At a small company or startup, “senior management” often implies that your title is CTO. And yet the CTO job is one of the least well-defined roles in the technical world. If you’re a CTO, what are you supposed to be doing? If you want to become a CTO, what do you need to do to get there?
Let’s start by talking about what a CTO is not. CTO is not an engineering role. CTO is not the top of the technical ladder, and it is not the natural progression engineers should strive to achieve over the course of their careers. It’s not a role most people who love coding, architecture, and deep technical design would enjoy doing. It follows that the CTO is not necessarily the best engineer in the company.
Now, with that out of the way: what is a CTO, if not the best writer of code and the natural pinnacle of the engineering ladder?
The challenge in defining the role of the CTO is that if you look at the folks who hold that title, you’ll see many different manifestations. Some are the technical cofounders. Others were the best of the early engineers. Some started at the company with the title, while others (such as myself) were promoted into it over time. Some became CTO after being the VP of Engineering. Some focus on the people and processes of engineering, hiring, and recruiting. Others focus on the technical architecture or the product roadmap. Some CTOs are the face of the company to the external technical world. Some CTOs have no direct reports, while others manage the entire engineering organization.
After looking at all these different examples, the best definition I can give you is that the CTO is the technical leader at the company’s current stage of evolution. To me, that definition is rather unsatisfying, and misses the hardest part of the job. To expand, the CTO should be the strategic technical executive the company needs in its current stage of evolution.
What do I mean by “strategic”? The CTO thinks about the long term, and helps to plan the future of the business and the elements that make that possible.
What do I mean by “executive”? The CTO takes that strategic thinking and helps to make it real and operational by breaking down the problem and directing people to execute against it.
So, what does a CTO actually do?
First and foremost, a CTO must care about and understand the business, and be able to shape business strategy through the lens of technology. He is an executive first, a technologist second. If the CTO doesn’t have a seat at the executive table and doesn’t understand the business challenges the company faces, there’s no way he can guide the technology to solve those challenges. The CTO may identify areas where technology can be used to create new or bigger lines of business for the company that align with the overall company strategies. Or he may simply ensure that the technology is always evolving to anticipate and enable the potential futures of the business and product roadmap.
No matter what, the CTO must understand where the biggest technical opportunities and risks for the business are and focus on capitalizing on them. If he is focused on recruiting, retention, process, and people management, that’s because it’s the most important thing for the technology team to focus on at the time. I present this idea in contrast to the notion that the CTO should focus on purely technical issues, as the “chief nerd.”
Strong CTOs also have significant management responsibility and influence. This doesn’t always mean they’re deeply involved in the day-to-day management, but part of maintaining your ability to shape the direction of the business and the business strategy is putting people behind solving the problems you believe will impact the business. Other executives will have ideas and needs for technology. The CTO must protect the technology team from becoming a pure execution arm for ideas without tending to its own needs and its own ideas.
Things get tricky when the team grows to be very large, and the CTO starts to hire VPs to manage all the people. Many CTOs give up all of their management responsibilities to their VPs, sometimes going so far as to not even have the VPs reporting to them. It’s incredibly difficult to maintain influence and effectiveness as an executive with no reporting power.
I saw this clearly at a previous employer, where the most senior members of the technical staff in large business areas would often hold the title of CTO for that area. These people were always highly respected and technically capable. They understood the business and its technical challenges, and were often called on to help inspire the engineering team and help with recruiting. Yet they had trouble being successful because they often lacked the direct management oversight of any teams, and because technology was frequently viewed as an execution arm, they didn’t have much strategic influence.
If you’re a leader with no power over business strategy and no ability to allocate people to important tasks, you’re at best at the mercy of your influence with other executives and managers, and at worst a figurehead. You can’t give up the responsibility of management without giving up the power that comes with it.
The CTO who doesn’t also have the authority of management must be able to get things done purely by influencing the organization. If the managers won’t actually give people and time to work on the areas that the CTO believes are important, he is rendered effectively powerless. If you give up management, you’re giving up the most important power you ever had over the business strategy, and you effectively have nothing but your organizational goodwill and your own two hands.
My advice for aspiring CTOs is to remember that it’s a business strategy job first and foremost. It’s also a management job. If you don’t care about the business your company is running — if you’re not willing to take ultimate responsibility for having a large team of people effectively attacking that business — then CTO is not the job for you.