Fall in love with your product vision.

As a CTO, you will be in a product-influencing position. Your working relationships with your company’s product leader will be one of your most important ones. It will influence the commercial success of your product, your platform, and your company.

Therefore, fall in love with your product vision and become a user advocate. Wholeheartedly channel this into your teams. Never fall into the trap of saying, “I just deliver what The Business wants.” This leads to distanced, disconnected development teams. Make an enormous effort to show your teams how you personally understand the product vision and how deeply you attempt to learn about, and understand, your users.

Many of your team may say things like, “I don’t care what it does, I just want to solve interesting problems.” And though you should encourage your team to yearn for solving really hard problems, guide them to also think about the ever-present, and maybe hardest, problem: What do your users want and what do they need? And, importantly, how best can you help your design team, and your product team, deliver this?