The CTO ToolBox: Table of Contents

Congratulations. You are the CTO

You be you

1. Know Yourself
2. Ask the dumb questions
3. Make the hard decision
4. A dose of humility goes a long way

Culture, Strategy and Tactics

1. It starts with Culture
2. Tactics and Strategy
3. Learn from the best
4. Drive clarity in Decision Making
5. Communicate Courageously
6. Bridging the Customer-Engineer gap(my writeup for cio.com)
7. Customer Centricity
8. The rule of 3
9. The Unit of 1
10. Avoid weasel words

Software Development is a team sport

1. Hiring and Interviews
2. Hiring for Leadership positions
3. Establish a growth mindset
4. Build an inclusive culture
5. Embrace change
6. Managing Debt
7. Building Confidence
8. Speedboats: Sustaining Innovation and Engagement
9. Partner hard
10. Structuring teams
11. Establishing a Meritocracy
12. Managing a remote workforce
13. Generalists over specialists (mostly)

Metrics, Financials

1. Establish a financial framework
2. The value to cost ratio
3. You cannot fix what you do not measure
4. Systems optimize for inspection points
5. Core vs Context Framework
6. Architecture Decision Logging
7. Quality: a misunderstood concept
8. Do not confuse Input and Output metrics

Process is your sidekick, not the boss

1. Establish an on call program
2. Why are you not measuring Developer NPS?
3. RCA’s — an essential systems skill (from my writeup while at Intuit)
4. The Success RCA (SRCA)
5. Anatomy of an RCA
6. Beware of proxies
7. Engineering cheat days: Unleash creative talent
8. Working efficiently as a remote, global team
9. Business Continuity Planning (My article at cio.com)
10. Training, access to ongoing education
11. Mentoring, teaching and learning

Technology musings

1. Technology Choices
2. Pace Layers & Technology
3. The importance of performance in your products
4. API’s as a product
5. Engineering & Operational Excellence
6. Beware of abstraction layers
7. Why I prefer Serverless
8. Boring as a system choice
9. Speeding up development using ChatGPT 4.0 (June 2023)