Being an Effective CTO

Glossary

Canonical definitions for every term the course defines.

25 terms

20-40 rule: Always spend at least 20 minutes on a problem before asking for help, and never more than 40 minutes before asking.
Altitude test: Larson's test for whether a guiding policy sits at the right scope: applicable to real trade-offs, enforced with teams held accountable, and designed to create leverage.
Business executive (senior role): A leader whose first focus is the business itself, balancing development needs against business growth and owning high-level prioritization.
Coherent actions: Feasible, coordinated policies, resource commitments and actions designed to carry out the guiding policy. Not implementation detail.
CTO (Chief Technology Officer): The strategic technical executive a company needs at its current stage of evolution. Not an engineering role and not the top of the technical ladder.
Diagnosis: An account of what is going on. It names or classifies the situation, links facts into patterns, and directs attention toward some issues and away from others.
Execution (senior role): Making work actually get done: aligning roadmaps, planning, prioritizing, breaking roadblocks, resolving conflicts.
External face of technology: The client meetings, sales cycle and conference talks a senior technical leader carries, including the engineering brand a company hires against.
Fluff: Restated obvious ideas dressed in buzzwords and unnecessary complexity, giving the surface appearance of analysis. One of Rumelt's four hallmarks of bad strategy.
Ground game: A VP of Engineering's ability to drop into the details and make things happen at a low level, while tracking several in-flight initiatives at once.
Guiding policy: The approach for dealing with the obstacles named in the diagnosis. A signpost marking the direction forward, without defining the details of the trip.
Infrastructure and technical operations: All technology infrastructure and its operation, focused on cost, security or scaling depending on the company's stage.
Leverage: The measure of output generated by a given managerial activity. Managerial output is the sum of each activity multiplied by its leverage.
Listening tour: A deliberate round of meetings across and beyond your organization in a leader's first months, aimed at building an accurate picture and visible trust rather than at gathering decisions.
Managerial meddling: A supervisor using superior knowledge of a subordinate's responsibilities to assume command of a situation rather than letting them work it through. Its leverage is negative: the subordinate shrinks their view of the job.
Managerial output: The output of the organization under your supervision, plus the output of neighbouring organizations under your influence. A manager's own individual work is not part of it.
Organization (senior role): Owns the structure and people: the staffing plan, the org design, and making sure projects are staffed to match.
R&D (Research and Development): Expanding the cutting edge: experimentation and new technology generation, sometimes owning technology strategy, sometimes purely finding new ideas.
Skip-level: A 1:1 between a leader and someone who reports to one of their reports, used to hear what the intervening layer may be filtering.
System change: A change to the thing that produces outcomes, so it produces different ones from now on without the executive present.
Tactical action: A direct intervention that fixes an instance of a problem. It produces the appearance of improvement and leaves whatever generated the problem untouched.
Technology strategy / visionary: Where technology strategy meets product. Predicting how technology will evolve in an industry and using that to grow the business.
The engineer/manager pendulum: Charity Majors' model of a technical career as deliberate swings between engineering and management roles rather than a permanent choice of one. The best frontline managers are never more than two to three years from hands-on work.
The kernel: Rumelt's logical structure shared by every good strategy: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and a set of coherent actions.
VP of Engineering (Vice President of Engineering): The senior leader responsible for the day-to-day operation of the engineering organization: delivery, process, hiring and the management team. Usually the top of the management career ladder for engineers.