$807 Billion Question Nobody Can Answer

Software is Eating the World, Narrative-Driven Engineering is Eating the Enterprise

Marc Andreessen famously declared that "software is eating the world." A decade later, his prediction has proven prophetic. Yet at the precise moment when software engineering has become the most strategic function in most businesses, it remains fundamentally unmeasured. The function that determines competitive survival is managed through narratives, not numbers.

To us, the paradox is staggering: As software devours industries, narrative-driven engineering devours enterprises from within.

What's the $807 Billion Question, Steve

By the end of the quarter, companies worldwide will blow $807 billion on software development. That's billion with a B. Yet ask any executive what they're actually getting for that money, and you'll get a lot of hand-waving or uncomfortable laughs or vague platitudes about "next big thing" or, vague assurances about "building for the future," or honest admissions that they simply don't think about engineering in those terms.

It's absurd. Marketing teams can tell you the cost of acquiring a customer down to the penny. Sales organizations forecast pipeline with 94% accuracy. Product teams track feature adoption in real-time.

But engineering? The department eating close 40-60% of operating budget runs like a black box. It's as if we've collectively decided that the function consuming most of operating expenses should be exempt from rigorous measurement. And it's the exact problem that keeps us up at night.

Engineering is a Narrative Contest

In the absence of meaningful metrics, engineering decisions become glorified storytelling competitions. We've witnessed this pattern across hundreds of organizations:

The team with the most persuasive executive sponsor gets resources. The team with the most compelling slide deck gets resources. The team building the shiny new thing gets resources. The team that can most vividly describe an imagined disaster gets resources.

Meanwhile, the teams working on unglamorous but business-critical infrastructure struggle for attention. The architects warning about scaling issues go unheard. The refactoring that would unlock months of future productivity gets perpetually postponed.

Without data, narrative wins. And the most strategic work often has the least compelling narrative. The enterprise becomes a machine for converting capital into feature bloat and technical debt, rather than re-inforcing customer value and competitive advantage.

Data-Informed, Not Data-Driven

We're not advocating for turning engineering into a soulless, metrics-obsessed function where every decision is dictated by a dashboard or be overfitted on quantifiables. Goodhart's law is real. The moment a metric becomes a goal, it's no longer a useful metric.

The most successful functions aren't "data-driven"—they're "data-informed." This is precisely the transformation engineering needs—not to be ruled by metrics, but to be informed by them. It isn't about about eliminating human judgment. It's about enhancing it.

The best CMOs today are still creative visionaries, but they're visionaries with data. They know which creative risks are worth taking because they can measure the outcomes.

Great salespeople still build authentic connections—they just build them with the right prospects at the right time. Measurement didn't replace intuition; it amplified it.

Product teams still dream up bold new features—they just validate them with real user data before investing months of engineering time.

In each case, measurement didn't replace the function—it elevated it. These departments aren't less human or less creative; they're more effective. They waste less time, energy, and capital on efforts that don't matter.

The Final Frontier

Engineering is the last holdout, the final frontier of unmeasured knowledge work. But that status quo is becoming increasingly untenable.

The gap between where engineering resources are allocated and where they would create maximum value represents the largest untapped opportunity in most businesses. For the average mid-market software company, this misallocation costs $15-30M annually in unrealized value.

As markets tighten and capital becomes constrained, companies simply can't afford the luxury of unmeasured engineering. The pressure to demonstrate ROI has never been higher.

The era of growth-at-all-costs engineering is over. The future belongs to data-informed—not data-driven—engineering organizations that can balance the quantifiable and unquantifiable aspects of their craft.

And honestly? It's about damn time.