More Gecko, Less Founder, Let’s Rebuild Us
The truth, even founders must realise they might be of more use to the company in less conventional roles, even roles lacking fancy titles.
About a year and a half ago I stopped including CTO on my business cards, my email signature, and when no-one was looking, around midnight on a Saturday, I even adjusted my LinkedIn profile to just being Co-founder. While it was a decision I took upon myself to make, the realisation that I was not the best in the business to fill the role was bittersweet, at first.
When we started SyndicateRoom it made sense to have a CTO, more than anything as an external symbol of technical strength: we take our platform seriously. Prior to SyndicateRoom I was product manager Trainline Engineering for a number of years, a role where my passion still lies, so I knew my way around tech, and from numerous days spent with Iqbal Ali and a few online courses, I could write bits and bobs of code here and there, which meant I was the most technical in our founders team and therefore CTO. I will not debate if it was the right or wrong decision, at the time it made some sort of sense and for a year or two after it continued to make sense.
But, as we’ve grown and the technology and team have evolved, and I started to find, because of the title, not experience, I was counted on to make decisions about our technology choices I simply wasn’t the right person to make. So, while I was “leading” the tech, in reality I was leaning more and more on the team, GitHub, Google Developers, Stack Overflow, Medium and an incredible community of developers with even more incredible blogs to piece our strategy together and not completely lose the plot. While it’s amazing how much you can learn from simply reading, it’s never going to replace actual experience and the lessons learned from doing.
Eventually our decision making, for the bigger decisions at least, became a very democratic process. And, while there is nothing wrong with democratic decision making, when we decided to start rebuilding our site from scratch I knew we had to evolve and secretly I knew it was the right time to start handing over the reigns even if I didn’t want to openly admit it.
What followed is probably the most mature course of action I’ve taken in my professional life. I promoted a few people to leading teams, one for UX and one for back-end, as well as focused my head of tech on problem solving (he does a lot more than problem solve and does not always get the credit he deserves. For the rebuild we were about to embark on, I needed him to be as freed up as possible to be able to jump in, put out fires, and solve the problems we knew would arise).
We then set about working on our tech strategy with the help of an outside consultant. While the strategy initially did not focus on the tech stack, it did focus on our reasons for rebuilding and the ultimate aims we wanted to achieve from the rebuild. With the strategy confirmed, we then turned to the tech stack and reverted to our democratic forum to decide. We could have made the decision for the team with input from the consultant, but the key to any project is buy-in and their is no better way to get buy-in than to sound out the team and give them a voice in the decision.
While I knew I’d ultimately be stepping away from the role, once the strategy was in place and the stack agreed on, I felt this immense weight lifted off my shoulders. Sure, delivering on time and to spec would still be stressful, but at least we had a solid vision and a completely motivated team. Life was good, except it wasn’t. With the team kicking ass, I knew I wasn’t really needed so much any more. I wasn’t going to have time to learn the new stack and with the team leads in place I didn’t have to make decisions, except when it related to product.
And I also knew the business could use the skills I was good at to better effect in other areas. Product, Business Development (which I like to refer to as for profit networking), and filling some gaps in teams which are short on resource.
So while it felt a bit odd at first to officially shed the title I had privately shed years ago, and it was a bit of a surprise to the team, the only thing that really changed is I feel less guilty about not being able to find a solution to some of the more difficult technical challenges we face. My time with the team has not really gone down. I’m in on the stand-ups to handle product questions, and I still revert everyone back to the strategy when required, but other than that, I’ve been able to better fill the other roles a co-founder should fill. Will we hire a true CTO one day (or promote one from within)? I’m not sure. To be honest, and this applies to any department, not just tech, if you have a great team with strong individuals leading the various parts, why do you need to have a specialist in charge?
