CTO Role and Responsibilities

It has no real legal bind and acts solely as a testimony of mutual understanding between the founders. Chief Technology Officer job description should start with an interesting, eye-catching introduction. To save time, attract qualified candidates and hire the best responsibility of cto employees. CTOs should be continual self-educators to compete with the ever-changing technological environment. Becoming well enough in their profession aids in this purpose and shows that the applicant can think about technology prospects in a broader way.

The dilemma is that the head of engineering is a position that falls somewhere between technical execution and operational management. CTOs in a mid-sized and small companies are usually the most skilled tech specialist in a team. This rule changes if we are speaking about a large enterprise, where the CTO has more management-related tasks and fewer practical engineering-related duties. If a problem occurs, the CTO is the first person to be informed about it. On the one hand, the head of engineering is expected to develop and launch operating process automation solutions .

These candidates should also state their development and research objectives. The CTO is in charge of security procedure development, algorithm development, conducting emergency audits, and much more. Other engineers must work according to security rules set by the CTO. A controller is an individual who has responsibility for all accounting-related activities within a company including managerial accounting and finance. Investopedia requires writers to use primary sources to support their work.

The Chief Technical Officer’s responsibilities are to decide who is in charge of the debug process. And when a tech bug is found it is usually relayed to the CTO, who then needs to decide how to solve the issue. The hands-on job may also include recording instructions for typical bug fixing. Originally a chief information officer previously performed dual roles as CIO and chief technology officer . However, as technology continued to advance, there was a growing need to separate the CIO job into two roles to ensure a company’s success. CTOs are in charge of ensuring that technology resources satisfy the company’s long- and short-term requirements and defining the company’s technological strategy.

What is your favorite book related to technology? Why?

After an MVP has been deployed, the CTO focuses on making the product better. The idea is to plan new features, scale teams to cover growing product tech support needs and develop a scalable optimized product infrastructure to raise corporate efficiency. The CTO is still in charge of these tasks, while the role turns into a hybrid of tech visionary, HR specialist, and team manager instead of being a highly-qualified developer. In simple terms, a CTO thinks about the future, maps it, and then implements the step by step plan. On the project discovery stage, the CTO builds a growth roadmap, taking into consideration corporate goals and strategies. The CTO works with various aspects of a digital product — development, UX, security, budgets, operational processes, and team coordination.

As with most jobs in the IT industry, the path to CTO starts with a bachelor’s degree in a computer- or information science-related field . Becoming a CTO often involves at least 15 years of IT experience, along with a graduate degree and certifications in computer sciences and business administration.

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A Chief Technology Officer job description could also include some practical aspects — if a tech team doesn’t have the knowledge or resources to complete a task, then it is down to the CTO to find a solution. It’s no wonder they have to obtain a wide variety of tech and ‘soft’ skills. You’ll also find it difficult to find a common startup CTO job description. The only thing you can be sure of is that a Chief Technology Officer’s main duty is to enable a company to reach its financial and marketing goals using an innovative tech approach. CTOs generally have at least 15 years of IT job experience under their belts. Along with technical expertise, they must demonstrate leadership, decision-making, management, and business strategy skills.

We the founders agree that we’ve read and accept the role of the CTO as described in this doc. If you join a startup as the CTO and you’re the only techie guy around, there shouldn’t be too many problems regarding expectations and role. Its important to remember that every startup has its own dynamics and different founders might want different things.

CTO (Chief Technology Officer) job description template

But the responsibilities and role of the CTO also depend on the company. There are typically four different kinds of CTOs, whose main duties may differ. All the statements that appear in this doc are things we heard from multiple sources of different companies. Controversial points that some founders disagreed on or things we heard from only one or very few sources were not included. While this doc define the most common roles of the CTO in a startup, it should be taken as a general guideline and not as a hard set of rules. Setting up and maintaining the company servers, databases, and all external services and tools.

This type of CTO may envision how technology will be used within the company while setting the technical strategy for the company. This CTO will also look at how to further implement new technologies within the company to ensure its success. Constantly exploring new tools and technologies to improve development efficiency and product quality.

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• On the other, they are also experts that work on technical issues without external support.
• Building the dev roadmap, with coordination with the other founders regarding priority of features.
• Therefore, candidates should demonstrate an understanding of technology’s dynamic nature and discuss technology’s role in the company’s future.
• CTO startup responsibilities include hiring IT specialists, data scientists, and engineers.
• In mid-sized companies, the CTO must develop a system of testing upcoming updates and tools to monitor the progress.

