You define your own role

The higher you rise, the more it’s up to you to define your role.

When you are the CTO, there’s no one to hold you accountable but yourself.

Improving the deployment scripts? Why not. Writing production code? Sure. Building the team? Yep.

It’s a blessing and a curse.

If anything goes, how do you know what work has the highest return on investment?

Here’s a way that works for me. A strategic compass. It works like this.

First, you map out potential tasks to work from whatever already fills your calendar. Add what you know you should be doing but are too busy to do. Order them by potential impact.

The goal is to maximize time spent on projects with a high potential for impact. That’s your 10x lever on tech team output.

Anything below a specific line can and should be delegated to the team.

The focus should be on making space for things that only you can do.

Here is what that could look like:

When you’re in a leadership position, all problems bubble up to you. So you get to deal with the most annoying problems that weren’t resolved up the chain of command.

It’s easy to keep busy by fighting fires. Your team appreciates help. Your peers see you hustling. That keeps us busy. But it’s just an illusion of meaningful work.

The trick is to identify what project or task is so important for you specifically to work on that you are willing to let a few fires burn to deliver that. 🔥

If you can do that consistently, your success will take care of itself.

P.S. For tomorrow, think of a single fire you can let burn so that you can focus on something with a higher ROI. Let me know how it went.

Best regards,

Taj