CTO 2.0: Adapting to the Future of Technology Leadership
Jesper Brøndum, Boozt CTO and co-founder, attended the TechBBQ 2023 conference in Copenhagen where he discussed his role as Chief Technology Officer. In this blog post he will share his thoughts on how to lead tech teams in the future.
A few months ago, I had the opportunity to join a panel debate on the subject “CTO 2.0 Future of Tech Leadership” at TechBBQ 2023. We discussed the changes that we as technology leaders are facing with the increasing speed of innovation. The debate was brilliantly led by Pia Ella Elmegård, who emphasised that future technology leadership is not just about prioritising and running projects, but to a large degree also about managing people and teams.
A lot of the topics we discussed were hard lessons learned from, in my case, 13 years of experience from taking the Boozt Platform Team from 0 to 200 developers as well as my previous experience from research and consulting. The others on stage had similar — yet slightly different — experiences.
To boil it all down; we work in a field where there are no best practices for how to navigate a team of growing size and complexity. There are no textbooks to read and learn it all. And to top it all off; what might work for us, is not necessarily the right solution for other companies, industries or people.
Yet, or maybe even therefore, I decided to put down in writing my own thoughts on how to lead tech teams in the future on our tech blog. Maybe it can inspire some people out there on how to manage people and technology in the future.
9 bold statements
Let me start by giving a few bold statements on future technology leadership divided by people relevance, problem relevance and innovation relevance:
- Be a people manager
- Grow an organism instead of an organisation
- Feed forward and Personalised Career Path
- Fall in love with the problem — not the solution
- Risk management is everyday business
- Use product thinking — not technology thinking
- Teach curiosity
- Small is beautiful
- We are never done
Let me dive further into each of these statements below.
1. Be a people manager
With the pace of innovation and the eternal lack of resources, the role of a modern CTO is not just a technology expert, but also a people manager who leads, inspires, and collaborates with cross-functional teams. They are responsible for aligning technology initiatives with business goals, managing talent, and driving innovation to ensure their organisation remains competitive in a rapidly evolving tech landscape.
This includes not only attracting top talent, but also nurturing their professional growth, facilitating open communication, and creating a positive and inclusive work culture. Ultimately, the modern CTO understands that the success of technological initiatives depends on the collective capabilities, creativity, and commitment of the people they lead. Thus, generally in a tech team, it’s not only to navigate complex technical challenges, but also to skillfully manage and inspire a high-performing team.
So being a people manager is not only a CTO responsibility. It’s also not only for all managers and Team Leads. It’s for all people working within tech — up and down in the hierarchy, and across all teams.
2. Organism instead or organisation
In Boozt we have six tech divisions spread across five different locations, a deliberate approach that helps us mitigate recruitment risks and avoid the potential loss of too many employees simultaneously. Our offices span across Sweden, two in Denmark, and locations in Poland and Lithuania, covering a good part of Europe.
Our unique recruitment process actively involves our developers, from senior staff to others. We believe in providing candidates with a firsthand experience of our culture and operations. This begins with HR searching, selecting, screening, setting up initial meetings and transitioning them to the tech team who is handling the rest of the recruitment process.
In terms of retaining talent, we’ve been fortunate to have a loyal team. An intriguing aspect is that we’ve had ten individuals who initially left but later returned, which underscores the effectiveness of our people management approach.
3. Feed forward and Personalised Career Path
Developers and engineers are often excited to try and learn new areas or technologies. Yet, they are also often reluctant to leave their comfort zone and make a full jump into a new field. At Boozt we make extensive efforts to provide personalised career advancement opportunities for all our employees, allowing them the flexibility to try out different roles and responsibilities. It can be a mix of multiple roles, but it can also be temporary and later grow into a more permanent solution.
We prioritise regular one-on-one meetings with our employees, emphasising “feed forward” over feedback and our colleagues have the opportunity to comment on their own results and development desires before being reviewed by the team lead or manager. Also, we use constructive peer reviews to improve teamwork and collaboration even further.
Finally, we have a company-wide mentor program, where employees on all levels can have a mentor typically from another team. All this fosters collaboration and shared learning experiences.
4. Fall in love with the problem — not the solution
It’s easy to get seduced by technology. The possibilities with modern technologies are endless, but it’s also impossible to do everything. It’s important to focus and get started the right way. I am an engineer, and us engineers love problem solving. We are basically put on this earth to solve problems.
In order to solve a problem, you really need to understand the core of the problem. That has been a guiding principle for the culture we’ve built within the Boozt Platform Team. Break things down. Isolate what you don’t understand or know how to fix.
Whenever we are asked for an assignment we challenge the project by asking “Why?”. Why is this important? What will it solve? Is it the best way to solve the problem? It starts with the “Why”. In some cases the project owner may find it annoying, so it’s important to explain why this is important.
So, although it’s tempting to fall in love with all the technology solutions that are out there, it’s more important to fall in love with the problem and focus on solving that.
5. Risk management is everyday business
When you work with risk in technology leadership, you need to consider two things:
1. Is my technology secure and stable?
2. How stable is my team?
The first part is about classic IT risk management. What are the risks for downtime, lack of performance, functionality error, process errors, data errors, GDPR issues, etc. Often tech companies are pretty good in dealing with these risk matters, where you often can find best practices and even get expertise help for mitigating the risks. In Boozt we have a number of methodologies such as early prototyping, observability services, automatic tests, code reviews, continuous release, roll back plans, service redundancy and so forth. All proven methodologies to minimise the risk when things break — and IT does that.
