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- How to keep your job as CTO
How to keep your job as CTO
#30 – March 29, 2021
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If you are a CTO, you need to see yourself as an executive. If you don’t, you will be fired.In this blog, I give advice I failed to follow at the beginning of my career. It is advice, once followed, that propelled me to the top. Not only was I able to help take a company public, but now I run a successful consulting business. I use the same principles found in this article.
Probably the most common tradeoff in organisational design I see for startups that are starting to scale relates to the types of mission/scope you give to engineering groups/teams.
In my experience, managing up is usually a lot more practical. Your manager doesn’t (and can’t!) know every single detail about what you do in your job, and being aware of what they might not know and giving them the information they need to do their job well makes everyone’s job a lot easier.
A couple of years ago I got some excellent training on finance from a finance director at the FT. At the end of last year I went on a longer, more intensive course from the IoD, aimed at non-finance directors, and I learned LOADS.In this post I will cover some important principles about company finance, sources of company funding and financial statements, and include a quiz!
The most visible change in moving to management is you get a lot less feedback. When you're an engineer, you get feedback on your code, on your design documents, or how your projects are going. As a manager, you have none of this. There are also often no clear and specific expectations of what you should be doing in this role. I wanted to make the path to becoming a new manager "easier", and so I created a "checklist" that I wish I had when starting out as a new EM.