SaaStr היקר: מה הופך CTO גרוע?

SaaStr היקר: מה הופך CTO גרוע?

אמנם אין הגדרה חוקית ל- CTO 🙂 או לקו בהיר בין CTO ל- VPE, אך הייתי מציע שמנהל CTO מתחיל באמת צריך לעשות רק כמה דברים - וזה מאוד קשה:

• להרכיב צוות קטן (3-9) של מהנדסים טובים מאוד
• אלה זריזים במיוחד
• That can ship a lot of very functional, very clever code that supports early, very rapid growth (from a very small base); and
• That can react and positively respond to a whole ton of issues, from downtime, to security, to API issues, and so much more.  That often were never anticipated and aren’t part of the job spec.

So … a “bad” CTO is one that can’t recruit a strong “pizza box” team. A bad CTO is an OK engineer him or herself but can’t get 3 other great engineers to join him/her.

A “bad” CTO isn’t agile enough, and can’t push out quick releases and features to save big deals, fix terrible bugs, etc. A “bad” CTO sometimes wants to do this, but just isn’t good enough. Or a “bad” CTO is a bit too unmotivated / whatever to do what it takes to keep up.

A “bad” CTO doesn’t care about growing very, very quickly. So much changes once you have your first few customers. It’s exciting — but also tiring and very stressful. A great CTO embraces this change, participates actively in it, and drives it. A bad CTO resists the change that come with scaling the early customer base.

A “bad” CTO doesn’t think it’s their problem when things have to change, a lot.  When the customer base changes. When the product ends up having to go in a very different direction than everyone thought at first.

This skillset is critical but then later … but a lot of it does not scale. The skills it takes to build a clever hack with a small team, and iterate that hack very rapidly to respond to customer and market needs … are not the same skills it takes to scale from 10–100 engineers. To refactor the codebase. To ship truly enterprise-grade software. To walk into a room full of CIOs and instill confidence.

לפעמים, חברות התעסוקה העליונה יכולות לצמוח לסמנכ"לים אמיתיים להנדסה. אבל בדרך כלל, הם לא רוצים. הם רוצים שהחברה תביא מנהל אמיתי שיגדיל את הצוות מעבר ל 1-2 קופסאות פיצה. בעוד שה- CTO יכול להתמקד בעשיית זריזות רבה, דברים מהדור הבא.

In SaaS, plan to recruit a true VP of Engineering around $5m-$8m in ARR. You’ll need her by then.  They can take over the routine stuff.  Once you transition into a phase where more of it is … routine.

(note: an update of a classic SaaStr answer)

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And for an example of a great startup CTO, here is one:

Source: https://www.saastr.com/makes-bad-cto/