CTO interview: Angel Benito, there’s more to your career than becoming a manager
Meet Angel Benito, CTO at Zartis, a software engineering consulting company. Angel has an unusual vision of what a manager should be, and explains how Zartis doesn’t believe in traditional managers. He also shares how Madrid, Spain, stacks up as a potential place to work in the tech sector and how being CTO of a consulting company works.
How did your career lead you to Zartis?
This is an interesting story. I started in 2006 as an intern in IT. I went up the ladder from intern to junior, mid, senior, tech lead, then solutions architect, and so on. My career involves working as part of a team, and when I was about 25 years old, I was asked to lead teams of people in their forties who had 15 years more experience than me, which was quite challenging. I used to work at Siemens, leading an emergency management product for nine years. I was leading the technical area, part of the product roadmap and its strategy. It was a mix between technical and product leadership. I was also participating in sales meetings.
After that, I was a little bit tired of managing people and was looking for a more technical role. I was stuck for several years in one product — one technology — and I didn’t want to get rusty. That’s why I wanted to join just a technical role. My people management skills are well-developed, but the technical part has to stay up-to-date.
Because of that, Zartis called me to join as a solutions architect, and I accepted, as it was a technical role not involving people management. But I like helping people, it is in my nature, so I was eventually promoted to head of engineering and then CTO. I went through all the steps.
I feel those managerial roles are being glorified while they don’t necessarily mean a promotion. It’s a completely different job.
Yes, it is quite interesting. The industry asks you to choose tech or management. We don’t do that at Zartis. I don’t believe in just managers. When you hire very senior people, you need people to help them facilitate their success. In Zartis we use a servant leadership approach for that. It’s easier the technical part. Machines are easier to manage than people, for sure.
We are organizing things at Zartis very differently. We don’t aim for people to become managers, but rather to become the best of themselves, reinforcing their technical capabilities. You can become a principal, solutions architect, and then enterprise architect. It is a technical path that doesn’t involve management if you want to.
If you have the skills and time to help people be successful, you want to work on conflict resolution and emotional intelligence, you can have an assignment to be a manager. In the technical path, there will be lots of stakeholders to manage and your persuasion skills will be very important. Look for your “ikigai,” which is a Japanese concept about finding ‘your reason for being’. A perfect mix what you’re good at, what people want you to do and be paid for, where you are useful and what you love. People need to learn what their ikigai is.
Is there something different about being CTO of a software house? You don’t work on a single project. You’re the first CTO from that kind of company I’ve interviewed.
When I was asked to become the CTO, since we don’t have a software product, my answer was “do we need a CTO?” I am the technical representative of a lot of people. I need to provide all the services to people inside the company (value, culture, tone, proper training, mentoring, a great teach community, etc.) and set the technical strategy for the company. Picking the right technologies we decide to focus on is also important and Zartis is a tech company, tech needs to be involve in the stratey. My role as CTO at Zartis is also to be the CTO of other companies as contractor. I’m trying to help other companies with my role leading the high level consultancy.
I help decide which projects and customers are good from a technical point of view, and which ones are not. We have very senior people working on high-quality projects. The only way to retain people in tech is a good environment and interesting technologies.
Now, we are expanding our business for more high-level consultancy, helping companies from a strategical point of view. We act as experts in terms of structure, processes, products, strategy, etc. Not only that, but we are also trying to think about investing in our products, which is a normal startup CTO role. We have an incubation division to start our own ideas. It’s a new thing, so we’ll see how it goes. It’s not only for our internal usage, but for problems we see within our clients.
You’re based out of Madrid. Can you please share some insights on the tech scene in Spain?
It’s a mini-London in terms of culture. It is very open; everyone who comes here is welcome. From the technical point of view, as the capital of Spain, it is the main hub. From the cultural point of view, the good thing about Madrid is that it is never sleeping. There are always places full of people.
For the technical sector, Spain in general has a culture of being more conservative regarding job-switching, so we are more stable in our work. For Zartis, it’s good as we build a great culture and people stay for 5 or 6 years. For the sector in general, it is not great as people take fewer risks. We have some entrepreneurial spirit in Madrid, but not as much as in other important cities in the world.
Any fun or horror stories to share from your career?
Millions! A fun story… I would say when working remotely, there are funny stories about screen sharing. One teammate shared a screen with a customer, and I was giving inputs on Slack during the presentation. He didn’t deactivate the popups, so everyone saw my comments. A bit embarrassing, but it’s fine. People got over it.
One time, when I was sharing with someone, instead of sharing just the tab, I shared the whole screen and exposed additional information that I didn’t mean to share.
For a horror story, in an emergency management system where I was for nine years, I had stressful moments. When I was working at Atos the 112 emergency number wasn’t working. I was responsible for it, and it was really stressful. Luckily, it wasn’t our fault; it was the phone provider in Spain, not our system. I remember those 30 minutes to be extremely stressful. Nobody answering emergency services for people in need is the worst nightmare!
If you want to connect with Angelo, click here.
To learn more about Zartis, visit their website: zartis.com
If you’re a techie working on something exciting or you simply want to have a chat, get in touch with me. I’m currently CTO at Kolleno.com
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