“What are you going to do once I’ve joined?” is what a candidate asked me when I hired a VP Engineering. As CTO, I couldn’t give my team the attention they needed, being many timezones away from most of them.
That question worried me, because I didn’t have a good answer. I said so in the interview, but kept ruminating on it. What does a CTO really do?
That’s the same question many of my clients are facing as the company grows around them, and the needs of the business and your teams change. It’s easy to get lost as you hand off more and more responsibilities, hire a management layer, or a VP Engineering, like I did.
From everyone else’s perspective, the CTO role is barely defined already. Nobody really knows, so it’s even harder to figure out what your contribution to the business is or could be.
In addition, every decision you do make about the future of your role seems permanent. What responsibilities you take on now you’ll be stuck with. That’s the fear.
In my latest essay, I talk about the different types of CTO personas that I’ve come across (so far), what their responsibilities are, and how they contribute to the business. Whether it’s the Futurist, the Architect, the Co-founder, or the People Manager (to name a few,) the breadth of a CTO’s role is immense.
The goal is for these personas to help form a much clearer vision of what your role looks like now and how it can evolve over time. Personas are abstractions, but they do help identify the things that help the business the most and that also fulfill the personals wants and needs of a CTO.
I hope this can serve as a useful framework for CTOs as they explore their current and future roles!