I am a CTO, and have been for 20 years. 20 years ago I was co-founding a company, so that kind of CTO was very different than the CTO I am today. Starting a company meant I was
the technical part of the company. Raising money, talking to VCs, customers, hiring, and all of the other usual growth stuff. Of course I developed code, architectures, plans, deployments. I deployed, installed network switching gear, configured BGP peering, and debugged database problems. As the company grew, the role changed.
I'm now CTO of the larger company that acquired me and the role is different in almost every way. The role is to lead a path to technology changes, but much of that is technology coming from the technology staff itself. The most valuable learning happens by listening to my team and the teams around us. There is as much business as there is technology, as much future guessing as there is past evaluation.
Through all of these changes, day 1 to today, the most important skill has been a desire to be technical. I still write code for my own projects, develop my own projects, design microprocessors, hardware, software, sensors, and everything in between. If someone asks me a question, I want to understand how to get to the answer, not just get the answer.
Of course I have to understand the fundamentals of the business, and of business. Of course I have to convince non technical people why we need to do things. None of that is easier done by being non-technical, and much of it is done wrong by being non-technical. Stay frosty.
(Funny side note.. in the beginning, I often said during a 'introduce yourself' part of a meeting "I'm Jeff, the Chief Technical Officer" by mistake. )
I'm now CTO of the larger company that acquired me and the role is different in almost every way. The role is to lead a path to technology changes, but much of that is technology coming from the technology staff itself. The most valuable learning happens by listening to my team and the teams around us. There is as much business as there is technology, as much future guessing as there is past evaluation.
Through all of these changes, day 1 to today, the most important skill has been a desire to be technical. I still write code for my own projects, develop my own projects, design microprocessors, hardware, software, sensors, and everything in between. If someone asks me a question, I want to understand how to get to the answer, not just get the answer.
Of course I have to understand the fundamentals of the business, and of business. Of course I have to convince non technical people why we need to do things. None of that is easier done by being non-technical, and much of it is done wrong by being non-technical. Stay frosty.
(Funny side note.. in the beginning, I often said during a 'introduce yourself' part of a meeting "I'm Jeff, the Chief Technical Officer" by mistake. )