CTO (Chief Technology Officer)

The CTO (Chief Technology Officer), or technical director, is the executive responsible for the company’s technology strategy. They connect the organisation’s objectives with the architectural choices, investments and skills needed to achieve them. This profile covers digital businesses and software products; it does not describe technical leadership in industry.

The CTO works with other executives to determine the technical direction. Their reporting line and authority must be specified in each organisation. Setting a direction, committing expenditure and leading teams do not necessarily involve the same powers. To define the role, distinguish between the decisions they make, those they prepare and those they delegate.

In a young software company, their remit may combine product design, technical choices and a direct contribution to development. In a more structured organisation, they may focus more on evolving architectures and coordinating technical managers. Size alone is therefore not enough to describe the role: the composition of the team and the responsibilities already assigned also matter.

CTO, Tech Lead and engineering leadership: who does what?

• The CTO takes responsibility for technological direction across the organisation and the trade-offs it involves.
• The Tech Lead guides implementation choices and code quality within a team.
• Engineering leadership may structure teams’ work and coordination. Its relationship with the CTO depends on the organisation.

This division helps identify the need before choosing a job title. If the problem mainly concerns a team’s daily decisions, examine that remit closely. If several technical choices affect the product’s future and the company’s resources, the issue calls for broader technological leadership.

Technology choices affect the company’s ability to develop its product. An architecture must support the intended uses while accounting for costs, available skills and operational constraints. For leadership, the challenge is to understand what a choice makes possible, what it limits and the resources it requires.

Keeping room for future development

A decision that meets an immediate need may have to be reconsidered as the product changes. To assess a trade-off, ask which assumptions underpin it and what events would prompt a review. This approach helps distinguish an accepted constraint from a risk with no assigned owner. It also allows technical debt to be discussed in terms of its consequences for the product, rather than through a general judgement about code quality.

Allocating resources to priorities

The CTO contributes to technology investment decisions. Their exact budgetary authority depends on the role. A useful decision accounts for its full cost and the skills needed to implement it. Choosing a technology solely because it is new, or underestimating the resources needed to operate it, risks creating a gap between ambition and the ability to execute.

Fictional example: a company wants to launch a new feature while its service is experiencing stability problems. The CTO must make the risks of the options under consideration explicit: continuing development, stabilising the service first or limiting the launch. Leadership can then decide with an understanding of each option’s consequences.

Robustness, security and performance also require a clear allocation of responsibilities. The CTO cannot replace every specialist single-handedly. Poorly defining a role before recruitment can leave decisions without an owner, even with a technically strong candidate. Give as much attention to their actual authority as to their expertise.

• Define a technological path linked to the company’s objectives.
• Make decisions on architectural changes, taking account of costs, uses and available skills.
• Translate technical priorities into a roadmap that the relevant managers can use.
• Assess technology investments and explain their consequences to leadership.
• Organise the allocation of responsibilities for robustness, security and performance.
• Develop teams’ technical skills and working practices.
• Assess new technologies against the product’s actual needs.

The British digital capability framework cites software development, technical architecture and operations among the backgrounds that can lead to a CTO role. These career paths provide different starting points. They do not define a single course of study or a minimum length of experience applicable to every company.

When assessing education and training, focus on the knowledge and skills relevant to the role. The candidate must be able to understand a software system, reason through its constraints and connect technical choices with the objectives being pursued. Depending on the product, explore the knowledge required in architecture, service operations or security. Proficiency in a particular environment should be judged against the problems they will need to address.

The experience expected goes beyond participation in projects alone. A background involving responsibility for evolving an architecture, making investment choices or supporting technical managers prepares a candidate for the role’s decisions. The nature of these responsibilities tells you more about the remit they have already held than a prestigious title does.

Experience in an organisation similar to yours can facilitate discussion without becoming an exclusive criterion. For a team with little structure in place, examine the ability to contribute directly while preparing for what comes next. For an organisation that already has technical managers, focus on coordination and delegation. A relevant background is one that has developed the capabilities required for the proposed role; the corresponding achievements can be explored further during assessment.

To assess a CTO candidate, adapt the following steps to the role’s decisions and responsibilities.

1. Define the criteria before the interviews

Write down the decisions the person will need to make and the resources available to them. Choose distinct criteria: architectural perspective, investment decisions, risk management and support for teams.

Specify the contribution expected to development and the relationships with existing managers. For each criterion, prepare a situation to examine. Avoid letting proficiency in one technology take over the entire interview.

If your company lacks technical expertise, involve an assessor who can discuss the product’s architecture. Ask leadership to assess the trade-offs and HR to examine managerial responsibilities.

2. Explore a past decision in depth

Ask the candidate to present an architectural or investment choice for which they were responsible. Have them specify the initial problem, the options considered and the constraints known at the time.

Distinguish what they decided from what the team delivered. Ask what happened after the decision and what they would change today. Where these can be shared, examine anonymised documents or a reconstructed diagram.

A positive sign is the ability to explain a compromise and its limits. An inability to describe the other options, or consistently blaming previous teams for difficulties, would be a warning sign.

3. Work through a case similar to the role

Fictional example: your product needs to evolve, but part of its architecture has weaknesses and the available budget is constrained. Ask the candidate to propose an approach to making the trade-offs.

Give the candidates being compared the same information. Let them ask for missing details, then observe how they prioritise the questions. Do not expect a complete architecture from an incomplete brief.

Ask them to make explicit the risks accepted, the skills required and the conditions that would prompt them to revise their recommendation. Assess the consistency of their reasoning. An immediate solution presented as certain without examining the context warrants discussion.

4. Examine team leadership and communication

Ask for an example of a technical manager’s development supported by the candidate. Explore the help provided, the responsibilities delegated and the difficulties encountered. Look for concrete actions beyond statements about autonomy.

Then invite the candidate to explain their technical trade-off to a non-specialist. Observe whether they make the consequences understandable and are receptive to objections. Ask how they would handle a persistent disagreement with product leadership.

5. Cross-check the decisive points

With the candidate’s agreement, speak to people who have worked with them on the responsibilities examined. Prepare questions linked to the same criteria: decisions for which they were actually responsible, cooperation and support for teams.

Gather each assessor’s observations before the final discussion. Distinguish evidence, reservations and matters that remain uncertain. If a central point remains unclear, arrange a focused follow-up rather than reaching a conclusion based on a general impression.