The problem of the CTO role evolution

When I tell people what I do, I get this a lot:

Oh man, our CTO is not up to the tasks, projects are late, we are slow and the CEO is slowly recognising it’s a problem.

That’s a bad situation to be in, but it’s also quite normal in an early stage startup that grows past a few engineers.

Early stage:

The CTO is the only tech person, prototyping.

MVP stage:

The CTO has a small team, but is still very much an individual contributor, plus handling all the IT and administrative things like buying computers and setting up access.

Growth stage:

Things start showing cracks. Progress stalls.

Let’s unpack …

Most startups grow way faster than the initial leadership team is able to keep up.

It takes many years to learn the skills to go from an individual contributor to an engineering manager.

It takes even longer to learn strategic thinking and to adopt a business-first mindset.

And that’s okay.

But you need to have the uncomfortable conversation when cracks start to show and that’s much easier if you’ve already talked about a plan on how to evolve the business.

Your options as the CEO are to hire a coach for your CTO, or have them step down and bring in someone strategic.

Coaching only works if the current CTO has an ambition to be a strategic lead. But not everyone wants that.

Stepping down is underrated.

Why not keep the salary, the shares and keep doing your best work, while someone else takes over talking to the board, interviewing, planning and tech strategy?

I’ve seen companies struggle because the CTO was one of the co-founders and the other founders didn’t wanna have the hard talk.

They eventually hire a more experienced technical leader to take over, give him a Head of Tech title or similar and make the CTO report to them.

That’s just silly.

But I’ve also seen founders who hired their replacement as soon as they could, so they could focus on growing the company and not working in the tech team.

There’s not just one way to get it right, but ignoring the problems is a sure way to run into trouble.

Best regards,

Taj