Tech team is about ten people: 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.
• Architecture The CTO is still very much involved in all 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.
• Time horizon Half a year.
• Size of tech team Around ten.
• Typical phase of the company Customers are on board and are using the company’s product in anger. The company starts to be able to segment their customers and work at segments instead of individual customers. The company’s focus is more on scaling.

Back to the CTO Readiness Levels

Level 3

Level 5