I highly recommend Kent Beck's keynote talk from RailsConf 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aApmOZwdPqA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aApmOZwdPqA (or if

I highly recommend Kent Beck's keynote talk from RailsConf 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aApmOZwdPqA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aApmOZwdPqA (or if you prefer, a more recent blog post with a similar message): https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/accountability-in-software-development-375d42932813 https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/accountability-in-software.... Software development is hard, and it's easy to do things the wrong way. The thing to do is figure out how to do things that give you confidence you're doing things the right way. In some ways, it can look bad for someone in leadership, like a CTO, to get called out for not doing things the right way. At the same time though, if you and the leadership in your company have hired the right engineers working with you, even if you are the CTO hopefully people working with you know more about specific areas than you do, and as CTO you can help make sure that things fit together. So what if you get feedback on how to do things better? You as CTO have a chance to set an example to others on the team for how to receive feedback constructively.