Notes on CTO job role

  • 4 must-have knowledge for a CTO:
    1. Team Management
    2. Tools and techniques
    3. Technology and trends
    4. Timing of decisions
  • Jobs of a CTO:
    1. Strategy - meeting corporate goals with technology, bringing technology in different departments
    2. Translating - Communicate the business needs to tech guys and vice-versa in an effective way
    3. Leading - setting goals and plans for the engineering team, preventing others from distracting engineers
    4. HR - hiring the right people and mentoring your team to develop their skill set
  • Different types of CTO:
    1. Start-up coder - only person, main tech guy
    2. Hands-on CTO - leading 4~5 people
    3. Mid-size - leading 50 people
    4. Corporate - leading >100 people
  • Technology team consists of:
    1. Software development
    2. Quality assistance
    3. IT support
    4. Product management
    5. Project management
    6. Chief scientist
    7. Data science
    8. Technical writers
    9. Professional service
    • the first 3 are the most common in any company, the remaining are mostly in big corporations
  • Common CTO failure modes
    1. Odd Man Out
    2. Kid CTO
    3. Six executives in search of a CTO
  • Managing a project to avoid ‘That’s what I said but not what I meant’
    1. Accurate and non-ambiguous specifications
    2. Regular check-ins and course sorrection
    3. Agile software development
  • Engineering project Triangle - used to define quality and analyze a project
    1. Scope - features, functionality, performance quality
    2. Cost - resources, budget
    3. 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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrL25lW_is0 (todo)