I recently watched a CIO at a 200-person food distribution company spend 14 months migrating to a custom Kubernetes cluster.
They sell frozen shrimp.
Here's what I keep seeing across non-technical companies: the IT leader arrives with ambition, builds an engineering org that rivals a mid-stage startup, and delivers nothing the sales floor can point to.
This is about how to fix that.
The problem is an IT leader building a resume, not a business function. Replacing ERPs that work fine with ones that are "more scalable." Re-platforming e-commerce stacks generating revenue yesterday. Standing up data lakes nobody's fishing in.
It takes two years to build. By the time it's done, the stack is aging out. So they pitch the next migration. The board approves because what are they going to do, say no? They don't understand the details.
Meanwhile the VP of Sales still runs forecasts in a spreadsheet she built in 2019 that drives more revenue decisions than anything IT shipped in three years.
I talked to a 90-store retail chain last quarter. IT had onboarded Jira, Confluence, a custom BI platform, and was evaluating ServiceNow. The average store manager's biggest tech challenge is getting the POS to print receipts.
Nobody could tell me what any of it did for same-store sales.
The IT leader who thrives in a non-technical company sits in on sales calls. Knows the top three customer complaints without checking a dashboard. Asks "does this help us sell more or keep more customers" before writing a single line of requirements.
A logistics company we work with gave their IT lead one rule: every project needs a sales sponsor. Not a stakeholder. Someone from revenue who owns the outcome. No sponsor, no project.
They killed 60% of their backlog overnight.
What survived:
- Real-time delivery tracking customers could see.
- Automated reorder triggers based on purchase patterns.
- CRM integration that auto-populated client history before sales calls.
Boring stuff that moved numbers.
Every dollar on infrastructure not tied to acquiring, retaining, or serving a customer is a dollar burning in a server room nobody visits.
I could be wrong. Maybe your frozen shrimp company really does need Kubernetes.
But probably not.