The Startup CTO Handbook — How to manage technical change as a CTO
7 Essential Lessons for New Tech Leaders Scaling Their First Business
No matter where you are in your journey as a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) — joining a high-growth tech start-up levels out your experience. Unless you’ve worked in a startup environment before, you will be exposed to a whole new set of challenges that your previous corporate experience will not have prepared you for.
Quick navigation
Lesson #1 — Embrace the Startup Mindset
Lesson #2 — Know what you’re building
Lesson #3 — Know where you’re going
Lesson #4 — Implement a Product Development Process
Lesson #5 — Build IT processes that fit your business
Lesson #6 — Understand your key scaling risks
Lesson #7 — Nurture your team culture
To illustrate the point, here’s an extract from my own journey as a startup CTO…
I started my career as a tech consultant at one of the Big Four accounting firms before becoming a freelance consultant and then switching to the other side of the table to become the CTO for a scale-up. After a number of years there, I decided to step back into the fire and was hired as the first employee of a startup that had just received considerable funding.
I remember my first day as a start-up CTO like it was yesterday. I had no team, some tech that was built by another company and about 20 people in three different countries all looking to start work. I will never forget learning how to network and patch servers and help reset passwords whilst building a team to support a cloud platform that going to fund millions of dollars worth of assets.
Just weeks before, I was in a different job, one that I’d been in for 5 years, where I’d built a solid team. To be honest, I did very little besides manage them and sit in meetings. I wasn’t unprepared for my new job, but it was a long time since I got my hands dirty at the lowest level.
I look back on those days with great pride. Not simply because that business became very successful but mostly because, by the end of it, I built an amazing team. A team that I still work with today, but this time in our own venture. One that helps other companies get their tech off the ground faster.
The lessons you will read in this blog mirror that journey I took all those years ago and have been compounded by decades of working with start-ups of all sizes, shapes and industries. Hopefully, they will lift the curtain on the life of a startup CTO and prepare you for the hurdles ahead.
Get to the point — what are the lessons?
Embrace the Start-up Mindset — In this lesson, we’ll explore what mental processes you’ll need to change in order to adapt to working in a Start-up
Know what you’re building — It sounds obvious but, when you work in a start-up, you’ll soon realise that there are a hundred different ideas floating around. If you don’t know what you’re building, you’ll end up with nonsense.
Know where you’re going — If you don’t know where you’re headed, you won’t know how to get there or worse, you may never get there. Again, it seems simple but too often people lose sight of their purpose as they grow.
Implement a Product Development Process — Customers always come first, otherwise, it’s just a hobby. You need to make sure that your development process keeps the customer in mind. You’re building for your customers, not for yourself.
Build IT processes that fit your business — If you left your old job to become a start-up CTO to untangle yourself from rules and processes… well, I have bad news for you. Those rules and processes were there for a reason. Now, you’ll be responsible for building your own.
Understand your key scaling risks — Risk is inherent in all parts of a business. If you can’t identify, measure and monitor them, you will suffer the consequences.
Nurture your team culture — Even though I was a one-man IT band for a short while, it was pretty clear that I couldn’t run a multi-million dollar start-up alone. You need to build a team but, most importantly, you need to learn how to lead them and foster the right culture.
I hope you have as much fun reading the lessons as I did writing them. They are not meant to be a definitive, “know it all” account of being a start-up CTO. They are meant to serve as a guide for the future and, perhaps, highlight things you have yet to consider:
The 7 Lessons
Lesson #1 — Embrace the Startup Mindset
Lesson #2 — Know what you’re building
Lesson #3 — Know where you’re going
Lesson #4 — Implement a Product Development Process
Lesson #5 — Build IT processes that fit your business
Lesson #6 — Understand your key scaling risks
Lesson #7 — Nurture your team culture
Let’s Ponder
If you have followed the advice above — you should have a strong team, product development process and IT systems in place to manage risk as you scale. At this point, you’re geared for hyper-growth and ready to rumble! Now, you truly have something to grow and protect. Your next challenge is to navigate your market conditions and stay ahead of the game.
There are many things outside your control including; new regulations, technological disruptions and even macro-economic impacts. Of course, you can only make the best decisions with the information you have available. So, what questions should you ask to get more information?
Here are a few to ponder over as your rocket ship takes off:
What stands in your way?
What external factors will influence your product’s success?
What are your biggest risks or fears?
What is your next inflexion point?
The ultimate point to make here is that as a CTO, where does your journey end? Have built a team that can function well without you — have you created a succession plan? If so, then great, if not then why not?
We’re all human. We all get excited by different things and, once the business gets bigger, it may not excite you anymore. If your role is more hands-off and you find yourself managing more people or spending more time in meetings — your thirst for the job may disappear. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s an important thing to recognise and plan for. Some CTOs enjoy the thrill of taking a business from 0 to 1, others embrace stability and love working in much larger organisations with bigger budgets and bigger teams.
“At the end of the day, a CTO is not judged by what they’ve built but by how well it lasts.”
As a CTO, you have to know when to leave and, ideally, leave when you’re ahead. Make sure that you’ve identified potential replacements that fully understand all aspects of your job. You want them to maintain the culture you’ve built because, at the end of the day, a CTO is not judged by what they’ve built but by how well it lasts…
Good luck folks! I hope that these lessons have given you some food for thought at the very least. Feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn — we’re happy to help where we can.
About the Authors
#ScaleupLessons is written by serial entrepreneurs, engineers and technologists to share knowledge about scaling startups across various industries. This blog was written by:
Bhairav Patel — Bhairav is the Managing Director of Atom CTO, a company that provides strategic and operational tech advice to start-ups, scale-ups, SMEs and investors. He has over 23 years of experience in the tech industry and has been the CTO for a number of award-winning start-ups and scale-ups across the globe.
Selby Cary — is a serial entrepreneur, inventor and engineer with a passion for data-driven and automated systems. Previously, Selby co-founded ZIVA Robotics, an award-winning deep tech startup based in Edinburgh, before joining TestCard.com to accelerate affordable at-home digital healthcare. In his free time, Selby hosts the Edinburgh Tech Meetup and Entrepreneurs Social Club, bringing the tech startup community together one meetup at a time.
This guide originally appeared on Medium, you can find the original here.