I love being a CTO. You can design the technical organization you want to lead. If you are unhappy, change the design of your organization. It takes time (and money), but totally worth it.
I think the key when you achieve product market fit is filling the roles in your technical organization with stronger leaders than you, and stepping out of those management positions. Plus, you can learn from and partner with these people.
If you're a technical CTO, and want to code more than manage/build a team, then hire/promote a VP of Engineering with strong soft skills to grow/manage your team. If its the reverse, hire/promote a VP of Engineering who's technically stronger.
If you're constantly being pulled into engineering battles, hire/promote an architect you respect to negotiate.
If you're running engineering meetings (ipm's, retros, etc), hire/promote a SCRUM master or equivalent.
If you're battling sales, operations or marketing, hire a Director of Product Management with solid communication skills. That person will 'fight' your battles (and probably love it!).
If you're putting out fires in production, hire/promote a Director of QA. They'll work on designing systems to catch those bugs.
If your infrastructure goes down a lot, hire/promote a senior devops engineer.
On the engineering/coding front, I find it super helpful to rotate into teams and pair one-on-one with engineers. You get exposure to their day-to-day code battles/challenges/environments, the tech decisions at the lowest levels, the ability to code/manage daily and respect with your team. You can then prioritize stories/epics to fix problems that you see across your organization that plague a technical team like debt, environments, knowledge gaps, etc.
Don't step away, stay positive and solve for the organization you want to lead.
This is a great response, thank you. Unfortunately for me, it's unrealistic as we simply don't have the budget to hire all these people.
I see a future over the next couple of years where I have someone great in each of those positions but it will be a long, hard journey to get there.
This whole thread has given me a lot to think about and I wish I could personally thank everyone. However HN is limiting my responses so it might take a while!
Neighborly | San Francisco, CA | JS Engineer, Data Engineer and internships
We're a small fintech startup building a modern public finance platform for school districts and cities.
We're looking for civic-minded engineers passionate about public finance/economic data and beautiful frontend experiences. At the moment, we have positions open for a Data Engineer and JS Engineer. We also have internships available for the summer.
Our tools help citizens invest in projects in their communities and public finance professionals research and advise local governments.
Granicus - Passionate Coders & Designers for Democracy - http://www.granicus.com - San Francisco, CA
We help 1000+ governments make more transparent decisions and involve 1 million+ citizens in the democratic process every month.
Hiring:
Graphic Design - Help us transform some of our citizen-facing properties
Ruby/Rails - We're moving our server-side architecture to ruby, join us in putting government on rails!
Javascript - Backbone, Ember, Angular? We love it.
Front-End Design - Great at prototyping or mockups? We'd love to chat.
Join us and help make a difference! Email me directly with questions dan@granicus.com
I think the key when you achieve product market fit is filling the roles in your technical organization with stronger leaders than you, and stepping out of those management positions. Plus, you can learn from and partner with these people.
If you're a technical CTO, and want to code more than manage/build a team, then hire/promote a VP of Engineering with strong soft skills to grow/manage your team. If its the reverse, hire/promote a VP of Engineering who's technically stronger.
If you're constantly being pulled into engineering battles, hire/promote an architect you respect to negotiate.
If you're running engineering meetings (ipm's, retros, etc), hire/promote a SCRUM master or equivalent.
If you're battling sales, operations or marketing, hire a Director of Product Management with solid communication skills. That person will 'fight' your battles (and probably love it!).
If you're putting out fires in production, hire/promote a Director of QA. They'll work on designing systems to catch those bugs.
If your infrastructure goes down a lot, hire/promote a senior devops engineer.
On the engineering/coding front, I find it super helpful to rotate into teams and pair one-on-one with engineers. You get exposure to their day-to-day code battles/challenges/environments, the tech decisions at the lowest levels, the ability to code/manage daily and respect with your team. You can then prioritize stories/epics to fix problems that you see across your organization that plague a technical team like debt, environments, knowledge gaps, etc.
Don't step away, stay positive and solve for the organization you want to lead.