One Important Yet Overlooked Benefit of a Tech MBA

When contemplating career paths, people can question the necessity of undertaking a specialised educational programs such as a Tech MBA, that is until they face two challenges.

The First Challenge

At CTO Academy, we coined the term ‘Accidental CTO‘ to describe an accelerated path to the Chief Technology Officer role.

This tends to be someone typically working within an early-stage, fast-growing company who has been fast-tracked into a CTO role, due to a combination of their technical expertise and the rapid growth of the company. 

These individuals may not have initially planned to become CTOs (or at least not so quickly) but they find themselves in that role due to the aforementioned combination of skills and company needs. 

One of the members from our Global Community and one of our Tech MBA graduates, Mostafa Khattab, when CTO at Dubai-based Wakeup Technologies, published a series of blogs about his experience.

He recalled …

“I struggled to jump directly from senior developer to CTO, especially during a time of growth where absolutely everything was running at full speed. The business, the tech challenges and the fundamental change in my role are the challenges you cannot anticipate in advance. I, for one, didn’t see them all.”

Reality kicked in when Mostafa realised he was responsible for everything on the tech side of the business and everyone in the technical teams.

Realisation triggered stress, fatigue and anxiety to the point where he began questioning his ability to deliver what was expected of him. He instinctively knew that something had to change and he had to be at the forefront of that initiative. Which is where finding a community of peers with many similar experiences is crucial.

“Working with CTO Academy has been just the fresh start I needed. I was shocked that someone out there could feel my pain. It wasn’t just me. I wasn’t alone in all of this. These growing pains were very familiar and shared by other tech leaders around the world. It was like a dream to find someone with extensive experience to help me out. I have been working with them for nearly a year and I cannot recommend it more highly. You cannot take this all on your own shoulders, particularly if, like me, you become a CTO ahead of schedule.”

Mostafa’s story as an Accidental CTO is not uncommon within our community and is one of the challenges that can accelerate the need to ramp up your need for a Tech MBA style course.

The Second Challenge

For most people landing a CTO role means the obvious obstacle of the job interview.

In our deep-dive guide on mastering the CTO interview questions, we revealed the true purpose of these interviews. In a nutshell, the company searching for the Chief Technology Officer initially wants to learn a few important things about the candidate:

• Predict the candidate’s future performance
• Assess interpersonal skills or the so-called soft skills
• Asses hard (technical) skills
• Candidate’s long-term thinking capabilities
• Motivation

To get the information, they commonly use functional and behavioural interview questions based on predefined criteria. Interviewers use success/failure data points to assess whether or not the candidate is the right choice for the role. 

Now, this is where it gets challenging. 

You are tech-savvy without question. Your hard or technical skills are excellent and you have experience with an array of technologies, frameworks and tools. But how good is your business acumen? 

You see, in technology leadership, there are three distinct roles: 

1. Tech Leads
2. Technical Leaders
3. Chief Technology Officers 

Only one of these requires extensive experience in business administration. Hence, only one provides enough knowledge to answer inevitable questions about business fundamentals, business goals and, finally, finance and funding. 

Let me explain.

Tech Leads provide technical guidance to their team members and have more hands-on responsibilities. Technical Leaders, on the other hand, oversee the technical direction of a larger team or even multiple projects. They are responsible for the overall technical strategy and architecture decisions. 

Unlike these two roles, a Chief Technology Officer is a C-suite executive who reports directly to the CEO. They are a part of the strategic decision-making team responsible for aligning technology with business goals, managing budgets and finances in general, evaluating and implementing new technologies, managing IT infrastructure and ensuring the security and compliance of all technical systems. These responsibilities may span the entire organisation and involve multiple technical departments.

Now, if you haven’t worked as a CTO and haven’t gone through a Tech MBA, how difficult do you think it is going to be to go through the CTO job interview successfully?

CTO Academy is dedicated to supporting experts like you by providing the resources and training they need to excel in their roles. One of the most prominent is definitely our Digital MBA for Technology Leaders. A 4.9 Trustpilot rating clearly speaks about the career impact the program has on existing and future CTOs. Take a few moments and familiarise yourself with the Tech MBA that solves this second challenge.

Learn more about our Digital MBA for Technology Leaders and its positive impact on the careers of technology professionals.