"Why are we building this?" "Who decided that?" "Why does management keep changing priorities?"

Most developers have asked these questions. Many of the frustrations in engineering teams come from the distance between the people writing the code and the reasons the code is being written.

I started my career building custom software for all kinds of businesses, and learned early that most technical problems are business problems first. Later, moving from developer advocacy into communications, governance and operations, I saw the same gap from the other side.

This talk is about closing that gap. How businesses actually make decisions. Why priorities shift. What managers and executives are really worried about. And why developers who understand this make better technical decisions, have more influence, and are far more likely to work on things that matter. No MBA required.