CTO Role
Notes on CTO job role
- 4 must-have knowledge for a CTO:
- Team Management
- Tools and techniques
- Technology and trends
- Timing of decisions
- Jobs of a CTO:
- Strategy - meeting corporate goals with technology, bringing technology in different departments
- Translating - Communicate the business needs to tech guys and vice-versa in an effective way
- Leading - setting goals and plans for the engineering team, preventing others from distracting engineers
- HR - hiring the right people and mentoring your team to develop their skill set
- Different types of CTO:
- Start-up coder - only person, main tech guy
- Hands-on CTO - leading 4~5 people
- Mid-size - leading 50 people
- Corporate - leading >100 people
- Technology team consists of:
- Software development
- Quality assistance
- IT support
- Product management
- Project management
- Chief scientist
- Data science
- Technical writers
- Professional service
- the first 3 are the most common in any company, the remaining are mostly in big corporations
- Common CTO failure modes
- Odd Man Out
- Kid CTO
- Six executives in search of a CTO
- Managing a project to avoid ‘That’s what I said but not what I meant’
- Accurate and non-ambiguous specifications
- Regular check-ins and course sorrection
- Agile software development
- Engineering project Triangle - used to define quality and analyze a project
- Scope - features, functionality, performance quality
- Cost - resources, budget
- Time - speed
- any project should focus on one of the above
- a project constrained on all 3 dimensions often fail
- don’t build a cool interesting project that nobody wants. A technologist should understand business needs.
- it is cheaper to make a change as early as possible. With passage of time, cost of change exponentially rises.
References
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izBAXyYu3C0&t=1047s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wMKPk4xQGE