In my technology career, the movement from Waterfall (which should never have been adopted and is in the original paper as not being suitable for most software development) to Agile development of either Kanban or Scrum are the main processes adopted. Bags of time and effort has been spent on which method is better. It … Read more
The CTO Academy community is not only growing and facilitating the career transition of thousands of tech leaders within the UK, it’s also gone global with customers and contributors from every corner of the world – Guatemala to Sydney, Bangalore to Sao Paulo.
But despite a myriad of different countries, companies, roles and responsibilities there are consistent challenges when it comes to leadership and management.
Leadership doesn’t always come naturally to everyone, particularly for those people with a technical background. But picking up leadership skills is crucial if you’re going to have an impact at the senior level and with any significant management role. Whether you have firm ambitions to take a senior tech role or you’ve almost fallen into … Read more
As companies strive to stay ahead of the curve and embrace innovation, the CTO plays a pivotal role in shaping the technological direction of the organization. But what is that role? What does a CTO do on a day-to-day basis? To explain, we will delve into a typical day in the life of a CTO, … Read more
The business is going gangbusters. The team is starting to creak under increasing pressure. The CEO is demanding quick hires to plug the gaps. What to do? Recruit internally and know what you’re getting or, hire externally to find the right expertise but potentially disrupt team cohesion? Internal Promotion If you’re growing quickly, you will … Read more
Price’s law (competence is linear, incompetence is exponential) pertains to the relationship between the literature on a subject and the number of authors in the subject area, stating that half of the publications come from the square root of all contributors. If 100 papers are written by 25 authors, five authors will have contributed 50 … Read more
Do you know why some chief technology officers can drive very attractive salary and equity packages while others can’t? This post looks at the average CTO salary in the USA in 2023 across cities, states and organizations, examining the determining factors that affect the bottom line for tech leaders working in US companies. Just to … Read more
Board meetings can be an intimidating environment even for those of us familiar with the arena.
Who does what?
Who are the key players?
How can you increase your impact?
But they also provide the CTO with a very visible opportunity to circulate updates, ideas and generate feedback from the key managers within your organisation.
But it’s also important to understand what they’re not such as discussing day-to-day operational matters.
And as with most important meetings, a successful board meeting is almost always down to the preparation beforehand and if necessary, or dropping big issues into the conversation, without first laying the groundwork.
When I was a developer, I always wanted to use the latest language and framework. I would accept the foibles of the framework, just because it was new and cool. Spend hours setting it up, installing all the different components, writing a simple application and then deploying at the click of a button …. only to spend hours in the server backends, trying to understand why it did not work! I’d then get a exciting new job using the framework, and be immediately lauded as the star developer, which in truth became more like first line support.
As CTO, you should always be super aware of trends, but very weary about jumping straight in. Can you afford to lose man days, whilst the team gets it head around new technology. They might be having fun, but you’re getting nothing done and that costs money.
They say the best business ideas come from personal experience of something not working well or an unmet need.
CTO Academy emerged from the direct experience of founder Jason Noble struggling through his career as a CTO to find the tech leadership support he wanted and needed.
Always lots of training for the technical, but little available for the more challenging transition into senior roles and acquiring the softer skills required to become an effective tech leader.
London
2nd Floor, 20 St Thomas St, SE1 9RS
Madrid
Avenida de Brasil, 17, 1ª, 28020
Copyright © 2023 - CTO Academy Ltd