How the role of the CTO changes when the startup grows

1. Scaling Teams
From the CTO’s
perspective

2. About me
Formerly at Nokia, SoundCloud, Beatport
Currently: issuu
@klangberater, https://medium.com/@alexandergrosse

3. Shameless self promotion

5. About the book
Advice and best practices for every leader in a product organisation
Five dimensions of scaling
Key learnings

6. If you want a life, don’t write a
book next to your job
(especially when you have
kids)

7. Back to the topic

8. How does the job of a CTO change over
time?
Assumptions:
- You started as CTO of a small startup
- You are coding on the critical path
- Every engineer reports to you
- Team grows

9. What should happen?

10. What can happen?

11. WHY DOES THAT HAPPEN?
● Organisational issues:
○ Onboarding not sufficient
○ Effort for hiring
○ Wrong hiring
○ Wrong organisation (dependencies kill you)
● Exceeded the optimal growth rate

12. Some things that happen to you
- You are still the go to person for technical work, no time (or experience) to
manage the new engineers
- A lot of new stakeholders appear
- There is suddenly a management team, where you need to be present

13. Time spent in the beginning

14. Time spent while growing

15. What happens to the role
Focus shifts from technical contributions to team building and collaboration with
other departments

16. What makes it even more difficult?
Engineering is usually the biggest and fastest growing department in a startup
Therefore all the team scaling challenges are here first! E.g.:
- Career paths
- Training of managers
- Hiring processes
- Communication...

17. What stops you from changing?
- Old habits
- Missing knowledge
- Or… no passion for management work

18. What to do?
Two alternatives:
● Hire an experienced people manager (VP Engineering) - not covered here
● Adapt and learn it yourself

19. Adapt

20. Can I still code?
● Don’t code on the critical path (that is the easiest way to NOT scale the team)
● Your task is to give context, explain, mentor other engineers
● But do technical work as long as possible...

21. Scale Yourself

22. Disclaimer
● I know that everyone is different, every company is
different and there is probably not a single
person/company where all these points are true

23. The 5 sins of a startup CTO*
● Pride
● Isolationism
● Being a Bottleneck
● Lack of self awareness
● Shiny technology over business value

24. Pride
● In a growing startup just staying at the CTO position is
basically a promotion
● Give up the title if needed
● Accept that other people might be paid more than you

25. Isolationism
● Thinking about engineering in isolation
● To deliver business value there is more needed than just
engineering
● Us vs. them

26. Bottleneck
● Sometimes conscious - sometimes unconscious
● Not cool: All communication runs through you
● Your job is to make sure that everything runs without you

27. Lack of self awareness
● What are your strengths?
● What is your passion?

28. Lack of self awareness
● If you had the choice between coding for a day or
organizing teams/hiring: What would you choose?

29. Shiny technology over business value

30. Shiny technology over business value
● Use simple (not outdated) technology which delivers what
you need
● Goal is to make the business successful, not to use e.g.
Microservices

31. COOL / NOT COOL

32. HIRING

33. NOT COOL
“I have to check all the technical work”

34. WHAT TO DO?
● Anti Pattern: We are cash restricted, we only pay very low
salaries and get what we pay for
● The way to do it right: Find the right balance and pay a few
highly qualified engineers (referral trap)

35. NOT COOL
“ONBOARDING is mostly: There is your desk”

36. WHAT TO DO?
● Small (one team): Mostly spontaneous
● More than one team: Team rotation

37. NOT COOL
“Hiring process takes ages and is unprofessional”

38. WHAT TO DO?
● Convince Management to hire recruiter
● Invest in tools
● Increase awareness

39. PEOPLE MANAGEMENT

40. NOT COOL
“1on1s are infrequent”

41. WHAT TO DO?
● Very pragmatic advice:
○ Make it a recurrent meeting
○ Reserve time for long term topics

42. ORGANISATION

43. COOL
“Teams who can deliver stuff fast without dependencies”

44. VALUE STREAM MAPPING

45. HOW TO DO IT?
● Build Delivery Teams: Self-sufficient teams that include all
the functions necessary to develop software from idea to
launch.
● 95% rule

46. WHAT TO DO?

47. COOL
“Teams who understand their customers”

48. WHAT TO DO?
● Purpose of the teams
● Assign support to teams
● Let the engineers talk to customers
● Let the engineers spend time in support

49. COMMUNICATION

50. NOT COOL
“NOBODY KNOWS WHAT THE OTHER TEAMS/DEPARTMENTS
ARE DOING”

51. WHAT TO DO?
● BASICS: Set up regular demo sessions
● EXTRA POINTS: All departments of the company present

52. NOT COOL
“I only have 1on1s with engineers”

53. WHAT TO DO?
● Identify main stakeholders
● Have a monthly 1on1 with them
● Typical candidates: Main Product, Design/UX, Marketing
people

54. Summary
● Job changes radically when company grows
● Adapt or change your role (seek support)
● Take care of how to scale teams!
● Engineering is not an island

55. Thank you
@klangberater