Why You Should Ask Engineers Business Questions When Hiring

Most interviews focus on technical questions when hiring engineers and leave business questions completely out. That's a mistake, and it can cost you real money.

Here's why it matters more than another coding question.

Engineers make business decisions every day

In a startup, everyone wears a lot of hats. Engineers make small decisions every day that quietly shape the company's direction. What to build next. Which trade-off to take. What architecture to commit to.

Engineering is a constant series of trade-offs. And an engineer who understands the business makes those calls based on what's good for the customer, not what's the most fun technology to work with.

That offloads a huge amount from you as a founder, because you're not in the room for every decision. The more your engineers understand why they're building something, the less you have to micromanage the what.

A real example

A founder I worked with promised a customer a feature that was technically challenging. It needed a significant architecture redesign, and the cost would have been substantial.

But when the team dug into what the customer actually needed, we realised we could solve it by extending a feature already in the product. No redesign. A fraction of the cost. That's real money saved from one question.

That only happened because engineers who understood the business were in the room. A founder usually doesn't know the technical details to spot it. And an engineer who only thinks about code wouldn't have asked why the customer wanted it in the first place.

The value was in the overlap: technical knowledge and business understanding, in the same person.

The questions to ask

So in interviews, alongside the technical questions, I ask things like:

• Who are your customers?

• How does your company make money?

• What problem does the product actually solve for them?

You're not testing whether they've memorised the answer. You're figuring out whether they think this way at all.

A practical tip: if the candidate is under NDA or early in their career and doesn't have a company to talk about, pick a well-known company and talk about that instead. It works just as well.

Make it a conversation, not an interrogation

Most engineers aren't used to these questions. They've spent their careers being asked about algorithms and system design, not customers and revenue. So give them time to think. Make it a conversation, not an interrogation.

Some will light up, and you'll see them connect the technical and the commercial naturally. Others will look at you blankly. Both are useful signals.

The takeaway

The best startup engineers aren't just building the thing. They understand why they're building it.

Hire for that, and you get more than someone who can write code. You get someone who helps steer the company in the right direction, one small decision at a time.