Interim CTO - Challenges for the role
One of the key things that an external ‘Interim CTO’ candidate needs is to hit the ground running.
It means
- Understand the business and its priorities, align with the leadership’s priorities
- Understand the tech and the team, the team’s priorities and pain points
- Align with the previous CTOs roadmap
- Assure the team that the values of the organisation are going to not change much, if there was no caustic culture earlier
- If required, convince the team to make ‘amends’, not because there is change in leadership, but because the business needs it
- Being ‘interim’ but still ensuring a strategy is in place, and aligned
A CTO’s job is not to become the ‘execution’ monitor, that is more of a President/VP thing. The CTO should be more about driving the direction of the product, and the offerings of the company, while being the face of the company, and working with the customers.
When i interact with people, the most common challenge I see is that the CTOs of the startups forget that they are a ‘dual role’ at the early stages. But they have to decide, and hand over one of them as the company grows or the product demands more.
Like with everything else in a startup’s life, re-evaluating the strategy is a continuous activity. What got us here is not what will take us into the future. But, also a startup’s life, that there is never enough bandwidth to think. In situations like those, get an ‘Advisor to CTO’ to help.
#interimexecutive #interimprofessional #cto #techchallenges #businessscaling
