The Engineer's MBA: Business fluency for technical leaders

Hold own in exec/business reviews AND make better technical decisions with business context

What you'll learn, module by module

1. Module 1 Foundations: The Engineer's Business OS

   The minimum mental model - how a software business actually makes money and what its scoreboard looks like.

   • Read a P&L and explain each major line
   • Distinguish revenue, cash, and profit and explain why they diverge
   • Compute and interpret CAC, LTV, payback, and gross margin
   • Recognize the major software business model archetypes and what each implies

2. Module 2 Strategy: Where to play, how to win

   The frameworks that structure strategy conversations - Porter, Christensen, moats - applied to companies engineers know.

   • Apply Porter's Five Forces to a real software company
   • Distinguish types of competitive moats and how they erode
   • Explain Christensen's disruption theory and recognize it in the wild
   • Reason about build / buy / partner decisions strategically
   • Use the three-horizons framework to evaluate a portfolio of bets

3. Module 3 Markets, Customers & Go-To-Market

   How software companies actually find, win, and grow customers.

   • Define an ICP and use JTBD to scope a product
   • Articulate positioning that distinguishes your product
   • Choose a pricing & packaging model that encodes strategy
   • Reason about PLG vs. sales-led GTM trade-offs
   • Read pipeline math and sales-funnel reports

4. Module 4 Operating a Software Business

   The metrics, cadence, and structures behind a running company.

   • Define and interpret the canonical SaaS metric tree
   • Recognize a healthy operating cadence and what each forum is for
   • Reason about org design trade-offs as a company scales
   • Estimate the true cost of an engineer and a feature
   • Apply real TCO and switching-cost thinking to vendor decisions

5. Module 5 Capital, Risk & Decisions Under Uncertainty

   How capital flows in a software company and how leaders choose between bets.

   • Reason about capital allocation the way an exec team does
   • Read a cap table and understand dilution
   • Frame an investment case the way a CFO will read it
   • Categorize the major risks that show up in board decks
   • Apply reversibility and cost-of-delay thinking to real decisions

6. Module 6 The Technical Leader's Playbook (Capstone)

   Putting it all together - how to read, write, and operate at the exec table.

   • Translate engineering work into business value language
   • Write strategy and investment memos that executives will actually read
   • Contribute usefully in QBRs, board prep, and all-hands forums
   • Negotiate across sales, finance, product, and legal vocabularies
   • Construct a continued-learning roadmap beyond this course