Jay Allardyce, Chief Product Officer at Octave, started his session on value engineering at ELEVATE 2026, the customer value event Ecosystems co-hosts with TSIA, with a show of hands. Who has built a business case to win a deal? Nearly everyone. Now keep your hand up if you went back a year later and looked at the same business case. A couple of hands stayed up. "That's what I'm here to talk about," he said.
Octave delivers industrial software to 14,000 customers who design, build, and operate infrastructure such as buildings, airports, roadways, and power plants. Jay introduced himself as "perhaps the only product person" in the room, and his argument was about value engineering: the discipline the room had built should move into the product itself.
That vantage point is rare at a value event. As Chief Product Officer, Jay decides what Octave's software measures, which most sales and customer success teams can't do on their own. But he spoke "as a fellow go-to-market leader," and he framed the change as one for everyone in the room: "This isn't a product team problem, this is an industry opportunity."
Why the Business Case Never Reaches the Product
The business case is built during the sale and never makes it into the product. "The promise lives in a spreadsheet, and the product lives in production," Jay said. "They never meet."
Jay gave value engineering its due first. "Features don't get signed. Demos don't get signed. Numbers do." The trouble starts after the deal. Eleven months in, with renewal coming, someone in customer success starts what Jay called an "archaeological dig" for baseline data, and the result is a slide built after the fact.
"We sell outcomes, we ship features, and we measure logins."
— Jay Allardyce, Chief Product Officer at Octave
"We call that value realization," Jay said, but "it's more so like forensics." "The product itself doesn't know what you actually sold or what it was sold for," he said.
What Changes When Software Can Make the Decision
AI lets software recommend a decision, and in some cases make it, while keeping a record of what it did and what the trade-offs were. Jay set one condition: "Always human in the loop in our industry, and I hope perhaps in yours as well." That record, he said, is "what people will pay for."
For 30 years, he said, software helped people do work: a person made the decision, and the software recorded it. Matching the two took meeting after meeting. If the product already records the outcome, the proof comes from the product, "not a model that predicts it, not a QBR that recreates it," Jay said. The business case stops being the forecast: "it becomes a spec, and the product's job is to meet it day in and day out to prove that value."
How It Works in a Construction Bid
In Octave's bid example, the product measures its work against the business case's baseline, checks every change against the bid the system recommended, and records the value of each recommendation in a running ledger.
In construction and industrial supply chain, Jay said, a bid is "the most important margin impact before a shovel even hits the ground." It involves thousands of line items, dozens of suppliers, and volatile material prices, and most of it still runs on spreadsheets and judgment. Margins are thin: in the panel Q&A, Jay said Octave's engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) customers make 6 to 10% margin, so "every cent out, they'll listen to." The business case promises three things: a faster bid cycle, better margin on awarded work, and lower supplier risk.
Every recommendation the product makes carries its own value: what changed, why, and what it was worth in dollars, hours, or risk score. The payoff comes at renewal time, Jay said: "Nobody goes digging, and the CFO doesn't come and ask, hey, did this work or not?"
Three Shifts for Value Engineering Teams
Jay's three shifts move the business case out of the spreadsheet and into the product, where it's measured as the software runs.
- Value engineers become value designers. Jay said the best business case should be part of the product spec, and he holds his team to build what it describes: the outcome, the baseline, and the metrics. "If you can't actually instrument it, it shouldn't be promised," he said.
- The business case becomes the spec. What's designed at the start should be a shared contract from the first discovery call to renewal, which is how he'd close the gap between sales and customer success.
- Teams stop proving value and start producing it. When the evidence is automatic, customer success gets out of forensics and focuses on growth. Jay said this is also where outcome-based pricing "actually comes to life," because a vendor can tie what it delivers to "what your customers are willing to pay for out of their pocketbook."
He ended on his show of hands. "You did your job, you made that promise," he told the room. "The failure was the fact that we let the promise live in a spot that the product did not understand." His last line: "I don't want you to build a business case. I simply want you to ship it."
What If You Don't Run Product?
Bring product people into the deal early, and start with a short, time-boxed project aimed at a few measurable outcomes. That's how Octave works with its largest customers, and it's what attendees from sales-led companies asked Jay about in the panel Q&A after his talk.
Jay's answer was Octave's "collabs," which he said is "code for FDE," or forward deployed engineering, where the vendor's engineers work directly with the customer's team. Each collab is an 11-week cycle: the customer brings a team of five, and Octave brings a team of five. With one large engineering and construction customer, the team started with 25 use cases, narrowed them to three, and picked two, each tied to a financial outcome such as moving "tens of thousands of hours" of engineers' time to other work. Octave picked its first five collabs by one test: board and C-suite involvement. Jay's warning was that collabs have to be "a yes and" alongside the products customers already use. Treating them as either-or, he said, is "a recipe to see a business tank."
Octave revisits each business case monthly, not annually or quarterly. "You need to be doing it monthly because it's a behavior change," Jay said. When a customer's needs shift a lot, Octave treats it like a scope change and measures it as its own use case, "not to conflate it to the first."
Teams that don't run product can still keep the business case alive after the sale. Ecosystems holds it in one system of record, from the value case built with the buyer to the baseline at close and the value measured after go-live.
Watch the Session
Watch Jay's full ELEVATE 2026 session, The Product is the Value Engineer, to see the bid example on screen. For the themes that ran through the whole day, read our ELEVATE 2026 recap, Closing the Promise Gap. For more on this topic, see our blog post "How World-Class Organizations Build Value into Their Products."
Frequently Asked Questions
What is value engineering?
Value engineering is the work of quantifying the business impact a customer can expect, usually in a business case built during the sale. Jay Allardyce, Chief Product Officer at Octave, argues it should also shape the product, so the outcomes, baselines, and metrics in the business case are built in and measured as the product runs.
What does it mean to make the business case the spec?
Making the business case the spec means treating the outcomes in the business case as product requirements. The baseline, target metrics, and measurement method become a shared contract from the first discovery call through renewal. At Octave, the product then records the value of each recommendation it makes, so nobody has to rebuild the evidence before a renewal.
Why is value realization hard to prove at renewal?
Because the evidence is usually rebuilt after the fact. Jay Allardyce, Chief Product Officer at Octave, described the pattern: eleven months into a contract, with renewal coming, someone in customer success goes looking for baseline data and builds a slide about what the customer got. He said it's "more so like forensics," since the proof is reconstructed instead of captured while the product runs.
How often should a business case be updated?
Octave revisits its business cases monthly. Jay Allardyce, Chief Product Officer at Octave, said annual and quarterly reviews aren't enough: "You need to be doing it monthly because it's a behavior change." If a customer's needs shift a lot, Octave treats the change like a scope change and measures it as a separate use case, so it doesn't blur the results of the original one.
Keep the Conversation Going
The conversations that started at ELEVATE continue all year with peers who are solving the same problems. Join the Customer Value Community to be part of them. And if you'd like to see how teams use Ecosystems to carry the value promise from business case to renewal, book a demo.
