CTO Learning — Sept 2022
Hey everyone! Thank you for reading this article. I’m Anup Marwadi, CEO of HyperTrends Global Inc., a SaaS Development Studio based out of San Diego, CA; CEO of TicketBlox (Blox Technologies, LLC) — a world-class Event Ticketing SaaS platform with a mission to helping Event promoters execute world-class events; a CTO for multiple startups like Tzilla and RevWork and advisor to many more. I am also a member of Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO-San Diego) and 7CTOs.
As an active member of 7CTOs.com, I highly recommend it to CTOs who want to grow their skills as an executive. 7CTOs has been instrumental in my journey as a CTO just as EO has been on my journey as a CEO.
So, talk to my friend Etienne DeBruin from 7CTOs and tell him I sent you there. I’m not affiliated with 7CTOs in any way, but I am sure that it will be the best decision you will make in your professional growth as a CTO.
In this article, I am going to share my learnings from our September Forum. There’s a LOT to cover, so saddle up amigos, let’s rock.
The Importance Of Influence
We discussed the importance of ‘Influence’ as a CTO. Now, more than ever, CTOs need to realize the importance of influence and how it can impact the trajectory of their organization.
Effective leaders are known for their ability to influence their teams.
Your success, or lack thereof, may depend on the influence you exert over your teams.
Thus, it is important to start building your influence muscle.
Leaders often control, or give commands to achieve outcomes. This may not be the best way to get things done.
It is important to know that while commands and control may lead to an outcome, exerting influence and empowering teams will almost always result in better outcomes.
So, according to me:
Influence is not about control. It is about empowerment.
If we approach our team with the intention of guiding or helping them, we see a totally new way of accomplishing things.
Control is a mechanism from fear, influence is a mechanism from humanity.
Helping the team see the big picture, helping them realize that they’re a valuable asset in accomplishing big milestones, helping them understand that we’re all in it together, helping them see beyond what they currently see — that’s what influence is all about, in my opinion.
When you come from a place of empathy and understanding, you see things differently, and that helps you become more influential in your day-to-day operations.
Exercise
You may want to think about the influence you exert over your team.
Take some notes and answer the following questions:
- What’s beneficial about being influential?
- How do you want to be influential as a CTO?
- How are your actions in alignment with the influence you want to exert?
- How would you close the gap between where you want to be and where you currently are?
This was a great learning session as I personally started to evaluate how I want to exert influence over the teams I manage.
I manage teams in Poland, Ukraine, Pakistan, India, and 3 different regions in the USA. Needless to say, I feel there is room for improvement.
I often find myself commanding or exerting control over the teams in Asia. It could be that it is later in the night and I am tired after a hard day’s work so influence may not be on the top of my charts. This is something I need to improve and work on.
Challenge Processing — Manage Resource Utilization Under Serious Constraints
This is a challenge that most CTOs face, one way or the other.
How do you optimize resource allocation when you are operating under severe resource constraints?
Startups move at a very fast pace.
Priorities change, feature requests keep pouring in from favorite customers, or prospects who promise to use your system if you provide them with a much-needed feature.
Sales reps make feature requests because their sales are contingent upon these features.
It almost feels like your backlog keeps growing but the amount of money available and the utilization of resources remains constant.
It gets harder and harder to dedicate resources to build these new features, when most of them are busy working on existing features.
So, the challenges are:
- You cannot necessarily hire new developers
- You might not be able to raise funds rapidly to support this growth in development
- You have a growing set of feature requests
So, how do you fuel product growth?
Here are some of the ways you could expedite your development
Outcomes over Outputs
Focusing over outcomes might help you better align these “feature requests”. If the entire team agrees upon a said outcome, it becomes a lot easier to separate the wheat from the chaff.
If you’re a CTO responsible for Product (as is the case in many early stage companies), then you have to get educated on focusing more on outcomes over outputs.
As an engineer, it is very hard to do that. We’re wired to solve problems analytically. We thrive on closing out tickets, hitting our story points etc. but to what end?
We have to take a step back and evaluate the outcomes we want to accomplish.
We have to build a series of experiments that get us closer to those outcomes.
These experiments turn into tasks that teams get to work on.
We constantly monitor the success or failure of these experiments and adjust our plans to lead us to better outcomes.
If you have a Product team in your organization, it is your job to influence the Product team to prioritize focus on outcomes. It is your job to collaborate with the entire organization to build things that move the needle.
Build a Hustle Squad
I often create “Hustle Squads” to deliver the outcomes I need. Think of this as a team of specialists that are brought together for one purpose — delivering the said outcome.
Every organization has individuals who are hungry for growth, recognition, challenge and something that excites them. They love doing things a little differently. As a leader, it is up to you to find these individuals and influence them and ignite their passion.
We have a hustle squad that continuously delivers amazing outcomes in TicketBlox on a daily basis. We set aside a few hours a day to accomplish the smallest things, and compound effect takes over. TicketBlox once released 39 features a week using such a hustle squad of just 3 developers.
Ask Customers To Pay For Features
We often have our customers pay for features they request. If the customer benefits tremendously by you delivering a said feature, it may be feasible for them to pay you the additional money to prioritize its development.
The ROI is high for the customer. This also boils down to the influence you have over your customer. We often take advance payments to deliver on features and then provide discounted service for a period of time in lieu of the payment.
Additional approaches may include:
- getting a bank loan
- hitting up friends for cash loans with guaranteed returns over market value
These approaches require conviction that the said features will deliver a higher revenue and that you will be able to pay back the loans as promised.
So, there you have it. This turned out to be a very long article, but I wanted to do it justice. Hopefully, you found this helpful.
Onward!
