The 3 Qualities That Separate Technical Leaders From Order Takers
Lessons from a former Google Cloud CIO on how real impact is made
I met Paolo Juvara during my first 90-day onboarding plan at Pure Storage. Paolo is the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at Pure and a former CIO of Google Cloud. He has spent years operating at the intersection of technology, business, and scale.
During one of our early conversations, I asked him a question I had been thinking about for a while.
What qualities are needed for technical leaders to succeed and actually make an impact?
He answered immediately. No hesitation.
Sufficient technical breadth. Business knowledge. Clear communication.
What struck me was not just the list, but how quickly it came to him. These were not abstract leadership ideas. They were patterns he had seen repeatedly across organizations and roles.
Let’s break them down.
1. Sufficient technical breadth
Paolo did not talk about being the deepest expert in the room. He spoke about breadth.
The ability to go beyond one system or subsystem. The ability to understand how systems interact, where integration points live, and how technology fits across an entire enterprise.
Most hard problems do not exist inside a single system. They exist between systems. They show up in handoffs, data movement, security boundaries, and operational friction.
Average technical leaders optimize locally. They go deep in their domain and stop there.
Impactful technical leaders think end-to-end. They understand how a storage decision impacts applications, how application changes affect workflows, and how all of it rolls up to cost, risk, and speed.
This does not mean knowing everything. It means knowing enough across domains to ask better questions and connect dots others miss.
“The most valuable technical leaders are not experts in one box. They understand how the boxes connect.”
Or as Fred Brooks famously put it:
“The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.”
That decision requires breadth.
2. Business knowledge
This is where many technical leaders stall.
Without business knowledge, leaders become order takers. They execute requests rather than shape outcomes. They react instead of influencing.
Paolo was direct about this. Business knowledge enables technical leaders to align with functional leaders and forge agreements to solve high-impact problems.
It is the difference between hearing “we need this built” and responding with “here are three options and the trade-offs.”
Leaders who lack business context often avoid these discussions because they do not feel fluent enough to participate. So they stay quiet. Decisions get made without them.
The strongest technical leaders understand how the business makes money, where costs matter, what risks are acceptable, and what success actually looks like.
That understanding earns trust and a seat at the table.
“If you are not part of the trade-off discussion, you are just implementing someone else’s decision.”
Peter Drucker captured this idea well:
“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
Business knowledge keeps technical leaders focused on the right problems.
3. Clear communication
This is the most underrated skill, and my personal favorite.
The ability to explain complex technical problems and trade-offs in simple, accessible language is one of the highest-leverage skills a technical leader can develop.
Executives do not need implementation details. They need to understand impact, options, risks, and consequences.
Teams do not need jargon. They need clarity on direction, intent, and priorities.
Average leaders hide behind complexity. Impactful leaders reduce it.
Clear communication is not about dumbing things down. It is a signal of clear thinking. If you cannot explain something, you probably do not understand it well enough.
Despite its value, many leaders treat communication as a soft skill instead of a core leadership skill. That is a mistake.
“Clarity is not a presentation skill. It is a leadership skill.”
Albert Einstein said it even more bluntly:
“If you cannot explain it simply, you do not understand it well enough.”
The three qualities, summarized
To make a real impact as a technical leader, you need all three.
• Sufficient technical breadth to see across systems and reason end-to-end
• Business knowledge to move from execution to influence and trade-offs
• Clear communication to turn complexity into alignment and action
This conversation changed how I think about my own role. I spend less time optimizing systems in isolation and more time optimizing decisions.
A helpful question to end on:
Where in your role are you still being asked to execute when you could be helping shape the decision instead?