sfmelton

I love being a CTO. You can design the technical organization you want to lead. If you are unhappy, change the design of your organization. It takes time (and money), but totally worth it.

I think the key when you achieve product market fit is filling the roles in your technical organization with stronger leaders than you, and stepping out of those management positions. Plus, you can learn from and partner with these people.

If you're a technical CTO, and want to code more than manage/build a team, then hire/promote a VP of Engineering with strong soft skills to grow/manage your team. If its the reverse, hire/promote a VP of Engineering who's technically stronger.

If you're constantly being pulled into engineering battles, hire/promote an architect you respect to negotiate.

If you're running engineering meetings (ipm's, retros, etc), hire/promote a SCRUM master or equivalent.

If you're battling sales, operations or marketing, hire a Director of Product Management with solid communication skills. That person will 'fight' your battles (and probably love it!).

If you're putting out fires in production, hire/promote a Director of QA. They'll work on designing systems to catch those bugs.

If your infrastructure goes down a lot, hire/promote a senior devops engineer.

On the engineering/coding front, I find it super helpful to rotate into teams and pair one-on-one with engineers. You get exposure to their day-to-day code battles/challenges/environments, the tech decisions at the lowest levels, the ability to code/manage daily and respect with your team. You can then prioritize stories/epics to fix problems that you see across your organization that plague a technical team like debt, environments, knowledge gaps, etc.

Don't step away, stay positive and solve for the organization you want to lead.

It's hard to believe they are only giving this guy $18k.