About the CTO Readiness Levels

The role of CTO evolves and differs in various stages of a company's growth. As a consequence, it’s not always easy for companies to accurately describe what they expect from a CTO. Inversely, it’s not always easy for a CTO to gauge whether they will fit into a company. Some people will perform well in every stage of growth, but they are not very common. Most people thrive best in a particular phase.

To improve the communication about expectations between company and CTO, we define "CTO Readiness Levels". In each company, the role of CTO is filled in differently, but it should be clear that a company looking for a "Level 1" CTO wants someone different than a company seeking a "Level 7" CTO.

The different aspects of the CTO Role

To get a clear grasp of the CTO Role, we identify a couple of aspects. We’ll use these aspects to describe each CTO Readiness Level.

The aspects of the CTO Role are:

• Programming At some levels, CTOs spend part of their time at programming. They’re writing code and deploying it to production.
• Architecture Architecture is the definition of the high-level blocks on how the code will be structured
• Team alignment A CTO is responsible to give direction to their team. They need to align the goals of the team members with each other, and to align the goals of the team with the company goals
• C-level alignment The CTO’s first team is their C-level team. The C-level needs to align on the company goals and on the strategies and tactics to work towards these goals.
• Time horizon The time horizon is often linked to the other aspects. It gives an idea on which time frame a CTO thinks in.
• Size of tech team While this is not really an aspect of the CTO Role, it helps to align a company’s expectation of a CTO with the expectations of a potential CTO.
• Typical phase of the company In which growth phase of the company can you expect to see this level of CTO.

The CTO Readiness Levels

We discern 7 CTO Readiness Levels:

Level 1

The CTO is the only software technician. The CTO programs everything.

Level 2

CTO has a few (up to three) developers; most of their time is spent on programming, but they’re already giving some direction and following up on developers.

Level 3