AgeRate Engineering: 4 T’s of the Technical Cofounder
The journey of a CTO is very vague at first. Their role depends on where their company is in it’s business cycle.
The CTO could be anywhere from visioning next to the CEO, being hands down next to the recruiters filtering through resumes, up late at night cheering on the backend engineers, convincing the other execs to give the technology group more money to fund tech projects. Mememing the CMO about their latest marketing campaign.
The CTO’s role is ever changing and needs to be adaptable. They should always be in sync and growing in lock-step with the growth of their company. However, even though they deal with many matters across the business, their focus should always be around 4 key areas of discipline that are known as the 4 T’s.
Technology
As the chief technologist in the team, the CTO needs to always be several steps ahead. They need to understand the different tradeoffs of why they would use a certain database technology over the other, the difference between certain communication protocols, when to use sync vs async architectures, etc etc. They are not afraid to be deep in the weeds, honing their craft, learning how low level mechanism can affect the broader business process.
The CTO does not have to be the smartest person on the team, however they need to be able to build the technical literacy and mouth piece in order to be able to have critical conversations with their team about each area of the tech stack from the operating system and up.
The goal of a CTO is not to go super vertical in the tech stack, but they need to develop breadth so their knowledge can cut across the business lines.
By developing a level of depth, it allows them to gain insight to the current gaps in the company’s tech stack — areas that is not aligned with the overall business strategy.
Tools
The CTO needs to identify the right tools for the team by creating standards about how and what tools should be used as well as why to use them over others.
It is the CTO’s role to make sure the team is running smoothly and that they have the necessary tools available to perform their job. If there is no tool for a specific job, then the CTO should build it.
The CTO should be aware and knowledgeable about many tools, but they should maintain a small tool belt. The smaller the tool set, it allows them and the team to develop deep expertise and experience with a few niche tools, then to be average at many tools. More tools in this case would be more maintenance and mediocre output as knowledge and expertise are divided amongst the other tools.
Trends / Timing
The CTO is always balancing for when is a good time to pursue further development, scale, stop or refactor. If a crossroads comes about whether to do one or the other, the CTO will have to decide to choose one for the cost of the other. This cost is usually in the form of technical debt.
similar to financial debt, there can be both good debt and bad debt. Following the concept of good debt, it would be wise to incur technical debt in order to allow the development of certain objectives that is aligned with the teams business strategy.
It can be thought as if they are spending potential time in the future to be able to receive money through the form of new technology. That “money” that was gained today will be used in order to refund the future. It sounds convoluted, but thats essentially how a normal loan works and it works the same for tech debt. You are giving up a little bit of the future, in order to get immediate rewards in the present. The trade off is at some point in time, you will need to pay it back, and it is the job as a CTO to understand the market conditions, the product pipeline, and the teams capacity in order to make an effective decision around timing and trends.
As for trends they should build awareness of newer technologies coming out, and how it may or may not be added into the product pipeline into the future.
Talent
When a tech stack is chosen, this determines the type of talent a company is going to get. If a popular mainstream stack is chosen, it will be much easier, faster and most important cheaper to hire someone with a javascript / python background than someone who knows Elixir or C++.
Depending on the product and business requirements, if performance is not a priority, a CTO can make the decision to go for a high level stack that allows for more readable and maintainable code. These tech stacks usually have deep talent pools that are afforadable at a fair market value.
However, if system performance is a non negotiable, a strongly typed lower level tech stack is the choice to go. The cost of this can be in the form of code readability/maintainability and a small talent pool that is highly competitive and above market value.
The CTO knows how to choose a stack based of business objectives knowing that this decision will dictate the type of talent the company will aquire.
These are the 4 key areas of discipline and focus of a CTO throughout their journey. How they balance these 4 areas depends on the progress of their company, and I will be writing about it in another article.
Hopefully you found this helpful and until next time!
AgeRate is a Biotech Startup in Hamilton Ontario that focuses on creating innovative next generation epigenetic tests. If you want to read more engineering, product design and R&D articles feel free to follow us!
If you are interested in our product launch in this summer then subscribe for exclusive access to pre-order prices (and to stay in-the-know on what we’re doing)
