It is part of the technology leader’s professional commitment to learn from the CEO and the other company leaders about all areas of the business, such as legal, human resources, and sales, and to educate them about technology so that together they can define the metrics used to evaluate the performance of the CTO and the area.
When the CEO has no previous experience in managing a technology company, part of the CTO’s job is to explain:
- How to measure engineering productivity
- The concepts of reusable platforms and tools that allow collaborative work
- How to better structure the team
- How to make room for innovation
On the other hand, it is the CTO’s responsibility to expand his or her horizons of knowledge to the other areas of the company, focusing on how technology can integrate better with them.
Defining the innovation horizons for the company will help the technology leadership to map out investments for product innovation. If the company’s strategy involves geographical expansion, for example, the CTO helps determine what technology will be needed, and over what horizon, so the strategy is actionable. In addition to strategic thinking, there is also tactical work on H1 and day-to-day operations, including system improvements, handling incidents, and reducing technical debt.
The biggest difficulty in the CTO and the CEO’s relationship is usually aligning expectations and deliveries, and the way to solve this is through frequent dialogue, exchanging information on both sides, so that the CEO familiarizes himself with the platform mindset and gets to be on the same wavelength as the technology leader.
Any CEO is always bombarded by legitimate requests coming from everywhere and is therefore tasked with the difficult job of having to prioritize and balance these requests with limited resources. It is quite common for the technology leader to hear “no” to a request, not necessarily because the CEO wants to say “no” but because of contingencies, such as a freeze on vacancies due to a tight budget.
Many are the frustrations that cross a CTO’s path:
- At more critical times, more speculative projects may be put on hold or canceled
- Regulations may change
- Unexpected problems may arise with suppliers
More than dealing with their own dissatisfaction, technology leaders must manage the team’s anxiety and maintain morale and motivation, especially when projects are canceled or promotions are postponed.
When making more extreme decisions, such as unifying or eliminating certain projects, the leadership should clearly and publicly outline the guidelines for taking that course of action. It is recommended that the process is inclusive, ensuring that all the interested parties are heard, and that the verdict comes without much delay.
There is no escaping it: senior leaders frequently must deal with difficult choices, which leave a trail of disagreement and for which the best remedy is a culture of “disagree and commit” so that people can move on and go back to work. It is impossible to please everyone, and delaying hard decisions can be very detrimental for the company.
The best way to be fair in these moments is to base the decision on well-founded technical judgment, whether it’s about a platform or a tool, a team reorganization, or a change in strategic direction for a project. These costly decisions from a financial and personnel viewpoint require firm leadership.
In this regard, the technology leader must be technically up to date. This applies to any field, not just engineering. A professional who has not been programming for ten years should not decide about tools and platforms based on the parameters from a decade ago. For example, nowadays there are many options for cross-platform frontend development, container management, and observability tools. These areas are constantly evolving, and engineering leaders must keep up with them to make assertive decisions.
More than dealing with their own dissatisfaction, technology leaders must manage the team’s anxiety and maintain morale and motivation, especially when projects are canceled or promotions are postponed.
Marcus Fontoura
Marcus Fontoura is a technical fellow and CTO for Azure Core at Microsoft, and author of A Platform Mindset. He works on efforts related to large-scale distributed systems, data centers, and engineering productivity. Fontoura has had several roles as an architect and research scientist in big tech companies, such as Yahoo! and Google, and was most recently the CTO at Stone, a leading Brazilian fintech.
