What Does a CTO do?

A lot of people may be thinking of what exactly does a CTO do. Well, there is not one universal answer to that. What the CTO does heavily depends on the business and the size of the organization. And also every situation is different. Finding out what brings the most value to the business, that's what the CTO should be focusing on. In my career, I grew from engineer to CTO, and in this video I am sharing all about what does a CTO do and how the role looks like based on different size of the companies. So let's first talk about why is a CTO important for a company. The CTO is responsible for everything technical. They're the go-to person if something breaks or if something is not working as it should be. CTO is also a strategist and a visionary, which means that they are here to create a great technical strategy that is aligned with the business. What's also important to note is that they need to build a great team around them. Only great teams build great software. Therefore, building a great team is one of the most important things a CTO can do. And there are so many other things like the culture, hiring, security, and all kinds of different processes. They should be able to create a great engineering organization where people can thrive. Now let's talk about how important the business mindset is for CTOs. I like to say that a CTO is a business role. Even though a CTO is responsible for everything technical, they should have a good understanding of the business. The alignment between business and tech is crucial. I like to say that alignment can either break or make a business. Imagine if you're building something that is not going to be expected by the rest of the business or the customers. It can mean a lot of wasted resources and can quite quickly create silos inside a company. This means that the departments don't really work together, but rather just work for their benefit. And when both business and tech are aligned, it can truly bring a lot of benefits. This aligns all the departments to move together to achieve goals, and there can be a lot of other benefits like automation and innovation. Now let's get into what a CTO does based on which stage currently the company is in. One of the most important things you can do as a CTO of the company is to acknowledge what is the best thing you should be focusing on. It's important to adapt to the needs of the company and the business and ensure that you are spending your time correctly. The role of the CTO heavily depends on which stage currently the company is in. Let's start with a small company first, company that is pre-product market fit. The CTO needs to be a tech lead or a team lead and develop the MVP together with the team. How much individual contribution a CTO does depends on the size of the team. Normally, the MVP is built with as few people as possible, but the bigger the team, the more coaching and mentoring the CTO needs to do. Overall strategy and business mindset combined with technical skills are very important in this stage. Let's go to a midsize company after the company has achieved product-market fit. In this stage, the CTO needs to be a good manager and build out the teams to support the growth of the organization. The number one focus is to build a great engineering organization and teams that are going to consistently provide business value. Therefore, the focus is on hiring, processes, and team mentality. The CTO should not be doing any individual contribution, but they should still have a good sense of what and how it's being done. The technical details need to be understandable and they should be aligned with the business, but the development should be left to the teams. I've seen CTOs having a hard time of letting go of the details and that is a huge problem at this stage. They should focus on how to make others around them better and make sure that the overall organization is on point and not focusing on the fine details. This is one of the hardest and most crucial things that first-time CTOs need to understand. Strategy and the vision combined with building out the teams and great organization, they should be the number one focus. There is a big difference if you work on your organization or if you work in your organization. The majority of the time you should work on your organization. Now let's go to the large company. At this stage, CTO is purely a strategic and business role. Aligning technology with the business vision is what CTOs in this stage should be focusing on the most. It becomes critical to acknowledge the business opportunities and align them with technical efforts. The thinking should shift a lot more to the future than the present. There should already be great processes in place, and you have hired a few VPs of Engineering. They should be handling the heavy lifting of the day-to-day processes. As a CTO, you should be focusing on bringing in the right people instead of you doing operational changes yourself. You become the face of the company on the tech side, and you can also contribute to success to the company by helping to promote with the products. This can be done by giving talks and presentations on events or hosting webinars. I'm curious to hear about your thoughts on what CTOs do on a daily basis. Make sure to share them in the comments. To learn more, you can subscribe to my newsletter. It's called Engineering Leadership, where I share similar tips and advice on how to be a great engineering leader. There are more than 100,000 people already reading it, and I publish 2 new articles every week. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you on the next one.