What's incredible (and frankly horrifying) in this blog post is the complete lack of anything pertaining to what /kind/ of company the CTO works at. Surely, tha

What's incredible (and frankly horrifying) in this blog post is the complete lack of anything pertaining to what /kind/ of company the CTO works at. Surely, that must be important; a large company that sells a non technical product may need a very different CTO from an enterprise software company, who may need a very different one from a quantitative trading find. Along those lines, I find the lack of connection to anything pertaining to product market fit equally horrifying. Sure, you might say, that's the job of the head of product. But if you're the CTO, you are going to struggle to prioritize your engineering roadmap without very strong product chops, and moreover, you will struggle to "skate ahead of the puck" and ruthlessly cut out infrastructural nice-to-haves versus necessities. You may also blunder into architectural traps that come about from insufficient awareness of product risks. It is a real cop out, and a vague one, in my opinion, to say that a CTO "should be technical." The big question is "what kind of technical." In contrast to this blog post (which I find a little empty, sadly), I'd recommend one of my perennials favorites: Werner Vogels post about the 4 different kinds of CTO: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/07/the_different_cto_roles.html https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/07/the_different_c... What I like about the quadrant is that it maps the four kinds into rate of business change on one axis, and information as percentage of products/services on another axis. This is really useful because it lets you stratify what kind of CTO you'll probably be looking for based on what kind of business you're looking at, which is very important because the world of business needs for CTOs are /vast/ and heterogenous. CTO could mean many different things at many different companies. A good framework for whether a CTO should be at X should also account for "at Y kind of company."