What are the most important skills to be a good CTO?
Can a super developer become a CTO? Absolutely.
The real question is, do they want to transition from code to this versatile/multifaceted role over the trenches?
Before diving into the details, let me start with a quick joke:
To navigate challenges and lead tech-driven companies you need the technical expertise of Linus Torvalds, the strategic vision of Elon Musk, the leadership of Satya Nadella, and the communication skills of Sheryl Sandberg
.. hahaha , not quite, maybe too much!.
As a developer, you enjoy building things, cool things, something that motivates you. That is beautiful. But the path to CTO shifts you to a different view, you need to think about the rationals, and the economics, and make informed decisions. Now, it’s about balancing tech with rational decision-making and economic factors. Sometimes, it’s about scaling, sometimes it's maintaining — every decision is crucial.
The CTO skillset:
Competent in many skills but may not specialize in any one. Also called a “jack of all trades”.
Strategic vision. Zooming out from details. From a narrow vision to a big picture, long-term view.
Understand technology and technical capabilities.
Manage expectations from your fellow C-level executives, while staying aligned with the company’s long-term strategy and actively contributing to the roadmap.
Understand financial stuff, P&L, capex, expenses, ..
Education, learnability to find the skills you’re missing. You can collaborate with others, willing to join some courses, MBA? (expensive), enroll in online training, related to technology, business, and management.
Let’s dive a little more on each:
Maintain a clear, big-picture vision while managing many moving pieces and adapting to changing priorities. Being proficient at handling shifting demands is key to success in this role.
Understanding technology, because you need to make intelligent decisions and challenge your management to do it as well. So you need this background, you are somewhere in the past, code yourself, and are up to date picking knowledge from different areas. You still remember bumping your head in front of the monitor until it made a click and fixed the bug.
Managing other C-level executives, because you will go to the board and explain what happened, what are the goals, how they are aligned with the company roadmap. Also probably deal with partner who are investing the company, selling or buying others.
You need to help to elaborate the long-term strategy because the company may want to purchase another company because of their technology or the technical team. Many people struggle with the CTO role because they think the board or sales executives are the enemy, always pushing things, elevating clients’ complaints. But believe me, this is wrong. They can help you and you need to help them as well, the board is now your team.
Probably it’s also useful to have a background as a Project Manager, so you need to organize and elaborate plans, follow up, and understand constraints, and resources, and be in different places and nowhere at the same time.
The board will expect you to:
Align technology initiatives with business goals and the broader company vision.
You’ll need to:
Lead technical teams, ensuring they’re motivated and focused.
Constantly innovate, adapt, and learn.
Effectively translate complex tech concepts to non-technical stakeholders (and vice versa).
In summary, if you want to become a CTO: Communication. That’s the golden rule, if any. You’ll need to understand both the tech side and the business side, acting as a bridge between teams and ensuring everything runs smoothly.
I assume you are a multidisciplinary leader, with business acumen and able to understand different parts of the company, not just able to deeply understand the technology itself and run efficient software teams, and bla bla bla.. so it’s not anymore you being the top-tier developer.