When it comes to driving revenue or improving client retention, engineering teams often feel like they're not part of the equation. In most companies, engineers focus on building, maintaining, and optimizing products, while the responsibility for selling those products falls to marketing and sales teams. So, it’s easy to feel like revenue goals or client retention challenges are out of our hands.
However, I believe there’s a lot engineers can do—through mindset, learning, and specific actions—to directly or indirectly impact the business’s bottom line.
Start with the Mindset
One of the most important things is for engineers to adopt a “customer-first” mindset. Often, we’re deeply focused on solving technical challenges and creating elegant solutions, but it’s critical to understand that the end goal is to deliver value to the customer. This means we need to stay attuned to how the features we build, the bugs we fix, and the performance we optimize affect the user experience. How do we do that?
Even if we’re not in direct contact with customers, we can actively seek out opportunities to understand their pain points better. For example, we can listen in on customer feedback sessions or review support tickets with the product team. If you have data or analytic capture of customer usage of your product, take time to review it. Who's using the product? What is the name of the company? What can you learn about the company? What ways might they be using the product? What matters to them about how the product is used or what features it has? By thinking about how our work impacts customer satisfaction and business outcomes, we can prioritize more effectively. If we don't know anything about our customers, then there is a good opportunity to learn.
Engineers as Revenue Enablers
While we might not create the sales funnel or handle customer conversions, the engineering team plays a crucial role in making a product reliable, scalable, and user-friendly—three factors that are key to both attracting and retaining customers. When we build a product that is performant and easy to use, it reduces friction for customers, which can lead to higher satisfaction, fewer support requests, and more referrals.
In terms of direct impact, here are a few practical areas where engineers can help improve revenue and client retention:
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Prioritize Performance Optimization
Slow or unresponsive software is one of the easiest ways to frustrate customers. Even if the product is great in every other way, a poor user experience can cause customers to churn. When engineers optimize application performance—whether through improving load times, reducing downtime, or enhancing scalability—they’re directly contributing to customer retention. -
Emphasize Quality
Bugs and crashes can harm the customer experience and erode trust in the product. By writing high-quality, maintainable code and emphasizing automated testing, engineers can reduce the likelihood of bugs making it into production. This leads to fewer customer complaints and helps build a reputation for reliability. -
Build with Scalability in Mind
As the business grows, so do customer expectations. A product that can’t scale quickly to meet increasing demand can lead to customer dissatisfaction. Ensuring that the product can handle large volumes of traffic or data without a hitch is another way engineers contribute to long-term revenue growth and retention. -
Innovate for Usability
Engineers should always be on the lookout for ways to make the product easier to use. Simplifying workflows, improving UI performance, or introducing new features that reduce customer effort can make a big difference in customer satisfaction. Even small enhancements to usability can translate into higher retention rates. -
Be Proactive About Customer Issues
Instead of waiting for a flood of customer complaints, engineers can use monitoring tools to identify potential issues before they become major problems. This allows the team to fix bugs or address performance bottlenecks proactively. A quick response to a problem—especially if the customer never even knew it existed—goes a long way in building trust.
Collaborate with Non-Technical Teams
Just because engineers may not interface directly with marketing or sales doesn't mean we can't contribute to the goals of those teams. By collaborating with product managers, we can gain insight into what customers really care about and align our work accordingly. Engineers can also make it easier for sales teams by building tools that allow them to demo the product more effectively or enabling the creation of proof-of-concept environments or scenarios that can be spun up quickly for prospective clients.
Invest in Learning the Business
Finally, I always encourage engineers to invest time in learning about the business side of things. Understanding how our company makes money, who our customers are, and what challenges the sales and marketing teams face can give engineers a better sense of how they fit into the bigger picture. Engineers don’t need to be sales experts, but knowing how revenue is generated and how customers interact with the product helps us build with a purpose.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that engineering teams do have the ability to impact revenue and customer retention. It starts with adopting the right mindset—focusing on customer value, thinking about the business outcomes of our work, and collaborating with non-technical teams. By taking these steps, we can help improve both the product and the customer experience, ultimately driving better business results. Even when we don’t directly interface with sales or marketing, we’re still a key part of the process that brings value to customers and keeps them coming back.