There’s a quiet moment, right before the meeting starts, where you can feel the gap.

On one side, the engineers: sharp, detail-driven, preloaded with architecture diagrams and a deep belief that the code should speak for itself. On the other, the executives: fast-paced, outcome-focused, solving for market share, risk, and quarterly margins.

And in the middle? That’s where I’ve spent a good part of my career.

Bridging that gap isn’t just about language. It’s not enough to translate “we refactored the API layer” into “we reduced platform risk.” It’s about aligning two fundamentally different worldviews, one that sees beauty in elegant recursion, the other that sees opportunity in a three-point margin improvement.

Most developers aren’t trained to think this way. And to be fair, most aren’t asked to. We teach engineers to value correctness, reduce ambiguity, and find answers in data. But the boardroom doesn’t run on certainty. It runs on confidence. On influence. On whether you can connect a blinking cursor to a bottom-line result.

That’s not a natural leap.

Especially for those of us who got into tech because we preferred not being seen. Who found solace in the clarity of logic, in the precision of code, and in the comfort of being behind the screen, not in front of the room.

But code doesn’t sell itself.

Great ideas die in silence all the time. Projects stall because no one could explain why they mattered. Technical debt piles up because the case for addressing it wasn’t made in a way that leadership could feel. Strategy wins funding. Vision gets buy-in. And if you want your project to thrive, if you want the freedom to build it right, you have to learn how to tell its story.

That’s where the technical executive comes in.

It’s not just our job to remove blockers or report progress. It’s to make the technical legible to the business. To shape the narrative around why this effort matters, and what it will unlock. We owe it to our teams to build that bridge. To be that bridge. To carry their insights forward, reframed in language that moves stakeholders to act.

But here’s the hard truth: doing it well means being fluent in both dialects. You have to understand the code deeply enough to respect the tradeoffs. And understand the business well enough to know which ones are worth it.

It’s not glamorous. It doesn’t come with applause. And it rarely shows up in the changelog.

In fact, both sides of the room may occasionally wonder what it is you actually do.

But in my experience, it’s the difference between a team that ships features and one that drives outcomes.

And it all starts with being willing to stand in the gap.