Business development

The technical seat during a deal

Business development creates the opportunity. Engineering determines whether it can become a working product, a reliable integration, and a partnership you can sustain. Those conversations do not always happen in the same room.

A partner wants to know whether your platform can integrate with theirs. An enterprise customer wants assurances on security, compliance, and data handling. An investor wants to know whether the architecture can support the growth you are describing. Sales needs an answer before the next meeting, and engineering has not had time to look.

Answer too cautiously and you can lose the opportunity. Promise too much and you can commit the engineering team to months of work nobody planned. I sit with founders, executives, sales, and business development on partner discussions, technical discovery, enterprise diligence, and integration planning. I turn a commercial objective into a commitment you can actually deliver, explain the system to people who do not live in it, and name the risks that stay quiet during a negotiation.

I am there so the deal you sign is one the organization can deliver.

The usual trigger is a security questionnaire that has been open for a month, a sales team promising integrations engineering has not reviewed, or a deal stuck because nobody can answer the technical questions with confidence.

A signed agreement is not an integration

Technical commitments often start as a sentence that sounded harmless. “We have an API for that.” “We can support single sign-on.” “That should be a straightforward integration.” “The infrastructure can handle the extra volume.”

Any one of those can be true and still hide the work. The API exists and does not support the workflow they need. Single sign-on means changes to how the application handles identity. The simple integration depends on undocumented behavior in someone else’s system. The extra traffic is fine until it brings new requirements for availability, data isolation, monitoring, or support.

Those details change the cost, the schedule, the contract, and what the customer will expect. I look for them before they become commitments. Which systems have to talk. Who owns the data. What happens when a request fails. Which team supports it afterward. What security obligations you are taking on. What happens when either side changes its API. And whether the commercial value covers the engineering you will have to keep doing.

What I bring

A technical plan for the opportunity

Partnership conversations stay on capabilities and outcomes. Engineering needs interfaces, dependencies, data contracts, authentication, and failure cases. I work with both sides until those are the same conversation.

I establish what the partnership is supposed to accomplish, which systems are involved, and how information and functionality move between them. That might be an API, an event-driven design, data synchronization, an embedded service, identity federation, or custom application work. I look at what you already have, what can be reused, and what would be new engineering.

Where it helps, I write an integration architecture: boundaries, data flow, authentication, error handling, who operates what, and the dependencies that dominate the schedule. The plan should be specific enough to price, estimate, and later build. “The systems can talk” is not a plan.

The technical side of the room

Enterprise sales, partnerships, and investor conversations bring technical people who want more than a polished deck. They want to know how the system works, where it is limited, and whether the person across the table understands the thing being sold.

I join those conversations as the technical advisor. I might explain an architectural decision to a customer’s engineering team, talk integration options with a partner’s CTO, answer infrastructure questions in investor diligence, or help a commercial team see what a customer’s requirement actually implies.

I change the level of detail for the audience and keep the substance the same. A CFO needs the cost and the operational exposure. A security engineer needs authentication, encryption, and access control. A product executive needs what can ship in a given window. Each of them gets an answer that is accurate, understandable, and qualified where it should be. I will not promise something the organization cannot support.

Diligence and security reviews

Enterprise customers and strategic partners increasingly want a technical review before they sign. Application security, infrastructure, access, retention, incident response, disaster recovery, how you build software, which vendors you depend on, regulatory obligations.

For a smaller company that request becomes a project of its own. The facts are scattered across engineers, the cloud account, internal docs, and third parties. I gather what is true, find what is missing, and draft answers you can defend.

Where a control exists, I describe it accurately. Where it is incomplete, I separate what you can do now, what you plan to do, and what you cannot reasonably promise. I can also coordinate the technical side of diligence, review the architectural evidence, and flag gaps that would delay or kill an agreement.

I will not dress up a control you do not have. If a request needs a formal certification, a legal reading, or an independent assessment, I say that plainly.

What a commercial sentence will cost engineering

The expensive part of a deal is often a sentence nobody marked as technical. A custom report becomes a permanent maintenance job. A service-level agreement implies monitoring, redundancy, and on-call coverage you do not have. A data-residency clause changes the infrastructure. A small integration creates a long-term dependency on another company’s platform.

I read proposed commitments with those consequences in mind: scope, performance, uptime, support, security, data ownership, customization, and dependence on systems you do not control. I separate what is straightforward, what needs more investment, and what carries risk out of proportion to the deal.

If something is feasible and still a bad commercial trade, I say why. If a simpler shape meets the requirement, I help you propose it. If the agreement would create obligations engineering cannot sustain, I say so before anyone signs.

A handoff that engineering can execute

A partnership can be negotiated carefully and still fail when business development hands it to engineering. Requirements disappear between meetings. Assumptions become expectations nobody wrote down. Ownership stays vague. A date gets announced before the dependencies are resolved.

I set the technical foundation before that handoff: boundaries, milestones, dependencies, acceptance criteria, and what each organization is responsible for. If the uncertainty is large, I will recommend a proof of concept, a limited pilot, or a phased rollout before a broad commitment, so what was discussed, what was agreed, and what engineers are asked to deliver stay aligned.

When I tell you to walk away

Some partnerships create more obligation than opportunity. A prospect wants heavy customization and represents a small slice of expected revenue. A partner wants privileged access that you should not grant. An integration is possible and would consume so much specialized maintenance that it pulls engineering off the product.

Those are business decisions. They need technical context. I put the expected commercial value next to the engineering effort, the operational burden, the architectural compromises, and the dependencies you would live with. Sometimes the right move is a narrower scope, a different implementation, or a price that covers the work. Sometimes the right answer is no.

I say that privately, to the people who own the decision. I will not make the commercial call, and I will not raise it in the room with the other party. You should understand the technical obligations before you accept them.

What you leave with

What I produce depends on the stage of the opportunity. It usually includes:

• An integration architecture: the systems, interfaces, data flows, security considerations, dependencies, and where the implementation stops.
• Diligence responses: evidence-based answers to partner, customer, or investor questions, including security and infrastructure.
• A feasibility assessment: what you can deliver now, what needs more engineering, and which assumptions still need a test.
• A register of commitments and risks: the technical obligations, what they are likely to cost, what they do to operations, and the risks they add.
• An implementation outline: milestones, responsibilities, dependencies, and acceptance criteria for the move from agreement to delivery.
• A private recommendation: my read of the opportunity, the commitments I would renegotiate, and the risks I would not accept without more work.

These are working documents for a decision and for the build that follows.

Who I do this with

Founders and business leaders who need an experienced technical voice and do not have a CTO or a senior engineer free for every commercial conversation. Growing companies chasing enterprise customers. Organizations weighing a strategic partnership. Established businesses negotiating an integration with a vendor or a service provider.

Sometimes I work next to an engineering leader you already have, and take on discovery, diligence, and the partner conversations they cannot staff. Sometimes I am the technical representative for one opportunity, in a discussion that would otherwise need expertise you do not have in house.

The opportunity in front of you depends on getting the technical details right. I bring engineering into the commercial conversation so the questions get substantive answers, the proposed integration gets a real look, and the people signing understand what they are agreeing to. Bring me in before the technical promises are in the contract.