About the Tech team growth phases

The dynamics in a tech team change as the company grows. Things that are easy with two developers might become hard when there are twenty developers. Things that are hard with two developers might become easy when there are twenty developers.

In these pages we give an insight of the things that change. You’ll see what happens in each growth phase. You’ll be able to make your tech team effective and efficient in their current phase. You’ll learn how to lead your tech team to the next phase.

Growing always brings some pain. A good preparation will soften that pain and enables you to grow faster.

The CTO

A crucial member and leader in the tech team is the CTO. We start with describing their role and how that evolves through the growth of your company.

What is a CTO?

A CTO (or Chief Technology Officer) is a particular role in a technology company. We define a CTO as follows:

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The CTO is the person who is responsible for building software as the core business of an organization.

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While there exist other roles as CTO – such as Chief Technology Officer in a software development agency, or Chief Technology Officer in a machine building company, or Clinical Trial Officer – this is the role we’re looking at in this document.

To get a better understanding of this role, we’ve put it against some other roles that you also find in technology companies.

CTO vs other roles

The different aspects of the CTO Role

To get a clear grasp of the CTO Role, we identify a couple of aspects. The CTO spends more or less time on each of these aspects.

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.
• Tech Strategy Tech Strategy aligns the tech team’s efforts with the business objectives, enables efficient decision-making, and sets the team up for long-term success.
• 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.
• Impact horizon The impact horizon measures the time between the decisions of the CTO and their impact. In a small company, decisions have an immediate impact. As the company grows the time to impact grows.
• 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 challenge of a CTO