What to work on as a CTO

My Story

As a CTO, for a long time I didn’t know what to work on. I was reactive and driven by problems and other people’s demands. When being part of a future leadership program at eBay, a SVP told us he spends 50% of his time lifting up his team to higher levels – and he told us to control our calendar and be aware in what categories we spend how much time. I realized I needed to plan how I spend my time as a CTO.

Four Focus Areas

Many CTOs and my CTO clients ask me how they should spend their time. What do I do? How do I spend my day? First, good question. If you do not plan on how you spend your time, others will make that decision for you and own your calendar.

There are four focus areas where you can spend your time to provide the most value – and which percentage changes over time as the department grows:

1. Operations
2. Strategy
3. Lift Team
4. Business

When your team and the company grow, CTOs need to shift how they spend their time. While being operational is great when there are two techies, it’s bad when you’re 10 and unsustainable when you’re 20. The work that brings most value to the company shifts over time. Over time shift from an operational focus to a strategy focus to a business focus.

If you do not shift your priorities, your employees and the company will suffer. You’re now working on the wrong things. With your surroundings suffering and you’re doing the wrong things, soon you will be overloaded and might be straight up for a burnout.

• Operational work is all the “real work” people are doing
• Coding is probably the biggest chunk of operational work
• Hiring
• Managing servers/cloud and deployments
• Finding the reason for bugs
• Planning architecture

• Strategy is your plan on how to achieve your ultimate goal for the technology department
• Strategy is both things you need to have in place and things you need to achieve
• For running a marathon I need shoes, a watch, clothing, a nutrition plan and a training process (things I need to have)
• For running a marathon I need to be able to run 10km, 20km, 30km, 40km (things I need to achieve)
• Strategy needs to make sense and have no plot holes
• Can be team composition, process, culture, quality, tech stack, managers, team size (things you need to have)
• Those can also be things to achieve, e.g. 20 people, 50 people teams, cloud light integration, cloud deep integration
• Strategy is work to push your plan forward
• Strategy is adapting your plan to new circumstances

• Make your team better
• Train them by showing them how to do their work
• Show them how you do their work
• Mentor and coach them to make them better
• Lifting the team to a new level has the highest impact
• The impact grows the bigger the team is

• Being part of the executive team
• Think about the whole company, not only technology
• Support business with technology
• Bring technology innovation to the table to drive business