The evolving role of a startup CTO–and why you need one
I recently helped another startup interview a potential CTO. To prepare, I thought about my own role: what it is, what it should be, how it’s changed over time. That reflection led me to even more questions: If I were a new founder, how would I know if or when to bring on a CTO? As a technologist, how could I become a CTO? As a CTO, how do I know if I’m doing my job well? And, as a CEO, how would I measure my CTO’s performance? As with most questions like this, the answer is, “it depends.” But there are certainly some theories we can use to help guide us.
One of the first inquiries I get from non-technical founders is, ”When do I need a CTO?” To answer that, you first need to understand how a CTO fits into a startup organization. Let’s take this summary from Amazon CTO Werner Vogels’ 2007 post on the different roles of a CTO:
“The CTO is responsible for determining how technology can be used to implement the business strategy. […] But then subsequently, the CTO is responsible for actually integrating and running the technology.”
If you’re building a company reliant on technology and you don’t have a technical co-founder, I’d tell you that you’d need a CTO from day one. A CTO who’s been with an organization from early on not only has the historical context to make big decisions; they can also translate business strategy into technology, and hire and manage the right team to bring plans to life.
And, as your company and team scale, the need for refining the CTO’s role will become apparent: The organization will need more than one leader to manage the responsibilities expected of an early-stage CTO. This is where the VP of Engineering role comes in (stay tuned–we’ll cover that in a later post).
Let’s pause for a quick sidebar, if you’re wondering about my own path to becoming a CTO: When I was five, my dad brought home a TRS-80 with a cassette tape drive for storage. That’s how I learned how to program–and fell in love with computers. I spent my childhood teaching myself various languages, building my own computers, dialing into BBS’s and dabbling with early-AI and neural networks. After college, I started my tech and entrepreneurial career at Trilogy in Austin, where I started to grow my network, get exposure to other aspects of running a business and build and lead teams. Then, I jumped into the early-stage world as the first engineer at B-Side; worked with and helped commercialize 71 different companies as CTO of Thinktiv; and joined The Zebra just over seven years ago to help build our product, team and business.
Back to the present: Today, my role as CTO (and what I’ve been referring to above) is just one type of CTO role that has historically existed. In Tom Berray’s terms, it’s the “Technology Visionary and Operations Manager.” Here’s how he explained the four types of CTO in a 2002 piece.
- Infrastructure Manager: Mainly used in traditional businesses where IT is in more of a support role.
- Technology Visionary and Operations Manager: Often a co-founder of the business or one of the first hires.
- External Facing Technologist: Typically found in established, more traditional software or hardware companies where interaction with key customers is a prominent activity.
- Big Thinker: Usually found in companies where information technology isn’t critical to success and where having someone focus on opportunities in the horizon could be beneficial.
Despite the age of Berray’s article, his categorizations remain relevant. But with the growth of the tech industry and increasing prominence of the “Technology Visionary and Operations Manager” role (especially in startups), it’s worth digging in to explore what exactly that role is, as well as how it’s changing.
When I started at The Zebra, in addition to translating the business strategy into architecture, technology and a roadmap, I was responsible for building and managing the engineering team–while also being on the ground writing code. As the company grew to around 20 people, I started to feel the strain of managing execution, leading a team and collaborating on a business strategy. Something had to give, so I stopped coding and split my role.
By the time we’d grown the staff to 100, the engineering, execution and delivery belonged to our VP of Engineering. That allowed me to focus on becoming a businessperson first and a technologist second. I shed the “Operations Manager” portion of my CTO role to become better aligned with the rest of the C-suite. In terms used by Patrick Lencioni in his leadership fable “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team,” my first team became the rest of the executive team, and the engineering team became my second team. I was responsible first to the other C-level executives–and when I was aligned with their visions and goals, I could bring my best to my second team of engineers.
I’ve been lucky to occupy tech leadership positions at organizations of multiple sizes and stages over my career, while learning a lot in the process about how I want my next role–and my team’s next roles–to look. A few key questions I’ve learned to ask of companies as I evaluate what being a CTO really means:
- How large is your team, and where are you in your growth?
- Are you still coding? If so, should you be? Are you sure your team wants you to? 😉
- Do you still own execution? Is it time to consider bringing on a VP of Engineering?
- Who is on your first team? (Hint: If it’s not the C-suite, it’s likely time to change that.)
As the tech industry continues to grow, the function of today’s CTO is also maturing to oversee areas like data, security, privacy and IT. It is not uncommon for the CTO to take on the roles of Chief Data Officer (CDO), Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) or CIO. In some companies, the product organization also rolls up to the CTO. This expansion appears to be a trend across CTOs regardless of industry, stage or location–and adds to the need for CTOs to find ways to stay up-to-date on advancements across a broad range of technology, law and best practices.
In the 2017 report, “Inside the Mind of the Chief Technology Officer,” Tristan Jervis, co-leader of the technology practice at Russell Reynolds, writes:
“CTOs are being stretched in completely new ways. They are expected to be more flexible and better informed on the latest trends and technologies, while also being a business-savvy visionary capable of bringing the company along a transformation journey. The best CTOs are achieving greater strategic and ‘front-to-back’ impact, creating or enabling new revenue streams, simplifying ways of working, and increasing resilience and reducing risk.”
Given this, as with transitioning ownership of engineering execution and delivery to a VP of Engineering, it’s critical for a CTO to have trusted, senior leaders in each of the other areas s/he is responsible for, or s/he risks being pulled into the weeds instead of focusing their impact across the business as a whole.
With the CTO’s expanding importance, what does the future hold? Even just a handful of years ago, a number of CTOs foresaw many of the ways the role grew through today. Nick Ismail of Information Age posits:
“As companies continue to embrace and depend on technology, the CTO role will become the bedrock of an organisation — potentially, becoming the CEO of tomorrow. The current roles and responsibilities of the CTO will become essential skills for every future CEO.”
Given the increasing importance, breadth and scope that the modern CTO faces–as well as the requirement for every exec to understand technology–I have to agree that the CTO is on a path to become the CEO of the future. Just don’t tell my CEO that quite yet. 😉
