How to become a CTO
6 strategies that you can use + my story of how I went from engineer to CTO!
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Let’s get back to this week’s thought.
Intro
Are you wondering how can you become a CTO? Well, if you ask 100 CTOs of companies various of different sizes, you will get 100 unique stories. There is really not one and the only way to become one. But there are some common patterns.
In this article, we will go through different strategies that you can employ in order to increase your chances of becoming one. But before we do that, let’s first recap what CTOs actually do and how the role of the CTO differs based on the size of the company.
CTO is responsible for everything technical
As we noted down already in the article: What does a CTO do (paid article). The CTO is responsible for everything technical. They are the go-to person if something breaks or something is not working as it should be.
CTO is also a strategist and visionary, which means that they are here to create a great technical strategy that is aligned with the business. You can read more about developing a great strategy here: How to develop a great tech strategy (paid article).
I also like to say that a CTO is a business role. Even though a CTO is responsible for everything technical, they should have a good understanding of the business. The alignment between business and tech is crucial.
CTO in a small company compared to a large one is a completely different role
This is important to understand because the skills you need to develop are completely different. In a small company, you are a LOT more hands-on, than in a large company.
Here are the main differences:
Small company (pre product-market fit)
The CTO needs to be a tech lead/team lead and develop the MVP together with the team.
Mid-size company (after product-market fit)
CTO needs to be a good manager and build out the teams to support the growth and business accolades.
Large company
CTO is purely a strategic and business role. Aligning technology with the business vision is what CTOs in this stage should be focusing on the most.
Should you become a CTO?
That’s a really good question to ask yourself and thanks to Markus Sandelin for bringing this up in yesterday's LinkedIn post.
There are not enough CTO jobs out there so that everyone can become one and it’s also important to know that the role is not for everyone. Hopefully reading this article and the article What does a CTO do (paid article) can help.
It’s also very important to note that it’s totally fine to do what you like to do, IC, architect, EM, DevOps, data engineering, QA, etc. I am learning from all of these people every day!
So if that’s what you like to do, it’s more than fine to be the best at it as you can!
One thing I would add:
Good CTOs are not born, they are made. All of the skills to become a CTO are learnable and can be acquired through experience.
Different strategies for becoming a CTO
As said in the beginning there is no “one way” to become a CTO. Here are 6 main strategies that you can take:
Start a company
If you start a company, you either do it alone or with co-founder(s). If you do it alone, then you will need to eventually make a decision either you are going to be focusing on tech or you will find someone to do it. in the long run, it’s almost impossible to be CEO + CTO combined.
So if you see yourself more on the business side, then the CEO is the right choice for you, but if you wish to focus more on tech, then you should get a co-founder.
Unless you already have experience working in tech, you will need to learn on the role. Especially if the company is growing, you will need to acquire good leadership + management skills and understand how building teams work.
This is the route of a lot of uncertainty and continuous learning on the job. But the returns on this may be immense. Even if the company is not successful in the end, with the experience you acquired, you can either start a new company or have a good chance to get a good role in some other company.
Become a founding engineer
You are one of the first hires of the startup and you are hired for one main reason - that is to build the MVP of the product. You normally get a salary and a certain percentage of the company (up to 2% normally).
This is especially for someone who is good at building MVPs. It’s not so important that the code is the most clean or well-structured, but speed is very important.
If the product has found the fit, you would potentially be a candidate for the CTO role, because you already have a good understanding of the product and the codebase.
So if that’s the case, you should let the founders know as soon as possible and you need to instill confidence in them about this.
If you become the CTO, make sure to prepare for a LOT of learning, because being a CTO is a much different role than being a founding engineer, especially in a high-growth company.
This newsletter alongside the learning tracks would help you a LOT to learn as quickly as possible!
Go through the Management path
This is the path that I took and I think it’s one of the best ways to become a CTO. If you were previously an engineer and later decide to go on the management path, you have experience as both an IC and a manager, which is extremely helpful as a CTO.
You know how to build teams, how to create a good development process, how to communicate, how to give feedback, how to inspire and how to empower people.
That’s how you can become a CTO in any of the companies no matter the size, because for mid-size+ companies → management skills are mandatory for CTOs.
You can think of it like this: the more you grow in the management path, the more you become a good fit for mid+ size companies as a CTO. One very important thing is that you keep nurturing your tech skills as well.
Many times it can happen that managers completely neglect the tech skills and become so outdated that they become less effective.
