Leadership attributes in a technology company

Good leaders in the tech industry should:

• Create a learning culture
• Keep teams motivated
• Adopt platforms and tools to boost the company’s performance

If a leader is too controlling and tries to be involved in every decision, this attitude directly affects how the team functions. The ideal scenario is that the engineering team’s processes work almost like an algorithm, with no room for comments like: “That person was only promoted because they report to manager A or manager B.” Leaders must work so that the processes are consistent throughout the organization. 

With the definition of processes such as performance review, budget management, and project planning, if there is a new CTO, nothing changes, because the systems are already in place. It’s practically like “meta-management,” building and implementing management mechanisms that can be replicated and applied systematically. 

Leaders must worry about the day-to-day operations but at the same time they need to think about how to “program” the organization. It’s as if they were writing a computer program to automate the CTO’s work, with pre-programmed solutions for most situations. Over time, as different situations occur, there will be more inputs to refine this large program. Every problem the leader faces and every new situation serves as information for changing or refining some rules so that the organization works better and better.

Another way of looking at this is to compare it to traffic control on the streets: the rules are so well defined that the driver internalizes them and just observes the signs without needing constant reminders explaining, for instance, that you can’t pass other cars when there is a continuous line painted on the ground. 

A technology organization ideally works like this. These “mechanisms” (the name used at Amazon, as explained in the book Working Backwards, St. Martin’s Press, 2021) are defined in such a way as to make it easy to follow them. A stipulation such as “everyone in the company must use shared repositories” can be expressed in spoken or written form, or better yet, it can be automated in a tool so that even if you try, you can’t go against it.

It’s like a law stating that a car can only drive at a maximum of 10 mph near a school. The simple law is a protocol that is easy to break. You could devise a mechanical solution, such as installing speed bumpers, or a more automated one, such as an electronic radar, that would improve its enforcement. 

But by using technology, and considering connected and autonomous cars, the vehicle itself could reduce its speed, without the user having the chance to bypass the law. Automation works better than written protocols. 

With the definition of processes such as performance review, budget management, and project planning, if there is a new CTO, nothing changes, because the systems are already in place.

However, companies are constantly evolving, and management should also be careful to respond to changes and thus prevent automation from overriding differences, which could make everything too impersonal. 

CTOs must balance their role to account for engineering tool improvement, reusable platform adoption, and team development by:

• Prioritizing projects with a multiplier potential (between a project that will impact a thousand developers and another that will involve ten, choose the one  that will affect more people)
• Defining how technology can align with the company’s strategic goals
• Mentoring  the creative top talent that drive innovation
• Designing reusable platforms that make work more rational and efficient
• Being ready the unpredictability of incidents that may cross the company’s path

Sense of mission

Leaders must understand their mission, their team’s mission, and how these missions connect to the mission of the other teams and the company. This understanding contributes to job satisfaction all around because the value of the work becomes clearer to all parties.

A useful exercise for any technology professional is to try to explain what they do on a day-to-day basis to a layperson outside the company. Employees often join the organization and start coding frantically without understanding the broader context of why they are doing it and how it adds value to the company. This kind of broader comprehension helps create engagement and induces people to work in a way aligned with the company’s objectives, by:

• Thinking in terms of platforms
• Adopting good standardized tools
• Embracing blameless culture
• Becoming multiplier leaders by having a growth mindset

“Are you happy with what you’re doing? How do you imagine your career expanding? How can you improve your impact?” These are some of the questions a mentor can ask their mentees to help them increase their job satisfaction. Subverting John F. Kennedy’s famous phrase, it’s not about asking what the employee can do for the company but what the company can do for them. And the company won’t do it out of benevolence. The ultimate beneficiary will be the organization itself, which will get a boost on its productivity. An employee who feels sucked dry by the company, without receiving anything in return, will leave as soon as an opportunity arises. Good leaders want people to stay for the long term. Employees who stay and seek professional development become better employees in the long run.

The work of a tech leader may involve transferring employees to different teams to give them a fresh start, and in some cases, even eliminating people who are not aligned with core corporate principles.

It is a gradual process, and, obviously, things don’t change overnight. The leadership mission is to contain productive anxiety, to show people that they may need to wait for a certain platform to be built before moving forward with a structuring project, and to spread the message of intentional transformation and platform mindset, with planned dependencies and long-term thinking.

Team satisfaction

Great leaders strive to create an environment where each employee feels that there is no better job. Their goal should also be to satisfy customers who choose the company for its efficient and affordable services. CTOs can’t force people to love their job, but they can actively work to make it happen. Just as they have no direct control over the mood of the shareholders, nor do they have a lever to the number of clients the company attracts monthly, what they do control is hiring the right people, organizing the teams, innovating, reducing technical debt, building scalable platforms, and dealing with incidents, all of which contribute to better products. 

It’s up to the leadership to feel the team’s pulse daily, to notice signals, and know where to act to correct the course of action. The environment may be excellent, but the development tools are terrible; the platforms may be great, but the people are not well rewarded, resulting in high turnover rates. Perhaps the culture is not collaborative, so that’s what the leader needs to focus on. It may be that the platforms are not scalable, and this should be the main point of attention. 

In a virtuous circle, there is less staff turnover, and the technology team works more efficiently, which allows it to be leaner. Everyone has a well-defined contribution, delivering the platforms with the scale the company needs at a lower cost. An optimum point is then reached, where what is best for individuals and for the company are not two conflicting components, but synergistic ones.

A systematic leadership framework

Creating a systematic model means solving a problem in a generic and reproducible way, which is more profound and effective than simply solving the problem.

The platform mindset aspires to be a systematic leadership framework, an answer to the question of how an engineering leader should think, to enable the development of high-performance teams and generate business value through technology and innovation. 

Computer science is a relatively new field that involves a lot of collaboration and interaction between people. Today, with platforms and abstractions such as cloud services, it’s becoming easier to develop systems. Having a business idea and building a system to make it true is less and less rocket science. Almost anyone can build a prototype, even without much technical training. With the platform mindset described here, this prototype will become a scalable business. 

It must be scaled up with engineering processes, architectural standards, tools, and platforms. Invariably, prototypes made by company founders need to be rethought at some point. That’s where the importance of solid technical leaders comes in. They will ask: Are all the security requirements being met? If users grow by 10x or 100x, can the system handle them? Are there mechanisms in place to combat fraud? Are all regulatory requirements being met? A group of young people making an app is one thing; building a system that will serve millions of people is quite another.

Experienced leaders’ role is to encapsulate these standards and guidelines in tools, platforms, and culture so that knowledge can be passed on and reused automatically, thus achieving the desired multiplier effect.