What is CTO School
CTO School is a meetup for CTOs, VP Eng, or Tech Leads that are interested in improving their skills and learning from each other. We are more focused on startups in terms of topic selection, but welcome all technologists. The goal is to have an ongoing forum for senior technical people (esp. in startups) to discuss their issues, meet each other, and share expertise. Secondary goals is to help grow the New York technology and startup ecosystem by building better technical leadership capacity.
The focus is both on people who are already in CTO / VP Eng roles AND people who are on their way there. One of the “use cases” is to have CTO school be an organization that a CTO encourages his / her lieutenants to join CTO school. If they attend meetings regularly, over time they will get exposed to the different areas of technical leadership, which will prepare them for more senior roles. |
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Who Can Join?
The ideal member is a CTO, VP. Eng, Architect, Technical Lead, or somebody with a few years of experience that’s on the cusp of becoming the technical lead. Membership is by approval; we do not let in non-technical people, and try to gently discourage people who are just starting out their careers (though we sill let them in if they feel strongly about joining). This is one of the ways we try to keep this group free of non-relevant content, including trying to keep recruiters and business people looking for technical co-founders away from this group. We want this to be a group of peers who can really relate to each other. Please join at http://meetup.ctoschool.org.
In New York, we meet on the second Monday of every month and have a speaker on relevant topics, from general topics, like how to create great engineering culture, to technology areas – e.g. comparison of cloud platforms.
In New York, we meet on the second Monday of every month and have a speaker on relevant topics, from general topics, like how to create great engineering culture, to technology areas – e.g. comparison of cloud platforms.
Core Skill Areas for Startup CTOs - Technology, Process, Management
We view CTO role as combining three broad skills areas:
When at one of the meetings we asked for feedback on these three areas, we overall got positive feedback. One thing that people made clear is that what they found especially valuable is the real-life experience. There are books on technology management, books on specific technology areas, but having somebody who has worked on something or stuggled with something and overcame it is very valuable to see in-person.
Note: There is some great work done on the role of CTOs available on the Internet. One particularly interesting framework is Tom Berray’s, which talks about four quadrants of the CTO role, which is also a useful way to look at the role (summary by CTO of Amazon). They seem to focus to larger companies more than smaller teams, and many attributes can be mapped to our skill areas. It’s useful to study those frameworks to understand the role more fully.
- Technology Skills. This one is the easiest to define, they need to be a great technologist. This involves knowing one or more technology platforms, software libraries, components, and of course knowing how to program.
- Process Skills. Here we are talking about Software Development Life Cycle and all related processes such as Quality Assurance, requirements gathering, Product Management, User Experience and Design. etc. CTOs with some experience typically have been part of teams and have seen some of these processes at work, though it’s a much different task to participate in a part of the process vs understanding the different tradeoffs behind defining a process. Scrum / Agile comes under this area.
- Executive / Managerial Skills. These are more general skills. They relate to recruiting, motivating, and managing people, with interacting with business stakeholders. Skills like public speaking, evangelizing your product, helping out with sales, networking, etc. This is the area that most CTOs probably have the least experience with.
When at one of the meetings we asked for feedback on these three areas, we overall got positive feedback. One thing that people made clear is that what they found especially valuable is the real-life experience. There are books on technology management, books on specific technology areas, but having somebody who has worked on something or stuggled with something and overcame it is very valuable to see in-person.
Note: There is some great work done on the role of CTOs available on the Internet. One particularly interesting framework is Tom Berray’s, which talks about four quadrants of the CTO role, which is also a useful way to look at the role (summary by CTO of Amazon). They seem to focus to larger companies more than smaller teams, and many attributes can be mapped to our skill areas. It’s useful to study those frameworks to understand the role more fully.
