CTO

Creating Focused Paths for Growth

In response to feedback from team members, the organization created three paths for career growth: a technical lead path, an architect path, and a manager path. This was supported by the TILES framework and a strategy document, as well as an engineering health framework. The implementation of these paths was adjusted to provide a softer transition for those crossing over to a manager role, and to separate tech leads from HR duties.

How I Moved Away From A Flat Organizational Structure

When the CTO of Narrative Science took over, the company was flat-structured with 14 engineers and 40 employees in total. To prepare for growth, the CTO implemented a QA and DevOps team, created a career ladder with five levels, and set up a program to hire recent graduates. He also had to explain the reasoning behind the changes to the existing organization and train people in having difficult conversations. He learned that it is important to make sure the requirements for each level are clear and that he should deliver on any promises made to employees.

Unlocking the Power of Product Management for Startup CTOs

This article explores the art of product management and how CTOs can use it to drive innovation and success. It covers core components, the importance of a strong CTO-product manager alliance, strategies for aligning engineering and product strategies with business objectives, and tips for implementing product management within an organisation. Agile methodologies and building high-trust empowered product teams are also discussed. By mastering these concepts, CTOs can unlock the power of product management to drive innovation and success.

Stumbling into chaos

The new director of engineering at a startup had to jump in on day one when the team had just done a re-org and re-oriented the product roadmap. He met with the CTO and engineering leads to understand why the new structure had been put in place, then worked with the product managers to focus on pieces they had high certainty of needing. He also added weekly planning meetings for each product team and daily standups to create structure and accountability. Through retros and feedback, he tailored these initial short-term fixes to their needs. He learned that plans often go awry and we have to adapt, look for short-term engineering work when long-term plans change, and creating a predictable process cadence can help create stability.

Hiring Rapidly and Time Efficiently

This article outlines the steps taken to rapidly hire engineers while maintaining quality. The author front-loaded the design, coordination, and preparation of the hiring funnel, set up hiring teams, and treated the hiring process as a product. Three metrics were used to measure success: percentage of hires from referrals, time taken to make a decision, and face-to-face interviews to hire ratio. The author also reduced the interviewing process to four hours and in one session. Lessons learned include the importance of treating the hiring process as a product, not letting quality fall to the wayside, and understanding that every hiring process is unique.

Scaling To The Extreme

Plixi, a company that allowed people to put photos on Twitter, experienced outages on their web servers due to high traffic. After a period of investigation, they discovered the problem was due to disk reads locking up. With the help of Rackspace and Fusion-io, they were able to install four servers with the fastest hard-drives in the world, which solved the problem. The lesson learned was that it was important for the CTO to understand the whole stack and collaborate with vendors to find a solution.