3 ms·

How do you concern about strategy all day? Just sit down and think about it?

by brabel 1y ago

dyauspitr 1y ago
Lots of conversations/meetings. Your job is to know what is happening and strategize accordingly.
matwood 1y ago
You read, talk to people and write. Then you get feedback on your writing, and repeat the process.
motorest 1y ago
> How do you concern about strategy all day? Just sit down and think about it? I'm not OP, but whenever your product is implemented by more than one team you will also have the need to coordinate and set strategic goals as well as accompany and steer each team towards where it's infrastructure/tech stack/systems architecture need to be. If you do not offer guidance and determine technical directions, each engineer working in each team will happily fill the void and do their best to scratch their itch at the expense of the whole company becoming an unmaintainable big ball of mud. Let's put things differently: what do you expect will be the output of a company if no one is responsible for things like directing the company's R&D effort, coordinate and specify the company's tech roadmap, even oversee product development.
prmoustache 1y ago
you read gartner's publication and blindly ask AI to copy paste that info in a memo or powerpoint to pass it on to the middle management without trying to figure out if it makes sense. At least that is how it looks from the engineers perspective.
sponaugle 1y ago
This is an interesting question - I am a CTO at >1B tech company and there is no doubt that part of my role is exactly this - Technology Strategy. How do I do it? (1) It is my job to be familiar with a wide range of technologies, which might include tech stacks, but us mostly tech offerings. The tech offerings means lots of meetings with companies that build tech that we might use. Some of those are useful, most are painful. (2) Actually using technology - IMHO - This is one of the most important aspects of the CTO job. I code all the time, but not for any of our products or operations. I code to learn so I can help make better decisions. We use Kafka for instance, and when we first started using it I built a cluster in my homelab so I had a better idea how it worked. The same with Hadoop, Cassendra, and a few different flavors of Kubernetes. The T in CTO is for 'technology', but it really should be for 'technical'. (3) Perhaps the single most important thing - I try to hire people that are much smarter than I am, always. The amount I learn from people that are smarter/faster/better is many orders or magnitude greater and more valuable than the reverse. (4) All the rest of the CTO job needs to support this - so budgeting, head count plans, spending strategy, patents and IP, roadmaps, decisions, etc. All of these details have to roll up and hopefully support a strategy.

How do you concern about strategy all day? Just sit down and think about it?

by brabel 1y ago

How do you concern about strategy all day? Just sit down and think about it?

dyauspitr 1y ago

Lots of conversations/meetings. Your job is to know what is happening and strategize accordingly.

matwood 1y ago

You read, talk to people and write. Then you get feedback on your writing, and repeat the process.

motorest 1y ago

> How do you concern about strategy all day? Just sit down and think about it? I'm not OP, but whenever your product is implemented by more than one team you will also have the need to coordinate and set strategic goals as well as accompany and steer each team towards where it's infrastructure/tech stack/systems architecture need to be. If you do not offer guidance and determine technical directions, each engineer working in each team will happily fill the void and do their best to scratch their itch at the expense of the whole company becoming an unmaintainable big ball of mud. Let's put things differently: what do you expect will be the output of a company if no one is responsible for things like directing the company's R&D effort, coordinate and specify the company's tech roadmap, even oversee product development.

prmoustache 1y ago

you read gartner's publication and blindly ask AI to copy paste that info in a memo or powerpoint to pass it on to the middle management without trying to figure out if it makes sense. At least that is how it looks from the engineers perspective.

sponaugle 1y ago

This is an interesting question - I am a CTO at >1B tech company and there is no doubt that part of my role is exactly this - Technology Strategy. How do I do it? (1) It is my job to be familiar with a wide range of technologies, which might include tech stacks, but us mostly tech offerings. The tech offerings means lots of meetings with companies that build tech that we might use. Some of those are useful, most are painful. (2) Actually using technology - IMHO - This is one of the most important aspects of the CTO job. I code all the time, but not for any of our products or operations. I code to learn so I can help make better decisions. We use Kafka for instance, and when we first started using it I built a cluster in my homelab so I had a better idea how it worked. The same with Hadoop, Cassendra, and a few different flavors of Kubernetes. The T in CTO is for 'technology', but it really should be for 'technical'. (3) Perhaps the single most important thing - I try to hire people that are much smarter than I am, always. The amount I learn from people that are smarter/faster/better is many orders or magnitude greater and more valuable than the reverse. (4) All the rest of the CTO job needs to support this - so budgeting, head count plans, spending strategy, patents and IP, roadmaps, decisions, etc. All of these details have to roll up and hopefully support a strategy.