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Yes, you can do it, the key is recognizing your weaknesses and that at some point you will cease to primarily be an active engineer (meaning you won't code day

Yes, you can do it, the key is recognizing your weaknesses and that at some point you will cease to primarily be an active engineer (meaning you won't code day to day etc). Great CTO's always remain very technical IMO, but they have to develop a whole new set of skills. Most of the time you will find it is hard to scale yourself fast enough if you are on a rocket ship, so the key way to remain CTO is to hire for your gaps beyond just engineers, hire product people, hire project managers, hire an ex-CTO that wants to mentor and play a role less than the CTO. I have been a founder prior and I have been a CTO for different companies as well as a Chief Software Architect at GE (essentially a large project's CTO where my staff was over 130 people). Being CTO is hard to do well, and depending on the organization it can be downright the most stressful job. It also can be the most rewarding and fun job, so I definitely love it. Some things I recommend (you probably already have some just listing things that pop into my mind) and this is by no means comprehensive: 1. Always make yourself redundant in all the positions you move through on the way to CTO (that's how you will be one). 2. Find a good mentor who can help you and will be painfully honest with you. Find this person hopefully before you are the CTO, that way they can help guide you on the way up. 3. Learn to take feedback across the board. Don't ignore the mentors advice and be careful not to ask 10 people for advice as at some point it becomes noise and you won't make a good decision. 4. Learn to make decisions with less than the full picture, and live with the consequences. And accept you need to change the decision or reverse course and that's ok, don't live with a bad decision when the facts show you made a mistake, correct and move forward. 5. Say no often. Learn that the business goals/needs comes first, not fun cool new technology. Of course, if the business is to develop fun new tech that's cool too. 6. Learn how to work with all types of people, this can be hard but it is absolutely required because you need diversity and you need to hire different skillsets other than just engineers as a CTO. 7. Learn to speak business, this is a fun challenge if you don't know already and it is immensely helpful. 8. Learn basic accounting so you understand why things are being asked of you sometimes. This also makes you far more valuable to the organization and in the future. 9. Learn to scale the organization, this is trial and error to some degree if you've never done it before. Hiring and team structure can be hard, experimenting and taking team feedback is how you succeed. 10. Respect your weaknesses and find people to compliment them. We all have weaknesses, respect you have them, acknowledge them and hire people to balance you. 11. Hire people that disagree with you. I don't mean hire assholes, but hire people who challenge your way of thinking, that force you to make better decisions. 12. Learn how to manage products, read some books on new product introductions, processes and find a product mentor. Product is what is important, not whether you used framework A or B, but you need to balance all that, so understanding product is critical to success. FYI: I am the CTO of a backed healthcare startup.

bwb 7y ago
Utterly fantastic reply!!!! Thank you :)
jaredsohn 7y ago
> Respect your weaknesses and find people to compliment them Your spelling skills are amazing. :)
- davismwfl 7y ago
  That's awesome. I screwed that one up, my bad. :) Complement vs compliment, just a slight difference.
adonnjohn 7y ago
Any tips on do's and don'ts of #1?
- davismwfl 7y ago
  #1 starts with not doing the same thing multiple times needlessly (so automate), then it is about mentoring others to do your job (and in general), plus being 100% transparent about what you are doing. Part of mentoring IMO is also raising your hand to help someone else that needs it, but still making sure you deliver on your commitments. People that hold onto information to try and keep their position are the exact opposite of this idea, probably everyone has worked with someone like this. The dude that "hides" credentials, or says he'll do it cause no one else can etc. You want to share everything you know and be transparent. It scares some people because they fear they'll be replaced if they do this, but the reality is you can't move on to the next level unless you've made yourself replaceable. I don't honestly think it is more complicated than that to be fair. One other nugget to all of this is you have to trust others to do their job, and when things break you have to take responsibility and help pick up the pieces even if you weren't the reason it broke. I think most good people take responsibility, but I know a lot of very capable and intelligent engineers that will never lead a team or be a CTO because they have the complex that only they can do a job correctly. We can approach a problem 2 different ways with tradeoffs each way, but if I am the CTO/director etc and I give you a project to do, along with some direction of course, I need to trust you (assuming you can defend your solution fairly) to do the job. A leader can't micromanage and succeed long term, it just doesn't work. And that is all part of making yourself redundant in my view.

bwb 7y ago

Utterly fantastic reply!!!! Thank you :)

jaredsohn 7y ago

> Respect your weaknesses and find people to compliment them Your spelling skills are amazing. :)

davismwfl 7y ago
That's awesome. I screwed that one up, my bad. :) Complement vs compliment, just a slight difference.

adonnjohn 7y ago

Any tips on do's and don'ts of #1?

davismwfl 7y ago
#1 starts with not doing the same thing multiple times needlessly (so automate), then it is about mentoring others to do your job (and in general), plus being 100% transparent about what you are doing. Part of mentoring IMO is also raising your hand to help someone else that needs it, but still making sure you deliver on your commitments. People that hold onto information to try and keep their position are the exact opposite of this idea, probably everyone has worked with someone like this. The dude that "hides" credentials, or says he'll do it cause no one else can etc. You want to share everything you know and be transparent. It scares some people because they fear they'll be replaced if they do this, but the reality is you can't move on to the next level unless you've made yourself replaceable. I don't honestly think it is more complicated than that to be fair. One other nugget to all of this is you have to trust others to do their job, and when things break you have to take responsibility and help pick up the pieces even if you weren't the reason it broke. I think most good people take responsibility, but I know a lot of very capable and intelligent engineers that will never lead a team or be a CTO because they have the complex that only they can do a job correctly. We can approach a problem 2 different ways with tradeoffs each way, but if I am the CTO/director etc and I give you a project to do, along with some direction of course, I need to trust you (assuming you can defend your solution fairly) to do the job. A leader can't micromanage and succeed long term, it just doesn't work. And that is all part of making yourself redundant in my view.