Technical leverage is capability a company has already built that has never been priced, packaged, or positioned. It is not the roadmap. It is not what the engineering team is excited about. It is the thing that already works, that customers already depend on, and that nobody has ever put a number against.
I find it in almost every company I work with, and I find it in the same three places.
Where it hides
- Data assets that could be a product. Years of transactional or behavioral data sitting in a warehouse, used only to render a customer's own dashboard. Benchmarked, anonymized, and packaged, that same data frequently becomes the most defensible thing the company sells.
- Integrations that could be a channel. A company builds connectors to satisfy individual enterprise deals, and ends up with deep footholds in three or four platform ecosystems. Each of those is a distribution channel that has already been paid for.
- Internal tooling that could be a moat. The deployment system, the migration tooling, the configuration engine built because customers kept churning during onboarding. It never appears in a demo, but it is often the real reason the company wins competitive evaluations.
In each case the capability exists, the cost is sunk, and the commercial value is unclaimed. That is the definition of leverage.
The audit
Finding it is a short exercise, but it has to be run with engineering and commercial leadership in the same room. Done separately, engineering lists what is technically interesting and sales lists what customers asked for last quarter, and neither list contains the answer.
Three questions do most of the work. First: what do customers actually use, measured, versus what we built? The gap between those two lists is usually large and always instructive. Second: which of our capabilities would be genuinely hard for a well-funded competitor to replicate in eighteen months? That filters enthusiasm out of the conversation quickly. Third: which of these would a buyer diligence and pay a premium for?
If a capability is hard to copy and customers already depend on it, the only remaining question is why it is not priced.
The output should be short — three or four candidates with an honest view of what it would take to commercialize each one. Most will require packaging and pricing work rather than engineering work, which is precisely what makes them attractive inside a compressed hold period.
Converting it into multiple
The commercial conversion follows a familiar path: name the capability, price it explicitly, put it behind a tier or a meter, and give the sales team a reason to lead with it. What changes is the narrative. A company that sells a product competes on features. A company that sells defensible capability competes on category position, and the two are valued very differently.
That distinction is what a buyer is actually diligencing. In a strategic process, the questions that determine the multiple are rarely about this year's growth rate. They are about whether the growth is repeatable and whether the thing driving it can be copied. Evidence of technical leverage — usage data, retention differentials, competitive win rates tied to a specific capability — answers both.
I have watched this reframing change an outcome directly: the same business, the same financials, presented once as a product company and once as the owner of a capability the acquirer could not build in time. The second version is worth materially more, and it is not a marketing exercise. The capability was always there. It had simply never been made legible.
That is most of what I do. Not building new leverage, but finding what a company already owns and making sure the market prices it.