cto-handbook

CTO Quick Wins

Communication

  1. Get people comfortable with real-time chat application. That involves be present yourself.
  2. If cross-functional channels don’t exist for your products, create them.
  3. Create a less formal chat channel for your department to engage with one another.
  4. Document important architecture decisions (“ADRs”), and get into the habit of discussing them amongst engineers.

Product Demos

  1. Ensure product demos are being regularly held, with participation from all stakeholders.
  2. Record your demos with a tool like Loom, then ensure they are made available on your Wiki.

Wiki

  1. Make your architecture diagrams available to everyone, with at least two versions: a simplified business-oriented version and a more technical version.
  2. Create an FAQ of common questions new joiners have about the purpose of the business, and how tech contributes towards that.
  3. Make the tech/product roadmap available to everyone.

Team Reporting

  1. Ensure all product squads are creating end of sprint reports with basic information around what was delivered, and a snapshot of the retrospective. Don’t worry too much about common formatting until everyone is producing quality reports, then iterate.
  2. What are business-related metrics that are important? Number of transactions per day? Funnel drop-off? Choose a maximum of three, and create a dashboard or automated report to regularly send to everyone in tech.

Tools and Tech

  1. Is a monitoring dashboard easily accessible? If not, create something very simple and iterate.
  2. Make all source code available to all developers in the company, unless there is something highly proprietary.
  3. Incident.io (or similar, but this is great) is a really great tool to lower stress of oncall people.
  4. Over time, define clear and actionable guidelines and standards how services in your company shall be written, tested, deployed to prod, monitored, etc. Provide service templates or shared libraries where useful.

DevSecOps

  1. Automate how code moves between environments, with secrets pulled from a central secret management service (segregated as appropriate).
  2. Run automated scans on code in the pipelines. There are many open source libraries which can be added which can scan for vulnerabilities, hard-coded keys, etc.

Team

  1. Have biweekly (worst case monthly) 1-1s with all one downs.
  2. Have monthly skip-level meetings with your two downs. You must drive this conversation, not just make yourself available.
  3. Have a regular (weekly, or biweekly) tech leadership meeting with the top 4-8 tech leaders in the company. Use a “living” agenda document to collect topics throughout the week.

Regulation

  1. Read the MAS Technology Risk Management Guidelines (or equivalent in your jurisdiction). People will quote this all the time, but have rarely read it.

Other

  1. Review the customer service/support tickets, or discuss challenges with the customer service/support staff. They will have a good idea where user painpoints lie.
This site is open source. Improve this page.