What Does the Leadership Expect from a CTO?

Obviously, the board of directors and founders expect the CTO to have a deep understanding of the business, including its vision, goals, culture, and technology stack. In addition, the CTO should identify technological needs that will support the company’s long-term vision and strategy, differentiate the company from the competition, and improve its technology solutions.

However, in practice, the expectations for a CTO are simpler than the previous statement suggests.

Regardless of the company’s size, the board of directors and founders expect primarily three things from the CTO. Notably, none of these items are technical.

Addiction to On-Time Delivery

When it comes to on-time delivery, it’s crucial to meet the agreed-upon timeframe for delivering a product or service. This aspect of project management plays a vital role in ensuring customer satisfaction and driving the success of the company. As a CTO, one of your key responsibilities is to ensure the on-time delivery of technology solutions. This commitment supports the company’s long-term vision and strategy, helps differentiate the company from its competitors, and enhances the overall quality of the technology solutions provided.

It’s important to recognize that as a CTO, you are not working in isolation within the company. Other teams and departments rely on the timelines and deadlines you provide. For example, teams may need to establish new workflows, hire additional staff, or plan marketing campaigns based on your delivery commitments. The most important thing they ask of you is a clear and reliable date. They expect you to honor that date and deliver as promised. Consistently postponing deadlines can erode trust in the technology department and damage the company’s reputation. Ultimately, this can have negative consequences for your own professional growth and career prospects.

Avoid Overwhelming Them with Technical Details

As the CTO, you possess the most technical expertise in the company. It is unlikely that anyone on the board of directors or among the founders can write code or comprehend technical terms as proficient as you do. However, it is important to recognize that they may secretly find technical details to be boring and overwhelming.

To address this, it is important to improve your ability to explain technical details to non-technical people in a language they understand. As an executive, you need to ensure that business departments feel secure without overwhelming them with technical details.

In order to do this effectively, it is important to be familiar with the terminology of other departments, such as marketing, finance, sales, and accounting. By researching these topics, you can better understand their priorities and use language that they will understand.

Ideally, leadership should think, “our CTO handles technical issues effectively and even better than our competitors. We don’t need to worry about it.” When you start hearing this statement frequently, it means that you are in the safe zone and can work with minimal intervention from others.

Complying with the Budget

As CTOs, one of our primary responsibilities is to effectively utilize the allocated budget to deliver products and services. This involves making strategic decisions on whether to purchase existing products or services or develop them in-house, based on the specific requirements and level of effort involved. It’s crucial for executives to understand this dynamic and take appropriate actions as needed. By effectively managing the budget and staying within its limits, we can streamline our work processes and foster stronger relationships with other departments.

Maintaining good budget discipline not only helps us cultivate positive relationships with the finance department and the CFO, who often serves as the CEO’s key partner, but also ensures a smoother operation overall. Requesting additional budget once we exceed our allocated amount can be challenging and may necessitate adjustments from the sales and marketing departments.

Monitoring our spending and keeping track of the remaining budget is vital. Implementing this discipline can yield numerous benefits. Furthermore, if we don’t exhaust the entire budget, we can identify and eliminate inefficiencies, resulting in cost savings that will be appreciated by all stakeholders within the company.