The important aspect of making mistakes is to learn from them and recover fast. As part of our continuous improvement process, we’ve documented hundreds of post-mortems, serving as valuable lessons from our mistakes. We believe in transparency and display these post-mortems for everyone to learn from.
The team stability is harder to find best practices for. Acquiring talents and keeping them for a longer time. For us it has been a solid foundation that we carved a solid culture from the beginning and stuck to it. In our case we are founded around the values Trust, Freedom and Responsibility. It’s the feeling of making a difference, of being important for the business and for the colleagues.
We have furthermore “branched” our technology into 6 different divisions spread on 5 geographic locations. I will touch upon this under point 7; “Small is beautiful”.
6. Embrace a Product-Centric Approach, Not Technology-Centric Approaches
Traditionally, when working with technology, there is a tendency to work in silos. Silos based on functionality areas or technology stacks, and typically with a very tech driven release and roadmap planning. The hunt for the next feature or the next refactoring phase to perfectionise the technical details, and often it’s cut off from other silos and may not even be considered from a holistic value perspective.
In line with the philosophy of being enamoured with problem-solving, it’s likely beneficial for you to introduce a more “Product-Focused Development Process.” By directing your attention towards identifying the problems, you aim to address across systems and teams, and subsequently seek the most effective priorities. Instead of fixating on the capabilities of the technology, emphasise the outcomes it can deliver.
Within our framework, we emphasise “Product Ownership” on the business side, complemented by “Product Management” and “Product Design” on the technical side. This approach ensures a holistic focus on solving real-world problems, fostering a mindset that prioritises the value and impact of the product over the technical intricacies.
7. Small is beautiful
Keeping things small is a good way of establishing an overview. This goes both with regards to team size and keeping tech development goals limited. It makes it mentally comprehensible and we try to mitigate both.
Our 200 people team is spread in 6 branches (or divisions) of limited size, and all developers work within small cross functional teams of up to 6 people. Furthermore, the teams are spread across 5 physical locations with all branches split out on multiple locations. This gives a good feeling of knowing each other at a smaller office instead of “drowning” in a big team, where one hardly knows each other. We’ve had a good experience with people feeling recognised and familiar with their colleagues, despite actually being part of a bigger team.
A positive side effect of being on 5 locations is also that recruitment risks are more balanced out. If we cannot find a specific resource type for a critical position at one location, we likely can in another. It does require some extra travelling overhead occasionally, but for most that is actually an added benefit. Most daily routines are easily handled with modern online collaboration tools and processes.
The other aspect of keeping things small is to work with limited scope and small releases. Break down tasks into smaller, manageable scopes, advocating for frequent, incremental releases instead of large, complex ones. This makes it easier for the business to specify requests and wishes, and it makes it easier for engineers and developers to propose solutions. Also, in a fast moving reality, things change so fast that it can be hard to know long in advance how things will turn out.
8. Promote a Culture of Curiosity
In a tech organisation, fostering continuous growth and development is crucial. Encouraging individuals to become more knowledgeable, adopt new technologies, or assume additional responsibilities is a significant challenge when approached solely through top-down management. Instead, a more effective strategy can involve instilling a sense of curiosity in individuals, empowering them to identify their own learning goals and pathways. From my experience, it’s more practical to teach and encourage curiosity than to prescribe specific technical skills. This philosophy is reflected in various mechanisms we employ at Boozt:
- Intrapreneurship: Promotion of internal, autonomous, risk-taking and own-funded innovative projects built with in-house data, processes and resources. This is extremely rewarding for employees to see these types of projects coming to life, and it’s an amazing opportunity for a fast moving company like Boozt.
- Internal Initiatives: Our organisation employs a variety of internal initiatives, including our own yearly conference, weekly knowledge-sharing sessions, hackathons, a tech blog, team lead training, and more, to provide diverse opportunities for individuals to explore and expand their skills.
- Conference Participation: Actively encouraging employees to participate in external conferences serves as a valuable avenue for staying updated on industry trends and expanding their professional network.
- Career Development: We prioritise career development by offering resources and support for employees to navigate their individual paths, promoting a culture where curiosity is the driving force behind personal and professional growth.
- By prioritising curiosity and providing a range of avenues for learning, our organisation aims to create an environment where individuals take ownership of their development, leading to a more dynamic and empowered workforce.
9. We are never done
Acknowledging that we are never completely done is not always a well-received fact. However, in the realm of technology, acceptance of everlasting evolution is non avoidable. There will consistently be a process awaiting digitization, a system demanding replacement, or an infrastructure component requiring refactoring.
At Boozt, we adhere to a principle known as “factor-10,” prompting periodic evaluations of whether a system or process can accommodate ongoing growth and change.
As a former colleague succinctly put it, “We are always 50% done.” While this realisation can be somewhat frustrating, as completion brings its own satisfaction, it aligns with the dynamic nature of technological landscapes where constant adaptation is not just a necessity but a driving force for innovation.
To learn more about how Boozt works with tech click here.
