategic mistake.
First, because delivering high-quality features quickly means nothing if they’re not used. It doesn’t serve the company’s ultimate goal — generating profit — and it reinforces the idea of engineering as an execution arm rather than a creator of value. Second, because product and engineering are not two opposing camps — they’re one and the same team. Holding developers accountable for the value generated by the features they release forces collaboration with product managers. Developers stop working merely to ship code; they work to deliver features that matter — that are adopted, used, and have measurable impact.
By integrating added value into its goals, engineering moves beyond the logic of being a “ticket supplier” and becomes a strategic partner to product — directly aligned with the company’s broader mission.
Redefining the goal of engineering
Reducing engineering to the mere execution of a roadmap is missing its true strategic role. An engineering team should not be seen as a simple ticket factory or a cost center, but as a profit center capable of directly contributing to the company’s growth.
Its purpose is clear: to deliver high-quality features, as quickly as possible, that generate strong user engagement. This purpose rests on three essential pillars — Quality, Velocity, and Added Value — which offer a far more meaningful framework than the roadmap alone. The roadmap is just a flow; what truly matters is the performance of the system that drives it forward.
For CTOs and tech leaders, the goal is therefore not to “deliver the roadmap,” but to build a technical organisation capable of continuously optimising these three pillars. That’s how engineering moves beyond pure execution to become a true engine of value and a driver of profitability.
* It can also raise its prices, but that’s a one-time action.
** It can also lower its infrastructure costs, but that’s a one-time action.