--- title: "Strategic Vision & Technical Direction - Jos茅 DA COSTA" description: "Strategic vision, the way I define it, is the ability to read a market, formulate a **12-36 month technical bet**, and defend it in front of an executive committee or a board with business reasoning. " locale: "en" canonical: "https://portfolio.josedacosta.info/en/skills/strategic-vision-tech-direction" source: "https://portfolio.josedacosta.info/en/skills/strategic-vision-tech-direction.md" html_source: "https://portfolio.josedacosta.info/en/skills/strategic-vision-tech-direction" author: "Jos茅 DA COSTA" type: "skill" slug: "strategic-vision-tech-direction" generated_at: "2026-04-26T21:14:35.420Z" --- # Strategic Vision & Technical Direction Icon: 馃幆 ## My definition Strategic vision, the way I define it, is the ability to read a market, formulate a **12-36 month technical bet**, and defend it in front of an executive committee or a board with business reasoning. not engineer talk. Technical direction is its day-to-day translation: stack choices, hiring plan, **build vs buy vs partner** arbitrations, P&L per product line, vendor contract negotiation. Without vision, technical direction executes better but with no compass; without direction, vision stays on slides. ### Context I run this competency on **3 simultaneous horizons**. **90-day ARR signal**: pricing, churn, expansion, sales cycle. **18-month platform direction**: architecture, hiring plan, technical debt, infra choices. **3-year differentiating technical bets**: applied LLMs in the ACCENSEO pipeline, regulated vertical SaaS (accounting, brokerage), edge runtimes for client e-commerce sites. My **MBA in Strategic Project Management** (2023-2025) gave me the frameworks (Porter, BMC, Wardley mapping, OKR cascading); **CTO Founder Celiane** (1999-2007) and **CEO/CTO ACCENSEO** (2024-today) calibrated the practice on real P&L. ### Relevance In 2026, **venture capital has turned selective** again on B2B SaaS, and founders are expected on three fronts at the same time: **market urgency, defensible AI differentiation, unit economics and execution**. A credible AI moat no longer comes from the chosen LLM but from **proprietary data loops, embedded workflows, and deep integrations** - a point well summarised in the [B2B SaaS AI Startup Investment Criteria 2026 guide](https://rightleftagency.com/b2b-saas-ai-startup-investment-criteria/). The CTO who holds all three threads at once is the one who clears the due diligence. ## My evidence ### Designing the ACCENSEO consulting + product hybrid **Context:** When I founded ACCENSEO in June 2024 right after I left Groupe Pichet, 3 directions were on the table: pure consulting (high margin but no long-term capital), pure product (thin margin in year one and tight runway risk), or a hybrid model. With limited starting capital, a single-shareholder French SAS, and a team to recruit through work-study apprenticeships, I had to make that call before the first invoice - not after. **Action:** I wrote that decision into a **3-page strategic note** that mapped 4 things: the addressable market by industry (real estate, manufacturing, e-commerce, accounting), the gross margin expected per offering (consulting day-rate vs SaaS license), the working-capital need across 12 months, and the **technical leverage** between consulting engagements and the in-house product roadmap - meaning how every line of code shipped at a customer could feed the reusable codebase of the accounting SaaS. I defended the note with my accountant, validated the assumptions during the first commercial meetings, and then structured year 1 around 4 pillars: e-commerce sites (Magento/Next.js), AI-powered product enrichment pipelines, Terraform AWS infrastructure for SMBs, and the accounting SaaS as in-house product. **Result:** Across the first 12 months I shipped customer work in **more than 10 industries** (real estate, logistics, accounting, food trucks, healthcare, construction, wealth management, fashion, viticulture, hospitality) while framing the accounting SaaS - **234 K lines of code**, **42 features**, **382 API routes**, **91 Prisma models**, compliant with the 2026-2027 French e-invoicing mandate. Margin from consulting funded the first year of product development without any external capital. **Value added:** The hybrid model was not a hunch, it was a calculation. And that is exactly the posture a board expects: showing that you can translate a market signal into a quarterly budget arbitration, defend a product trajectory with its unit economics, and not just pick a stack you happen to like. I now reuse that note as a quarterly template to steer ACCENSEO and prepare the next CTO scale-up role. ### Defending the iPaaS direction in front of the Pichet ExCo **Context:** At Groupe Pichet, the ESB running on **Tibco BusinessWorks 6** was the state of the art for the 2015-2020 decade but was starting to show its limits against the cloud shift: monolithic architecture, **18 K euros per month of Docker/Kubernetes hosting OPEX** for the run alone, and a clearly identified legacy risk profile. The leadership asked me to defend a modernisation trajectory in front of the executive committee, in the broader context of the IT transformation programme launched in 2022. **Action:** I built a **multi-year 2022-2024 roadmap** framed in business terms rather than tech terms, because the executive committee was not an engineering audience. 