22. People … grow according to the
demands they make on themselves.
They grow according to what they
consider to be achievement and
attainment. If they demand little of
themselves, they will remain stunted. If
they demand a good deal of
themselves, they will grow to giant
stature—without any more effort than
is expended by the nonachievers.
Peter Drucker, “The Effective
Executive”
The role of CTO is a fairly new, modern role. Came about in the late 80s, and as tech eats the world it continues to evolve
The role too often seems to get typecast as a necessary evil held y people who don’t know or care about running a business.
It is often held to low expectations, as long as the CTO isn’t too disruptive they’re considered to be successful. It’s coddled and tolerated because of the tech crunch, but by allowing ourselves to be held to lower standards we actually weaken the status of all engineers in our businesses.
Like an appendix
Or a tail
Something we have evolved not to need, or even to work around
This is not a cushy job, it’s time to get uncomfortable
Next slide: Grow and evolve with this opportunity
How do you evolve to keep from being a vestige of the past to being part of thriving present and future?
You have many different types of engineers, frontend, backend, ops, you can’t be “the best” at all of those areas
Too hands-on
Story of broken build frustrating me, hero parachuting in
Most engineers would not be happy with the job of CTO. They may imagine that it is like the engineer who gets to work on the juiciest projects and make the technical decisions
CTO is not the cushy job given to overfed overprivileged engineers just because we’re in a talent crunch
Strategic role:
Many possible futures of the business
Near or distant future depending on duration of the company
Inspires the team and helps them understand what they’re working towards in the long-run
A bursty exercise
a person with senior managerial responsibility in a business organization
Executives are doers, they must execute
Evaluating new technologies, guiding the team on adoption of new technologies and practices
Not just about you individually seeing opportunities, but about having an organization that is capable of surfacing and embracing technical opportunities
The CTO must protect the technology team from becoming a pure execution arm for ideas without tending to its own needs and its own ideas.
If technology becomes an execution arm, and you have no management execution influence, it becomes impossible to get things done
All the strategic ideas in the world are meaningless if you can’t ever execute against them
Purely influential leadership is very, very hard to pull off
Devs may not need to know that much to be happy and successful, but the executives do
To identify opportunities for technology to make the biggest impact, you have to understand the landscape of the business you’re in
Focus on collaborating with people outside of engineering
Your #1 team is not engineering, it is your executive team
This is where influence leadership comes into play
You have to be able to take technical challenges and translate them for external parties and vice versa
You’re building more than a tech team or platform, you’re helping to build and lead a company
People … grow according to the demands they make on themselves. They grow according to what they consider to be achievement and attainment. If they demand little of themselves, they will remain stunted. If they demand a good deal of themselves, they will grow to giant stature—without any more effort than is expended by the nonachievers.We have the power and ability to do more, but we have to see the needs and go after them, raise the bar for ourselves.
For the sake of your team, for the sake of your company, Evolve