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.

We view CTO role as combining three broad skills areas:

• 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 thinking about the key skill sets that either a CTO, VP of Engineering, or Technical lead needs to have to manage a small to moderately sized team, there are three skills areas that seem to be the most important. This is complicated by the fact that the role’s requirements are very specific to a particular company and depends both on the purpose of the company and the products it sells.  CTO School’s goal is to strike the right balance between the three core skill 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.