3 angles: a 3-year OPEX trajectory (build vs maintenance of both platforms during the transition), a quantified legacy risk profile (service continuity on financial flows, regulatory compliance), and a quarter-by-quarter migration plan with **explicit kill criteria** for every milestone. I ran the iPaaS audit by evaluating 2 vendors - **Middleway SAS** and **RS2I/TIBCO Cloud Integration** - through a full cost-benefit analysis, and I negotiated a **3-year commitment** on the Akeneo PIM renewal to lock pricing against a 30% vendor hike. **Result:** The roughly **370 K euros** annual envelope was approved every year, the vendor price was locked for 3 years, and the roadmap **survived 4 consecutive CIO changes** - a real feat in an organisation where each new IT director tends to reset the technical strategy. **Value added:** If the roadmap survived, it is because it was framed in **risk, OPEX, vendor dependency, and compliance** terms - not in tech terms. That is the posture I now replay every time I have to defend a technical investment in front of a committee. The CTO that gets hired into a 2026 scale-up has to be able to hold that language - market, defensibility, leverage - without giving up technical depth. That competency, I forged it in Pessac. ## My self-critique ### Mastery level I sit at **Confirmed trending Senior**. The frameworks come from the MBA (Porter, BMC, Wardley mapping, OKR cascading), the calibration comes from 2 founder roles (Celiane then ACCENSEO) and from the **~370 KEUR/year** budget responsibility on the Pichet ESB. Mastery is solid on 3-year framing and roadmap defence, more emerging on **unit-economics reading from a VC angle**. ### Importance in my profile For any CTO running a 10-engineer-plus org, this is **critical**. It stitches three layers, product direction (build vs buy, roadmap), technical governance (stack, hiring, infra spend), and board dialogue (technical P&L, defensibility). Without it, the leader executes better but without bearing. ### Advice (for myself and others) ### My personal hygiene Read 3 public board minutes per quarter (Atlassian, Confluent, GitLab) to calibrate the granularity, spend at least one day a month outside engineering immersed in sales / finance / customer success - *vision sharpens at the seams, not at the core of the code*. To peers stepping up: memorize **CAC / LTV** before the 3-tier architecture pattern, and rehearse every technical decision under the angle *"how do I defend this in front of a board in 90 seconds"*. ## My evolution in this skill ### Role in my professional project Strategic vision is the lever that takes me from **Engineering Manager** to **CTO scale-up**. In the 24-month plan, it is what enables defending a multi-year roadmap in front of a board, arbitrating *build vs buy vs partner* with an explicit framework, and positioning the tech function as an investment rather than a cost. Without it, architecture or security read as technical expenses, not as positioning choices. ### Mid-term target level At 24 months, the observable goal is threefold: **defend a 3-year technical roadmap** in front of an investor board or due-diligence audit in under 90 minutes, **produce in 5 days a structured strategic memo** for an investment committee (market, defensibility, hiring plan, technical P&L, milestones), and hold *unit economics* under a VC angle. The Confirmed-to-Senior+ shift is measured on those deliverables, not on a score. ### Current training Active mentoring with 2 European scale-up CTOs, monthly intake of public SaaS earnings calls (Atlassian, Snowflake, Datadog, Wise), continuous reading of *Inspired* (Cagan), *Working Backwards* (Bryar/Carr), *The Hard Thing About Hard Things* (Horowitz). MBA Strategic Project Management (2023-2025) and Master in Software Engineering (2023-2026) running in parallel. ### Future training Executive program targeted in 2027, [HEC Challenge+](https://www.hec.edu/en/executive-education/short-programs/challenge-plus) or *Stanford Strategic Decision and Risk Management* - to formalize the advanced financial layer (cash modeling, fundraising scenarios, dilution). Triggered upon landing the CTO scale-up role. ## Progression across journey This skill was developed across 9 different journey items. - **1999** - [CTO 路 Founder 路 technical director](https://portfolio.josedacosta.info/en/journey/celiane-founder.md) (entrepreneurship) - Confidence: 4/5 - **2016** - [Technical Project Manager 路 Co-founder 路 Early-Stage Startup](https://portfolio.josedacosta.info/en/journey/adspower-cofounder.md) (entrepreneurship) - Confidence: 5/5 - **2019** - [Engineering Manager 路 Project Manager / Product Owner 路 Technical Lead](https://portfolio.josedacosta.info/en/journey/pichet-group.md) (experience) - Confidence: 4/5 - **2020** - [Entrepreneur 路 Various Business Domains](https://portfolio.josedacosta.info/en/journey/auto-entrepreneur-jdc.md) (entrepreneurship) - Confidence: 4/5 - **2021** - [Project Manager / Product Owner 路 Flows and Products: PIM & DAM & ESB](https://portfolio.josedacosta.info/en/journey/pichet-project-manager.md) (experience) - Confidence: 3/5 - **2023** - [MBA Strategic Project Management](https://portfolio.josedacosta.info/en/journey/mba-strategic-project-management.md) (education) - Confidence: 4/5 - **2023** - [Master Expert in Software Engineering](https://portfolio.josedacosta.info/en/journey/master-software-engineering.md) (education) - Confidence: 3/5 - **2023** - [Engineering Manager 路 Enterprise Application Integration](https://portfolio.josedacosta.info/en/journey/pichet-engineering-manager.md) (experience) - Confidence: 4/5 - **2024** - [CTO 路 Founder 路 technical director](https://portfolio.josedacosta.info/en/journey/accenseo-founder.md) (entrepreneurship) - Confidence: 5/5 ## Related achievements - [Engineering Manager - Enterprise Integration Platform (alias ESB)](https://portfolio.josedacosta.info/en/achievements/engineering-manager-integration-entreprise.md) - ~370K EUR annual integration envelope, contract renegotiation (3-year rate locked), ~18K EUR/month infra OPEX Interactive version with navigation: https://portfolio.josedacosta.info/en/skills/strategic-vision-tech-direction