Why The Best CTOs Are Also Product Gurus, Customer Advocates, Finance Experts, and Much More
Over my two decades in Silicon Valley, I’ve worked alongside the brightest minds in tech at eBay, Google, and Intuit. I started my career as an engineer, leading large organizations within these industry giants over time. My biggest takeaway has been that the most effective tech leaders are much more than pure technologists; they’re also product visionaries, customer champions, financial strategists, and much more.
Yes, you have to be a smart technologist. That's a must. However, the best CTOs also understand their company’s business at a deep and structural level. You need to have knowledge of product and audience, team building and relationship building, and leadership. You need to pour over P&Ls, so you understand business priorities and financial pressures almost as well as the CFO does. You need to dig deep into planning and strategy, so you understand the company’s market and ambitions. And you need to level up your people management so that you can build an effective and trusted team. That broad expertise will give you credibility and amplify your influence across the organization.
The superpower of a great CTO is knowing the business on such a profound level that they are seen as both the tech expert and also a trusted strategic partner. That combination enables me to run an engineering team that’s trusted at every level, and is able to deliver exceptional results for our company.
Here’s how to build that same level of knowledge and trust — and how doing so benefits your tech org and your company.
1. Know the product and the customer — and deliver for them.
Leaders have two primary priorities: Driving business outcomes and delighting customers. Some projects only help the business without improving customer experience. A project to increase prices, for example, benefits the business but doesn’t benefit the user. Other initiatives may help the user but not the business. For example, adding a feature that improves usability, removes friction — in the longer term that’s likely to improve the business, but in the short term you’re not seeing a quantifiable business outcome.
Ideally you want to identify initiatives that achieve both goals: help the user and also show positive business value. And when you as a tech leader truly understand both the product and the customer, you can help steer teams toward ideas that will do the most on both axes — drive business improvement AND improve user experience.
For example, at Emeritus, we developed a simple self-service feature that allows users to request extensions on assignments. It wasn’t a request from a business unit. But we were able to see that when our students requested an extension on some deadlines, it would take up to 24 hours for a support person to review and respond to the request, and 90 percent of the time the extension was approved. (Wherever possible, we want to give our students the chance to complete their assignments.) The automatic extension approval feature eliminated the need for manual review of almost 90 percent of requests. We made a better, faster process for the learners, our customers, and we were able to drive efficiency for our support team as well.
2. Know the financials — and find levers to improve results.
When I joined Emeritus in February 2022, the market for tech startups was booming. Everybody was becoming a unicorn. And then after just a few months, we went into a funding winter. All the VCs were pushing their portfolio companies to become profitable.
I’d just started at the company, and I was learning everything I could, really digging into the P&Ls. And suddenly there was a new goal to reach profitability within 12 months. Because I understood the finances so deeply, I could see the levers that we as a company could pull to help reach that goal — creating high impact, but without compromising the user experience.
Before I came to Emeritus, tech decisions weren’t centralized. Different business units had signed contracts with overlapping service providers. We had multi-year contracts providing licenses for way more users than we needed. We had redundant tech teams supporting different business units in different geographies. By understanding the P&Ls, I could see the cost of these fragmented systems. Over the next 12-18 months, we were able to streamline our core stack, drive adoption across multiple business units, and deliver significant cost savings through greater efficiencies, which was crucial to our path to profitability.
3. Know how to lead people — and build a team that’s as trusted as you are.
A leader is only as successful as the people in their team. And so you have to build your team up and empower them. They need to be great technologists, but they need to be great leaders, too — knowing how to engage, inspire, innovate, and collaborate. You need that team to embody the same characteristics I think a great CTO needs to have — senses of urgency, accountability, collaboration, and authenticity. If you have these attributes, and if your leadership team has them, they’ll keep transferring down to the next layers, percolating through the org.
Building a great leadership team is like putting pearls together to create a beautiful necklace. When you join a new team as its leader, you identify some stars, and you develop and elevate them. You make tough calls on people you don't believe will fit the bill. You collect the best pearls. Assembling the right team takes time, but once you’ve created your ideal team, with strong trust and collaboration, your collective momentum becomes unstoppable.
4. Show your value to the business — and create a positive flywheel that puts tech at the center of decision-making.
Organizations are multi-year journeys. It takes time to gain the knowledge, build the trust and achieve a level of influence.
But you earn it.
I am a strong believer in the “say-do” ratio: setting the right expectations and then consistently delivering on them. And as you do that, as you demonstrate that you understand what’s important, think creatively, and deliver on your commitments, you create a positive flywheel with your counterparts. You start by delivering small wins, you gain more trust, and you leverage that trust to deliver bigger and bigger wins. And then you're able to work on the most impactful things, delivering the most value to the company, and you deliver on those, too.
5. And always prioritize!
Ultimately, running a tech org is about prioritization. Even at the largest companies, there are only so many engineers and so much time. It’s the responsibility of tech leadership to know that you’re focusing resources on the highest-value problems. Scarcity is important: It forces you to focus on what truly matters. It also means you’ll say no to your internal partners more often then you’ll say yes — and you need them to respect your prioritization decisions and trust that you understand the business well enough to make the right calls.
Over the last two-plus years at Emeritus, we have successfully transformed our tech team and built that trust. We leveled up. We also dug deep into how the business works. That enabled us to grow from a team that had difficulty influencing the business to a team that is truly trusted by the business. Thanks to that effort, we’re now a team that is empowered, influential, and has been able to play a significant role in advancing our company’s mission.