(have been a CTO/VPE/HoD for 20+ years, made many mistakes, am often wrong, now coach CTOs) I think it depends on how many developers are there. I tell all coa

(have been a CTO/VPE/HoD for 20+ years, made many mistakes, am often wrong, now coach CTOs) I think it depends on how many developers are there. I tell all coachees they should invest 50% of their time in developing their team. If you grow, don't hire team managers too late (or whatever you want to call them), or you'll get into burn out territory and you'll neglect developing people. Don't manage more than 5 people. As a CTO you should be the bridge between business and tech. Explain business to developers (marketing isn't stupid), explain tech to the CEO/CMO, support the CEO strategy with your specific tech knowledge. Spend time on explaining things and aligning people. You're the tech spokesperson and developer representative on the board. If learned, although often being the best developer overall, with only a small percentage of development time I know much less about the architecture, domains and edge cases of an application compared to other developers. So I did drop developing in the end (but do it in my spare time to keep up with the state of the art). Otherwise focus on the things that are fun to you, you're in for the long run which doesn't work if you don't enjoy the things you do.