Golden Rules of Being a CTO

One of the key rules as a CTO is to understand at least as much about your business as you do about technology. You need to be clear about what your business is there to do and how you, as CTO, can support and help drive the success of that business. Particularly at the CTO level, it is important that you spend as much time learning about your business as you do technology. Having achieved CTO level, you probably know enough about technology already; however, you may not know enough about your customers or your business to maximize your ability to contribute.

Don't assume that you personally represent your typical customer. If you are developing technology for non-technical customers, you are most likely not going to be able to think like your customers. Your products must be developed with your customers' needs in mind, not your own. We rely very heavily on usability experts in the design and development of our products. You have to understand how your customers are going to interact with your products and not allow your own biases as a technologist to come into play when you are developing a product that is going to meet a customer need.

Keep things simple. Try to minimize complexity. No matter what you do, you will end up with an environment that is more complex than you would like; whatever you can do to keep it simpler is always going to put you in a better position to be nimble. Don't deploy a new technology without a strong business case to support it. Every technology you add to your environment will add complexity and support costs; make sure it's worth it.

Make sure your team is working on the things that have the most value. As a business grows, there is a tendency for that focus to get diffused sometimes. I make sure that my team works very closely with the key leaders in our business to identify the things that have the most impact, and to make sure that we are focusing as many of our resources as possible on those things. We pick a small number of key initiatives that we focus on "nailing," and then deliver those things on time with everything that was planned in order to make sure that we get the full business benefit of the original idea.

Another big focus for me is building the team, getting the right people on the team, hiring well, and making sure that the team has the right support and training to do the things that we ask them to do. We have to make sure we have the right team and that they have the right capabilities and equipment to deliver maximum value consistently.