The Chief Technical Officer
The COO’s Technical Handler
The Chief Technical Officer (CTO) is Chisel’s Secret Weapon
It’s a rather complex role that lies at the intersection of business and technology. The CTO is usually seen as a seasoned professional with a combined knowledge of a solutions architect, programmer, DevOps, team leader, and domain expert. The truth is that in the Chisel environment, the CTO is often wearing several hats. She is obliged to pick up the slack when there’s no opportunity to hire dedicated specialists.
The main responsibility of the CTO is to ensure IT services delivery support the business model in place. She must know the ins and outs of our clients’ product, as well as the market and users and can turn this knowledge into a business benefit. Instead of managing, she guides an engineering team. The CTO serves as a functional product owner and has a vision and excels at communicating it to the team members.
Must ensure that the organization’s technology fully serves its business strategy. Whether the clients are established organizations or startups, this remains essential for this role.
After analyzing business goals, the CTO develops a technical strategy for the client. This step requires collaboration with founders, co-founders and other stakeholders in order to align the strategy with the business vision. To shape the vision, the CTO needs to combine the best of two worlds: technical skills and business acumen.
Responsible for creating an MVP that will gain real-time user feedback as fast as possible.
Responsible for the quality of the final product. CTO needs to come up with the testing system. Basing on technical and commercial properties, the CTO suggests likely technical platforms to use on the project. The solution requires such considerations as the number of developers available, the cost of developers, the cost of the framework, deployment time, security, community support, and fitting for business vision. CTO needs to handle the improvement process personally or hand this task over to a senior engineer.
CTO steps into the shoes as a DevOps until they can hire a dedicated resource. In this role, the CTO manages domains and SSL certificates, sets up servers, databases, third-party tools, and ensures company-wide security.
CTO Skills
Technical knowledge
CTO is a key decision-maker who chooses the tech stack, programming language, and framework. Ideally, a candidate needs to have 10+ years of experience in the IT field. She needs to know the ins and outs of the software development life cycle and are experienced to incorporate strategies to accelerate time-to-market.
Technical leadership
A CTO needs to be able to provide leadership for the technical strategy in order to accomplish the goals of an organization.
Communication skills
The ability to communicate the technology strategy to the engineering team, investors, and key stakeholders is important for this role.
Strategic planning of technological resources
A CTO is expected to research and create strategies, improve an IT infrastructure and finetune an engineering team efforts to align with business priorities
Project management
An essential part of the CTO position — overseeing the flow of work, design stable processes using best practices and methodologies.
Operational excellence
CTOs optimize operations by enabling agility, security, and reliance within ecosystems. The operating model developed by CTO is needed to bridge business and technology strategy.
Sense of entrepreneurship
This role is critically important for delivering a competitive advantage by choosing the right technology that will engage customers.
Mentorship and coaching
CTOs foster corporate culture by inspiring an engineering team to grow and develop. They should be actively involved in feedback and retention of team members.
Future anticipation
As an avid learner, a CTO continually researches trends in the IT industry, including innovative technologies and advises on the impacts of this technology in the long run.