The company

The company has found a problem and a solution that solves that problem. They have several customers that have bought the vision. Now they have to make that vision happen.

Typical in this company is that the way they look at their market shifts from looking at individual customers to looking at segments of customers. Their sales and marketing shifts from targeting individual companies to groups of companies. The same starts to happen in other parts of the company - and also in the tech team.

The tech team

The tech team is about 10 people.

Where the tech team in the past was often nudged or forced to cater for individual customers, they now start to realize that this strategy will harm them in the long run. Customized solutions are not maintainable at scale. Product Management gets a big(ger) focus on recognizing patterns amongst customers instead of solving individual customer’s requests.

What one expects to find in this tech team

• Automation in the coding process
  • A way to coordinate code changes
    • Branching strategy
    • CI/CD
  • A way to prevent regression bugs
    • Testing strategy
  • Infrastructure-as-code
• A rough roadmap
  • The team has been experimenting with how to get a roadmap that’s informational, actionable and maintainable
• Roles and responsibilities are agreed on; they’re probably written down
• Processes are agreed on, and are probably documented somewhere

The CTO

Tech team is about ten people: the CTO no longer directly manages everyone, but starts working mainly with a few key people.

CTO often still has a lot of influence on architectural decisions, but writes little production code.

• Programming Almost no production code anymore. Some CTOs still code Proof-of-Concepts to thoroughly understand some piece of technology they’re not familiar with yet. They might also pair with people on hard, obscure, or not-well-defined parts of their code.
• Tech strategy The CTO is still very much involved in all tech strategy and architectural decisions.
• Team alignment This starts to eat up the biggest part of the CTO’s time.
• C-level alignment C-level alignment becomes more formal. Tools like a common roadmap are deployed.
• Impact horizon Half a year.
• Size of tech team Around ten.