David Leangen
Business Engineer
Make AI accelerate business value.
Business Engineering is the emerging engineering discipline leaders call when AI efforts stall. I teach and embed the business value cycle so technology follows strategy.
- Business-first methodology
- Specify → Operate → Evaluate coaching
- Fractional CTO & PM support
How we can work together today
Business Engineering is available now through talks, workshops, and fractional leadership. Choose the format that best fits where you are in the value cycle.
Presentations & Workshops
Bring the Specify → Operate → Evaluate discipline to your leadership team with focused sessions tailored to your context.
Request a session →Fractional CTO
Align architecture and delivery with the value loop while you build or scale your product organization.
Explore CTO4Hire.today →Fractional Product Lead
Keep strategy, discovery, and delivery tied to evidence with hands-on product leadership over your value streams.
Explore PM4Hire.today →When AI efforts stall, here’s how Business Engineering helps
Everything depends on you
You’re the architect, developer, ops, and PM all at once.
Business Engineering gives you a structural backbone so you can operate with leverage and clarity.
Speed causes fragility
Rapid iteration leads to inconsistent systems and decisions.
Business Engineering turns speed into structured iteration—move fast without breaking the business.
Tools don’t align
Every platform has its own model and logic.
Business Engineering unifies how business, data, and automation fit together.
Hard to scale or delegate
Knowledge lives in people’s heads or scattered files.
Business Engineering makes reasoning explicit—policies, models, and systems are traceable and reusable.
Lean without a backbone
Experiments pile up faster than structure.
Business Engineering provides the engineering foundation Lean lacks—experiments feed a coherent system.
AI without governance
Models run, but the business can’t explain or control them.
Business Engineering keeps AI under business control with policy-driven execution and traceability.
What Business Engineering unlocks
Speed with stability
Structured models and deterministic automation replace rework, so momentum increases without introducing fragility.
Clarity
A unified language from intent to execution keeps leadership, technology, and operations aligned on what is being built and why.
Adaptability
Modular, policy-driven design lets teams pivot intelligently—change strengthens the system instead of breaking it.
Traceability
Every specification, decision, and outcome is versioned and explainable, giving confidence in automation, AI, and compliance.
Leverage
Individuals and compact teams operate at enterprise scale by designing once and materializing everywhere.
The Business Engineering stack
Policy layer
Capture governance, intent, and guardrails once so they are enforced consistently across every decision and workflow.
Model layer
Define your domain semantically—nouns, verbs, relationships—and reuse the model across data, code, automation, and documentation.
Directive layer
Guide architecture, naming, and conventions so every artifact fits the same structural rules.
Materialization layer
Generate deterministic, testable assets—APIs, DTOs, diagrams, docs—directly from your models.
Runtime layer
Execute, enforce policies, and trace every decision so systems validate themselves and expose why outcomes occurred.
Why this matters
Many organizations still treat value delivery as a sequence of specialist handoffs. Intent gets diluted, delivery slows, and teams debate tooling rather than outcomes.
Business Engineering keeps the value cycle intact: intent stays explicit, operations stay aligned, and evaluation happens fast enough to steer the next move.
When the loop stalls
- Ideas linger in translation and sponsors lose momentum.
- Teams optimize technology stacks while customer value waits.
- Evidence arrives late, so decisions default to intuition.
Specify → Operate → Evaluate
The value loop works when intent, execution, and evidence stay in sync. Tight cycles expose friction early and keep teams shipping what matters.
- Specify. Align sponsors on the value to create, the constraints to respect, and the signal that proves success.
- Operate. Move the intent through teams and automations without losing context or slowing velocity.
- Evaluate. Turn outcomes into evidence quickly enough to guide the very next iteration.
- 1 Specify: Frame the value hypothesis, guardrails, and measures in language the business owns.
- 2 Operate: Execute the intent end-to-end with shared context, so flow stays fast and compliant.
- 3 Evaluate: Compare outcomes with the hypothesis and feed insight into the next iteration immediately.
Pillars that protect the value loop
Every pillar keeps the business conversation connected from strategy to evidence, so momentum stays on value rather than plumbing.
Strategy
Value narratives, guardrails, and metrics define “good” before energy is spent on solutions.
Governance
Shared guardrails keep decisions fast, defensible, and aligned with the value hypothesis.
Domain
Intents, events, and projections describe how value is created in the language of the business.
Architecture
Deterministic patterns keep humans, services, and AI executing the loop without reinventing the stack.
Ready to see it in your context?
Let’s schedule a session to map your value loop, surface the friction, and decide where Business Engineering should plug in first.