Konamoxt, Inc.

As I mentioned in my last post, one of the many things I do as an entrepreneur is to advise other start up companies. One of the common requests I get as an adviser is the help interview and vet potential CTO candidates. Unfortunately in many cases, the choice to hire a CTO is the worst choice a CEO or management team could make.

But don’t misunderstand me, every technology startup needs the skills embodied by a great CTO, you can’t afford to NOT have a CTO.

So what do I mean, but the skills embodied by a great CTO? Understanding these skills is critical to understanding how to hire the right people to flesh out your technology team.

I recommend that management teams think about the roles of engineering management in three parts:

• Leading, inspiring, and managing the engineering team - Some people think of this as primarily a “people management” skill. We often give the title of “Development Manager” or “Technical Lead” to this role. These are very much “soft skills”, related to making other people successful, happy, and motivated.
• Leading the architecture and technical direction of the product - This is closely related to leading the development team, but it is really a different skill set. These responsibilities are much more focused on hard skills, related to deep technical knowledge. We often call this role “Architect” or “Chief Scientist”.
• Executive technology representation and leadership - Representing the technology team to the rest of the executive team, Board of Directors, company, key outside customers, government or legal parties. This is high end stuff, requiring a level of maturity and preparedness. It’s a combination of soft and hard skills, mostly soft skills. But it should be noted that the more sophisticated versions of these skills are only rarely needed in most start ups.

In very large organizations you will often see these roles divided into different jobs: “Development Manager”, “Architect”, and “Chief Technology Officer”. But in a start up, you can’t realistically afford to pay three six figure salaries to fill these skills.  So what are you to do?

Can you live without these skills? NO! You need to find these skills for your start up!

You need these, and hopefully, you can find them in a single person on your team. My recommendation is to start as close to your engineering team as possible and find the person who is closest to embodying these skills. Once you find that person on your team, then cultivate them to fill out their talents to include the rest of these important skills.

I’ll explain how to do this briefly, but before I do that let me quickly address the most common retort I hear to this advice. Often CEOs and BoDs will insist that executive technology representation is the most important skill they need filled. From there, they usually assume they already have a good enough architect but what they really want is “someone to manage those engineers”. This reaction is understandable, most of us feel more comfortable with “people like us”, so executives want to find other executives to hang out with, and they are afraid of those “engineers” and they want someone like them to “take care of it”.

The problem with this view, is that engineers are usually only inspired by other engineers. Yep, that’s the hard truth of it.

If your “engineering leadership” lacks street cred, then you can be certain that they won’t get far with your team.

Air-lifting in an “expert people manager” is one of the most dangerous things you can do. But finding that inspiring engineer on your existing team, and making sure they have or are learning good soft skills, is a sure way to take your engineering team’s productivity to the next level. If you have five engineers on your team, and they’re being productive and getting stuff done, then you can be certain you already have that leader on your team.

If you don’t have that person on your team, then you need to be very careful in how you add that leadership to your team. Look for someone who could slot into your team and sit side by side with your engineers and write the same code that your existing engineers are writing.

Don’t confuse years of leading large teams, with street cred. In fact, the longer that manager has lead large teams, the higher the probability that they’ve lost their street cred.

This is critical! If your “hired gun” hasn’t fired his weapon in years… he won’t make it on your team. Your engineers will eat them alive. Instead, look for an engineering manager that is still comfortable writing code. Maybe you won’t have them writing code in your organization, maybe you will. But if they can still write code, then they will do a great job leading your engineers that must write code.

Another common mistake that executive teams make is to assume that your architect and your engineering manager can’t be the same person.

It’s certainly possible for these roles to be seperate, but it’s much more efficient and cost effective to have a single person who fills both these skills. And I’d argue that a great engineering manager has many of the same qualities of a great architect. In particular, as your team and your mission grows, more and more delegation to talented engineers are required. This means that your CTO will need to be able to unselfishly delegate to the rest of the team, and truly inspire those engineers to run with the vision of the company and build a great product to meet the business needs.

Finding all of these skills in a single person may seem like a daugnting task, especially when you consider that I’ve said that person also needs to be able to code. But these people are out there, and if your company has a great idea, with an exciting market and the opportunity to work on great technology, then you’ll have no problem attracting them to work for you.

Filed by Brad Hefta-Gaub at 9:00 am under Entrepreneurship, Hiring, Leadership
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