Jess Szmajda - The CTO Role
Company and Product Strategy:
- Business strategy, vision
- Product strategy to deliver on mission
- Financial management
- Connecting mission to time-bound visions
- Organization structure to deliver on vision
- Operating structure to support the organization
- Market adoption
- Revenue strategy
- Roadmap
- Success definition and measurement
- Budgeting & managing to budget
- Fundraising & due diligence
- M&A - strategy, technical review and integration
People Strategy:
- Tech, Product, Design Organization structures
- Talent management
- Team plans
- Staffing levels
- Roles & responsibilities
- Operational processes
- Sourcing, recruiting, and hiring
- Growth & development
- Performance management
- Transitioning people out
Technical Strategy:
- Systems architecture
- Technology capabilities
- Stability & Performance
- Risk management
- Services definition & communication patterns
- Data flows
- Foundational technologies and frameworks
- Libraries and third-party software strategy
- “What should we use, why, and how?”
- New capabilities research & development
- Infrastructure reliability
- Maintenance
- Ongoing operations
- Risk identification and mitigation
- Quality engineering
I tend to operate best when I have these direct reports:
Functional Area leaders:
- These are usually Director-level roles, but sometimes are VPs.
- These individuals own and define what is great in a functional area, such as python or quality engineering, or infrastructure operations.
- It is these individuals’ jobs to define what is good and to hire and develop their staffs.
- Because my organizations are cross-functional, these people must communicate regularly with each other to help our collective team grow a thrive. Continued alignment activities to ensure we are moving together with one vision are crucial.
Specialised Individual Contributors:
- I often also promote non-managing leaders who own a key element of process or strategy.
- Examples:
- Leaders when a department is small (Agile Coaching for example - I tend to only have a handful of strong ICs who rotate through teams and coach on process evolution)
- Advanced technical individual contributors who can own architecture across large areas of the system
I believe management starts to lose effectiveness when one person has more than 7 direct reports, so I try to restructure my organization when that starts to happen.