The other morning I was sitting stuck in traffic … which an odd experience in New York, but for a few reasons I’ve actually been driving to work lately, profoundly surreal as a New Yorker, and not recommended.

Back to the story.

I was sitting stuck in traffic, and the last thing I’d seen before being stuck in traffic was the question, “How do I learn enough to become a good CTO?”

So below is the first blog post I ever tried to write via Siri. I thought about leaving in all the misidentified words, but the point wasn’t comedy. It still came out quite brief and almost certainly incomplete and incoherent:

It’s a leadership role, which means you need to develop a theory of leadership. It’s a spiritual role which means you need to be able to speak and write. It’s a role that fundamentally trades on credibility, so having been part of a team that did something that actually worked is key both for the reflected credibility but also because it’s important to have the certainty about what something working feels like.

It’s a role we learn by trial and error so you need to find a trusted community to compare notes with. You need to develop an empathy for the customer and interest in the business so whatever interdisciplinary pursuits do that for you is part of your training.

Finally being right more often then you’re wrong helps, but is less critical then you’d imagine.

It isn’t the 1st engineer either literally or metaphorically though that person is sometimes called the CTO. It isn’t the engineering manager in chief, though often you end up doing that job as well (but that’s a VPofE).

Software development scales non-linearly with clarity and excitement so your job is removing unnecessary ambiguity and drag. holding the narrative of what engineering means at YourCompany.

That’s how you learn to be a CTO.

And now that I’m typing this in to a textbox here on web, I’ll add, get good at managing your psychology