The executive job behind the title: strategy, measurement, org design, and the decisions only the CTO can make.
Most CTOs were promoted for being excellent engineers, and then spend their first year failing at a job that rewards none of the things that got them promoted. The work stops being technical judgment and becomes allocation: which bets the company makes, who owns what, what gets measured, and which rooms you spend your hours in.
This course covers that job. What the title actually means and how it splits from VP Engineering. How to spend a first quarter learning instead of changing. Writing a strategy that rules something out. Measuring an organization for four different audiences who each want a different answer. Designing teams knowing the architecture will end up shaped like them. Reporting to a board that is pricing risk, not grading engineering.
It follows Will Larson’s The Engineering Executive’s Primer, the one book written about this job rather than about engineering management in general, with Fournier, Rumelt, Grove and the DORA research where the primary source is thin.
Two things recur. Your output is your organization’s output, so activities are ranked by how many people they move. And an executive changes an organization by building systems that make changes, not by making changes. Almost every lesson here is one of those two claims applied to a specific decision.
Written one at a time, each grounded in a primary source.
1 What a CTO actually does The job · 8 min 2 CTO versus VP of Engineering The job · 8 min 3 Managerial output and leverage The job · 9 min 4 Staying technical without staying hands-on The job · 8 min 5 The first 90 days Landing · 9 min 6 Why early changes fail Landing · 8 min 7 The strategy kernel Strategy · 9 min 8 Writing an engineering strategy Strategy · 9 min