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.
When an organization uses or builds software, they have one of these main goals:
In the first case, you’ll often find a CIO or Chief Information Officer – sometimes also called “IT Manager”.
The CIO focuses on people and stakeholders inside the organization. They prefer buying software over building software (and for good reason: building software is expensive and often not worth the cost if you can’t use it at scale). If they do build software, it is done with a specific set of known stakeholders in mind.
A CTO focuses on people and stakeholders outside the organization. The software they’re building will be used by customers and people who are not part of the organization. At the time they’re building software, they don’t know yet who will be their users. Part of the work they’re doing needs to convince people to become users.
Beware: if you’re a CTO, you don’t need to build everything yourself. Be aware which parts you can buy. For example, if you need to store and manager customer data, you’ll probably better of buying a CRM than building one yourself.
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As a rule of thumb: the closer the thing you’re building is to the customer, the more likely you’ll be building it. Also, the less the thing you’re building is unique, the more likely you’ll be buying it.
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Nobody will pay you more because you built a database engine yourself (unless your business is selling database engines, of course).
A role you often encounter in a tech company is that of VP Engineering, sometimes also called Engineering Manager.
Both are responsible for advancing the product the organization is building. But their focus is different.
A VP Engineering’s focus lies inward. They spend time with the development team. They work on collaboration, structure, processes. They establish timelines and take away hindrances.
A CTO’s focus lies outward. They want to understand their customers. They need to know in what technology the company needs to invest to stay relevant.
A CTO decides “what are we going to do”. A VP Engineering decides “how are we going to do that.”
A VP Product – or Product Manager – is responsible for establishing a roadmap. Based on all the input they can gather – from customers, from the customer success team, from the sales team, from usage data, from market information, but also from the tech team and the CTO – they make sure the organization has consensus of the priorities the tech team needs to work on.