Every engineering team has infrastructure needs: technical debt to pay, tools to upgrade, reliability to improve. Every executive has competing priorities: features to ship, markets to enter, budgets to manage.
The disconnect isn’t about values—it’s about language. Engineers speak in technical terms: latency, uptime, scalability. Executives speak in business terms: revenue, risk, competitive advantage.
To get infrastructure investment, translate technical needs into business impact.
Understanding Executive Priorities
Before making your case, understand what executives care about:
Revenue: Does this help make money?
Cost: Does this save money?
Risk: Does this reduce risk of bad outcomes?
Competitive position: Does this help us win against competitors?
Speed: Does this help us move faster?
Every infrastructure investment connects to at least one of these. Find the connection and lead with it.
Framing Infrastructure Investment
Frame as Risk Reduction
“We need to upgrade our database” → “Our current database has a 15% annual probability of catastrophic failure, which would cause 4-8 hours of downtime and cost approximately $500K in lost revenue and reputation.”
Risk framing works when:
- Current state has quantifiable risk
- Consequences of failure are significant
- Investment meaningfully reduces risk
Frame as Capacity for Growth
“We need to improve scalability” → “Our current infrastructure handles 1000 concurrent users. Marketing projects 5000 users within 6 months. Without investment, we’ll experience degraded performance that our sales team estimates will cost us enterprise deals worth $2M.”
Growth framing works when:
- Growth is projected and credible
- Constraints are identifiable
- Business impact of hitting constraints is clear
Frame as Velocity Improvement
“We need to pay down technical debt” → “Our deployment pipeline takes 4 hours. Engineers wait rather than ship. Reducing this to 30 minutes would recover approximately 20 engineer-hours per week, equivalent to half an FTE.”
Velocity framing works when:
- Current state slows development measurably
- Improvement is quantifiable
- Business values speed (most do)
Frame as Cost Avoidance
“We should migrate to cloud” → “Our data center lease renews in 18 months for $800K/year. Cloud migration would reduce this to $400K/year with improved reliability and no renewal commitment.”
Cost framing works when:
- Current costs are known
- Alternatives have credible cost estimates
- Migration costs are reasonable compared to savings
Building the Business Case
Quantify Current State
You can’t show improvement without baseline. Document:
- Current costs (infrastructure, engineering time)
- Current performance (latency, uptime, capacity)
- Current risks (probability and impact of failures)
- Current velocity (deployment frequency, lead time)
Numbers are harder to argue with than opinions.
Quantify Proposed State
What does success look like?
- Target costs
- Target performance
- Risk reduction
- Velocity improvement
Be specific. “Better” isn’t a target; “99.9% uptime” is.
Calculate ROI
Show return on investment:
Investment: $200K (engineering time + infrastructure)
Annual benefit: $300K (reduced incidents, faster development)
Payback period: 8 months
3-year ROI: 350%
Even rough estimates are better than none. State assumptions clearly.
Address Risks
Every investment has risks. Address them proactively:
- What could go wrong?
- How will you mitigate risks?
- What’s the fallback if it doesn’t work?
Addressing risks shows business maturity and builds confidence.
The Proposal Structure
Write a clear, concise proposal:
Executive Summary (One Paragraph)
What you’re proposing, why, and expected impact. Busy executives may read only this.
Problem Statement
What’s the current problem in business terms? Include data.
Proposed Solution
What you want to do. Keep technical details minimal; focus on outcomes.
Business Impact
How this helps revenue, reduces cost, mitigates risk, or improves velocity. Quantify.
Investment Required
What it costs (money, engineering time, opportunity cost of not building features).
Timeline
When will benefits materialize?
Risks and Mitigation
What could go wrong and how you’ll handle it.
Alternatives Considered
What other options exist and why this one is best.
Common Mistakes
Too Technical
Executives don’t need to understand Kubernetes to approve Kubernetes investment. They need to understand the business impact of the improved deployment capability.
Instead of: “Kubernetes provides container orchestration with automated scaling and self-healing.”
Say: “This infrastructure change reduces deployment time from 4 hours to 15 minutes and eliminates the manual effort currently required for scaling during traffic spikes.”
No Quantification
“This will improve reliability” doesn’t get funded. “This will reduce incidents by 60%, saving approximately $200K per year in engineering time and customer impact” might.
Estimate. Use ranges if uncertain. But quantify.
Ignoring Opportunity Cost
Infrastructure investment means not building features. Acknowledge this tradeoff.
“This investment delays our mobile app by 6 weeks. We believe the reliability improvement justifies this because [reason].”
Asking for Too Much
Large requests require more justification and approval. Consider phasing:
Phase 1: Critical improvements ($50K) → Phase 2: Enhanced capabilities ($100K)
Early success builds credibility for future phases.
Not Following Up
After approval, demonstrate results. Show that the investment delivered predicted value.
This builds trust for future requests. Executives who see infrastructure investment pay off approve more of it.
Ongoing Communication
Don’t wait until you need something to communicate infrastructure value.
Regular metrics: Share infrastructure performance with leadership regularly. When everything works, leadership should know the infrastructure team is why.
Incident costs: When incidents occur, quantify business impact. Build awareness of reliability value.
Efficiency gains: When infrastructure improvements save time or money, communicate it.
Continuous communication about infrastructure value makes investment requests easier.
Key Takeaways
- Translate technical needs into business terms: revenue, cost, risk, competitive position, speed
- Quantify current state and proposed state with specific metrics
- Calculate and present ROI with clear assumptions
- Address risks proactively to build confidence
- Keep proposals focused on business impact, not technical details
- Acknowledge opportunity costs and tradeoffs
- Follow up to demonstrate delivered value and build trust for future requests