Mentoring from Experienced CTO

1:1 Mentoring at Startup Speed.

Mentoring is part of my coaching model and fits into consulting, coaching and branding.

You’ve wondered for some time about getting help to make your job easier, learn from someone more experienced and discover things you might not even know you need to know (the famous unknown unknowns). You’ve come to the right place.

1:1 CTO Mentoring

No groups. Just you and me. Real 60 minutes. 1:1. Every week or every second week based on your context and needs. So we can talk about the real challenges. My Material and document review included.

Success Story

Working with Stephan let me grow professionally as well as personally and help me become a great tech leader.
— Martin Klemann, CTO Sensit!l

For Whom? For You!

This is for CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and engineering managers who are stuck. Maybe you're scaling fast and everything is breaking. Maybe you have team problems. Maybe you're new to the CTO role and don't know what you're doing. I've helped many leaders unstuck and scale.

CTO Mentoring Topics

• How to make AI work
• Delegation and scaling yourself
• Being assertive
• Managing performance
• Hiring and layoffs
• ... and all you might need

Why me

40+ years of software development, 25+ years of engineering management. I've coached 80+ CTOs, engineering managers and founders through scaling challenges, team building, and career growth. From startup chaos to enterprise complexity - I've been there and can guide you through it.

What is the difference between coaching and mentoring? There are many definitions of mentoring and coaching around, but the one I find most helpful is this: Coaching is helping someone develop and find their potential. Mentoring is transferring knowledge and experience from someone more experienced - especially about topics you might not be aware of yet.

As a CTO coach I do both mentoring and coaching. We start with mentoring for setting you up, and then transition to coaching to find out what you want and need to change to be more successful. CTOs want to learn from my experience, discover blind spots they didn’t know existed, and avoid the same mistakes and pitfalls I encountered. Mentoring helps them progress faster than their peers and be able to have less stressful and more satisfying job experience.

In my sessions after I helped you fixing the urgent problems at hand (consulting), we start with mentoring. This is where I transfer my knowledge and experience to help you setup everything to run smoothly and enable both you and your tech organization to scale effectively. This does distinguish me from many coaches with no technology leadership experience, or no CTO experience at all. I’ve walked the walk a million times.

We cover topics you might not have considered yet:

• building quality processes before you need them
• anticipating business pressure patterns
• understanding CEO expectations you didn’t know existed
• proactive product management relationships
• scaling architecture before it breaks
• designing organizations that can grow
• implementing engineering culture that prevents problems
• establishing accountability systems that work
• building hiring processes that scale
• and many more topics that emerge as you grow

I have seen many scaling challenges, so CTOs can profit from my mentoring by learning about problems before they hit and setting up systems that enable smooth scaling. Mentoring is long term because the job of the CTO changes constantly in the first years, and new challenges emerge that you haven’t encountered yet - but I have.

After we have been through mentoring, transferred the essential knowledge you need for your current stage, and set up the foundational systems, we can move into coaching. At that time we focus on specific behaviors or patterns that might be blocking your progress and that arise repeatedly in different situations.

Examples may be being too accommodating and not assertive enough with business stakeholders, struggling with public communication to your technology department, or getting frustrated with others’ mistakes. I help you grow and develop to change these behaviors and support you when you stumble. Coaching is more focused and project-like. We have specific things we want to change. After the behavior is changed, coaching stops. Coaching might also focus on specific situations like M&A, getting promoted, or navigating major organizational changes.

PS: The one person who helped me most was a boss who invested heavily by mentoring me.