The head of engineering also defines the application and other digital products architecture and keeps an eye on the latest tech updates, to implement industry-leading new approaches within the company. In larger companies, a CTO job description could include organizing training activities for the tech department, self-education support, and team supervision. That is the reason why event management and mentoring experience, as well as a wide professional contact base, is a distinct advantage on a CTO’s CV. CTO is an IT professional responsible for all technology systems, processes, software design and development within the company.

Interview Questions for CTO

But unlike Wikipedia, here we’ll focus on the role of the CTO in a technological startup. Looking at the high-level decision is an essential responsibility of an executive position. Employers typically look for the factors that applicants find most significant while taking such types of choices and properly consider each option’s advantages https://globalcloudteam.com/ and disadvantages. It is also the CTO’s responsibility to keep up with technological developments and trends. It is also their responsibility to make executive choices on account of the company’s technology needs. The role of CTO includes software engineer selection and hiring, their onboarding, training, and management.

The candidates with effective hiring, coding, listening, strategic thinking, diplomacy, and patience, are the best fit to apply for a CTO job position. Getting a CTO job title is a dream job for many technical professionals. CTO or the chief technology officer assures that the organization’s goals and personnel are supported by current processes, hardware, and applications. In a typical corporate hierarchy, the CTO is among the top-ranking IT roles, and individuals who wish to learn how to be a CTO must expect to remember for the rest of their lives. As usual, mid-sized companies tend to assign some product management tasks to the CTO as well. A chief technology officer is the executive in charge of an organization’s technological needs as well as its research and development (R&D).

Peggy James is a CPA with over 9 years of experience in accounting and finance, including corporate, nonprofit, and personal finance environments. She most recently worked at Duke University and is the owner of Peggy James, CPA, PLLC, serving small businesses, nonprofits, solopreneurs, freelancers, and individuals. And those who were more talkative were also asked about statements from other founders and whether or not they agreed with them. We mostly talked with CEOs and CTOs, but few other roles also participated (like CMOs, CIOs etc.).

CTO startup responsibilities include hiring IT specialists, data scientists, and engineers. In 2020, the task is believed to be becoming more difficult for startups, as the job market is getting tighter, as digital companies continue to grow and require more employees. Tech specialists prefer to specialize in niche areas, whereas startups need universal soldiers.

The choice of the team manager must be approved and accepted by the CTO. When someone introduce a new tool or technology that integrates with the software or affect the dev cycle, the CTO must examine and approve or reject it. CTOs must have a broad understanding of the sector and a vision for the future. For this professional post, advanced technological skillsets and an established background in technology are also necessary.

Types of Chief Technology Officers

With that said, sometimes its important to coordinate expectations upfront regarding the roles and responsibilities of each of the founders. As the startup grows bigger and the dev teams expand, the CTO work less as a developer and sometimes stop coding altogether. Is the highest technology executive position within a company and leads the technology or engineering department.” They choose a development approach, workflow philosophy, and plan or check project budgets together with the assigned project manager. To remain in service they need to study new practices, discover technologies, and be comfortable in a high-level professional environment.

CTO as a service is one more approach that is gaining momentum in 2020. Just as engineering task execution, tech supervision, and management have been outsourced to save project budget costs. Chief technology officers evaluate new technology and implement it to launch or improve goods and services for their firm’s clientele and customers. Depending on the company, a CTO may play one of several roles, including strategic planner, customer relations liaison, and overseer of infrastructure. The distribution of responsibilities and authority between the CTO and the team manager would be decided by the CTO.

Team Manager / VP Engineering

Despite the titles, the CTO has more of an outward-looking, strategic planning role, while the CIO has more of a technology-focused, operational role. Generally, a CIO is responsible for technologies that run the company’s internal operations and business procedures. The CTO is responsible for technologies that grow the business externally, implementing services and products that serve clients and customers. A chief technology officer is an executive who is responsible for the management of an organization’s research and development (R&D) as well as its technological needs.

Chief Technology Officer FAQs

The CTO’s technological vision for a corporation is to focus on the future. Therefore, candidates should demonstrate an understanding of technology’s dynamic nature and discuss technology’s role in the company’s future. Security gaps may occur in corporate databases, within web sites, or other digital tools that the team uses. Products that are under development by the company may also require security algorithms to keep user data private and encrypted.

On the other, they are also experts that work on technical issues without external support. As you’ve noticed, the CTO’s duties need to be flexible even within one company. The bigger the company, the more management levels there are between a head of engineering and the actual hands-on tech task execution. Besides MVP deployment, the CTO is in charge of planning the next product version and tech updates. Usually, they fulfill budgeting roles regarding MVP rebuilding, study user feedback, cooperating with data scientists and filling resource gaps. A specialist of that kind needs to be acquainted with data processing and data storage security.