CFO's Guide to Engineering Metrics: What to Ask and Why
· 9 min read
A CFO usually sees engineering on one line of the P&L: salaries. A headcount column, a loaded-cost multiplier, a big number growing faster than revenue. That's it. Deloitte's 2024 Global Technology Leadership Study put the gap at its starkest: only 31% of CFOs said they could tell whether their engineering investment was producing returns proportionate to cost. The other 69% were flying blind on roughly the largest discretionary spend in the company.
This is not a tooling problem. It's a question problem. The numbers exist. Your CFO peers just haven't learned which five questions extract them.