Discover more from Bits, Bytes & Business - The Atom CTO Perspective
Lesson #2 - Know what you’re building
Hurray! You’ve just been hired as the CTO of a budding startup. You’ve signed the contract, been given tons of equity and soon you’ll be on your path to making billions. Or, perhaps, this is your baby — you’ve had a great idea and you can’t wait to start a business. Maybe you’re a technical co-founder. No matter how you got the job, what everyone wants to know is… What are you going to build? ⚒️
As the start-up CTO, you’ll have a lot of pressure from investors, the management team and employees to define a roadmap, forecast timescales and estimate costs. You will often get asked; Why hasn’t it been built yet? What’s taking so long? What do you mean you need more budget? This isn’t what I asked for, I wanted something else!
As the early-stage CTO your main job will be to say “no”. You need to bring your sales team back down to earth and tactfully encourage your CEO to stop using terms such as “cutting-edge AI”. Your job is to get a product out to the market as quickly as possible and ensure that it’s what customers want. Read the Tech Startup Machine to learn more.
“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late” — Reid Hoffman.
Unfortunately, most startups lack a clear product vision or any form of product management. They generally have a high-level notion of what they want to do but are often light on the details. More concerningly, they rarely think about the “non-happy” paths i.e. What are the deviations from a process that could impact a user’s journey?
Without a clear product vision that is aligned across the business — you will inevitably end up selling and building different things. So, you need to continually ask yourself — What are we building?
Practical Tips:
Focus on Benefits, not Features — Your job is to build a product that customers want to use and spend money on. However, you cannot do it alone. Your commercial and product teams must define each function and process that the user would need. You can provide guidance or make suggestions but every feature must be beneficial to your customer. Encourage your team to test their assumptions with user groups before you begin building in earnest — it will save you a lot of pain.
Pick a Stable Tech Stack — From a technical perspective, your job is to choose the right tech stack so you can hire additional developers easily when you start to scale. You don’t need to be fancy — pick a stack that allows you to quickly find someone to replace you (if you’re writing all the code). Ultimately, you need to make sure that your live products are stable, easy to maintain and fully monitored to fix any issues quickly.
Using the Latest Tech is Risky — Your CEO may want you to speak to investor meetings about how “sexy” your tech is. However, avoid integrating the latest and greatest tech into your product if you know it isn’t a good fit, expensive, complicated, difficult to maintain or find engineers to program.
Know your Limits — You may be a fantastic mobile developer but you don’t have the first clue about back-end architecture. Work to your strengths, not your weaknesses. When you have skill gaps, find someone to fill them. Of course, you can spend the time learning a new language or framework but Do you have the time? Or, more importantly, do you want to learn a new language?
Ask for Help — If your budget is limited and you can’t hire specialist skills — you will need to learn it for yourself. Use your network to help you. Whether that’s code reviews, setting up organisational structures, architectural advice or whatever you need to get your project over the finish line.
As long as it works — Your success will be measured by your ability to get to market with a product that works and generates revenue. Under the hood, your code doesn’t need to look pretty (as long as it’s readable). If you’ve taken shortcuts, document your technical debt so you know what problems you’ll face later on.
Stable, Controlled Changes — If your hypothesis is right, the market will validate your product and your value will increase. To sustain this trajectory, you need to be able to deploy changes to the platform quickly, in a controlled manner and without breaking what is already there.
Common Tech Startup Questions:
Do you need a technical co-founder or a development agency/engineer to build your product?
This depends on your level of technical skill and the complexity of your idea. Ask yourself; What can you do yourself? Do you need someone who shares your vision? Are you willing to share control? If you have enough money, you can use a development agency in the short term for low to medium-complexity projects — however, this is not scalable or efficient as you grow. Set yourself clear milestones based on deliverables and work backwards from there.
When should you hire a full-time software development team?
This depends on how fast you want to build and how much money you want to spend. If you have enough capital, you can hire a team of engineers within a few months and have a shiny product ready within a year. If you don’t have access to piles of cash, you can either do it yourself or partner with other engineers. Therefore, the question becomes; How long are you going to invest your time? And, how much control do you want?
Recommended Reading: Obviously Awesome (April Dunford) and Disciplined Entrepreneurship (Bill Aulet)
Take me back to the Startup CTO Handbook >
Go to Lesson #3 - Know Where You’re Going
This guide originally appeared on Medium, you can find the original here.
Subscribe to Bits, Bytes & Business - The Atom CTO Perspective
A weekly round-up of tech news we feel we want to share with the world along with our latest podcasts and other practical tips for budding entrepreneurs