After a short summer break, we're excited to kick off the second season of CTO Insights! We've got an incredible lineup of guests, starting with Drew Falkman, Principal at Moves the Needle, a product consulting company. Drew is also a former CTO, advisor to multiple startups, product consultant, and LinkedIn instructor whose CTO course has been watched by over a quarter million engineering leaders worldwide.
In our conversation, Drew shared valuable insights into what it takes to succeed as a CTO. He emphasized that the CTO role is, above all, a people job. As counterintuitive as it may be, Drew explains why skills like delegation, planning, and managing teams and other executives are just as important—if not more—than technical expertise. I especially appreciated his thoughts on deep work as a key driver of team productivity, highlighting that it's the CTO's job to enable it.
“Culture isn't the posters and how we talk about things and relate to each other. The culture is the work. We're all here to do the work, we love what we do or we're aspiring to do something and are working our way up to that. And so everyone has a reason to be there.
And when everyone wins, when the product wins, when we get more revenue, when retention is up, when all those things happen, it's exciting, it's fun, it's electric. That's what culture is.”
- Drew Falkman
Here are the main takeaways from this episode:
Being a successful CTO requires a balance between understanding and managing technology and leading and collaborating with various teams within the organization.
CTOs need to develop people skills and embrace the people aspect of the job, including managing up, being comfortable with uncertainty, and creating a strong culture.
The ability to manage the inherent friction points between technology and product is key to ensuring peak team performance.
Effective CTOs collaborate with other departments, such as sales, marketing, and support, understand their needs, and leverage technology to solve challenges.
The CTO plays a crucial role in setting up the right environment for flow, including structuring meetings effectively and providing uninterrupted blocks of time for deep work.
When making decisions about buying a ready solution versus building your own, it's important to consider the specific requirements, cost-benefit analysis, scalability, and long-term goals.
Finding the right balance between hiring internally and working with external partners requires a clear understanding of the qualifications and needs of the role, as well as effective communication and support for internal candidates.
Check out Drew’s course to dig deeper into the topic.
Listen now on Apple and Spotify.
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Mastering the CTO Role with Drew Falkman