I love tech, but I’m not an engineer

For most of my career, I led technology-driven organizations without being the most technical person in the room.

At Idealista.

At Tuenti.

At Google.

At Flickr.

At Verse.

At Headline.

In executive teams where engineering decisions shaped the trajectory of the business.

That experience is more common than we admit.

One Step Away from Reality

As a non-technical executive, you learn to manage through abstraction.

You review dashboards.

You hear about velocity, delivery, reliability.

You translate technical updates into business implications, often with very little science behind it.

But there is always a gap.

Because the language used to describe engineering work was never designed for business decision-making. Over time, that gap creates a sustained discomfort: the sense that you are always one step away from really.

You feel misalignment without being able to prove it.

You sense inefficiencies before they have an impact on your P&L.

But intuition is not quantifiable. And intuition doesn’t scale.

The Risk We Rarely Name

When executives lack a clear way to connect engineering work to business impact, leadership drifts toward two extremes:

• Delegating completely on their CTO and hoping for the best

• Intervening too much, pushing on delivery without really understanding how the system works

Neither is a failure of leadership. Both are symptoms of missing context and lack of transparency.

The real risk isn’t ignorance. It’s acting short-sightedness without knowing where the blind spots are.

The Moment Things Clicked

Two years ago, Dave, with whom I worked at Verse, told me he was building something new with the power of AI. He walked me through a way of looking at engineering that felt radically different.

Not more opaque metrics.

A shared understandable language.

For the first time, engineering signals—productivity, delivery patterns, focus, reliability, quality—were expressed in understandable terms. I didn’t need to translate. I didn’t need to guess.

What emerged was clarity:

• How execution today affects optionality tomorrow

• Where effort compounds. And where it doesn’t

• Whether teams are aligned on what actually matters

These weren’t technical conversations.

They were the strategic ones but now grounded in clean and structured data instead of proxies and intuition.

And I realized something transformative: this was the perspective I had been missing for years.

Why This Gap Matters Now

Technology can not be treated as a support function. It is a key company engine.

Yet many leaders still operate without a clear line of sight into how engineering effort turns into business impact. Decisions are made with partial understanding. Signals arrive late. Course corrections come after momentum is lost.

The issue isn’t data availability.

It’s the absence of a common frame of reference.

Why I Came Back

I hadn’t planned to return as a co-founder.

But once you experience what it’s like to reason clearly about engineering—without oversimplification, without intimidation—it becomes impossible to ignore how widespread this problem is.

I’ve lived with that gap.

I’ve paid the price of managing tech with no real transparency and accountability into my tech teams.

And I’m convinced technology is ready for a better way.

Not more noise. Not more intuition.

But a shared language that allows business and technical leaders to see the same reality and act on it together.

That’s the tool I didn’t have.

And it’s why I decided to build it.