Go through the Architecture path
Similar to the Management path, the more you grow in the Architecture path, the better fit you will be. But the reason is not in tech skills or pure architecture skills. The reason is that you would be leading teams and the more you grow, the more people you are influencing.
Through this path, you would be good for mid+ size companies or maybe small size if you are very good in fine details as well.
You would need to learn all the necessary management skills + build teams + understand other parts of engineering like + QA, Data Engineering, etc. and learn how to build such teams as well.
This might be a good path for you if you like to still stay in technical details and you love to design great systems. But keep in mind that as a CTO of mid+ size companies, you won’t be doing that anymore.
Go through the IC path
The more you grow in the IC path, the better you understand the business side of things, but one thing that you will lack is the lack of management skills.
Therefore you would be good for small-size companies, but you will need to learn the management skills for mid+ size companies.
If you see yourself in very fine details, being a CTO of a smaller size company is the one for you and I would also suggest that you immediately start learning and improving your management skills.
Become a CTO through other roles, mostly Product
I’ve seen where CTOs come from roles such as DevOps (Head of DevOps), QA (Head of QA), etc. but I’ve also seen where a CPO or Head of Product transitioned to either a CTPO (Chief Technology and Product Officer) or pure CTO role.
I’m not familiar if CTOs came from other business roles such as marketing, sales, growth, finance or similar, but I think for product it’s becoming common. Especially if the product person is also very good in tech.
Do you know of any transitions from other business roles to CTO? I would love to hear that.
How I grew from engineer to CTO
Like many other CTOs, I started my career as an engineer, the difference may be compared to others that I don’t have a CS degree. So in case you feel like you can’t become a CTO without a degree, I am living proof that you can.
If you wish to read more details on why a CS degree helps but is not mandatory, you can read here: A CS Degree is not needed to be successful as a Software Engineer (paid article).
How I started my career
I didn’t like programming in school, but I started to really enjoy it after I started to learn JavaScript a couple of years later. Building something visual with code motivated me to learn more and keep going.
If you wish to read how I started my career and how I got my first job, you can read here: Starting my career again as a junior engineer (paid article).
Freelance work helped me a LOT
I’ve been learning programming for full days and (also nights 🙂) and I quite quickly started to work freelance while working a full-time role. That turned out to be one of the best things for my career.
With freelance work, I’ve learned a lot of extremely useful skills such as good communication, understanding the business need, challenging requirements, etc.
You can read more about how freelance work helped me with my growth here: My secret for growing from engineer to CTO (paid article).
I was unsure which path I wanted to take
After becoming a Senior Software Engineer, I didn’t quite know which path I should take and I was a bit indecisive with it.
If you are feeling like that, make sure to read this article: Which is the right engineering career path for you? (paid article). I’ve noted down my recommendation on which path might be the right fit for you.
I took the management route
I had a hunch that the management path might be the path for me and when I eventually got offered a Team Lead role, I took it.
Of course, it was quite a rocky start at the beginning and I made a lot of mistakes, but after some time, I started to become more and more comfortable with it.
You can read more about my path of moving from IC to manager here: From IC to manager (paid article).
It turned out that it was the right path for me when I eventually grew to become an Engineering Manager leading 3 teams with 15+ people combined and later Head of Engineering when I switched companies.
From Manager to CTO
At the peak of my HoE role, I was in charge of 6+ teams and 35+ people combined (directly and indirectly). I’ve then gotten an opportunity with my current company Zorion as a VP of Engineering.
The company especially needed someone to streamline the process and ensure that the tech team was aligned with the business. That’s exactly one of my main strengths and I fit in very well.
After 6 months, I got promoted to the CTO role and have been in the role now for more than a year. We have successfully gotten the needed license to operate and we released our app to the majority of the countries this year.
We are currently in the growth phase, which is quite an exciting time for us!
Last words
As you can read from the article, there are many ways in order to become a CTO. If that’s what you aspire to be one day, you can already plan a bit on what skills and path you wish to take. But keep in mind this:
Fell in love with the process, not just the end goal.
That’s what’s going to keep you mentally sharp and you’ll always keep on improving, no matter if you achieve the goal or not.
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You are more than welcome to find whatever interests you here and try it out in your particular case. Let me know how it went! Topics are normally about all things engineering related, leadership, management, developing scalable products, building teams etc.
Very good article - and as a 30-year CTO who started as an consultant, but I've really always been the most senior engineer on the team since I left college long ago, so interesting to see the other, more traditional paths.
Amazing points. Very accurate in my (limited) experience