Ask HN: How to advice a HW startup with building a SaaS product?

I work for a small VC-funded hardware startup in Germany and would like to help them/founders make good decsions going forward regarding adding a SaaS product on top of their industrial hardware offerings (which are already doing great). Currently, I run and maintain a very cost-effective semi-automated data-aquisition and ETL pipeline for them.

However, mutual understanding proved to be difficult between me as a unix-minded software engineer and the hardware/business people running the company.

Often the founders/CEO hear from investors about new technologies such as Kubernetes or cloud offerings from the big fishes such as AWS and Azure or some cathy term and believe just using them will immediately contribute to their success (it will immediately contribute to their costs with no clear gains, investores like it however).

How could I best support the founders and CEO in making a software product and let them focus on "what" needs to be done, instead of "how" to do it in your opinion? Or perhaps I need to change my expectations? Either way, I appreciate your input.

Thanks.