Re:Role | The CTO And The Vision

  |  Compiler Team  
Desarrollo y distribución de aplicaciones.

Compiler • • The CTO And The Vision | Compiler: Re:Role

The CTO And The Vision | Compiler: Re:Role

About the episode

A Chief Technology Officer needs to be an expert in technology. That much is clear. But what does a CTO actually do every day? What outcomes are they responsible for? And how can others help them achieve those goals?

The CTO And The Vision is the first episode in Compiler’s series on tech careers. We call it Re:Role. We launch a fictional startup that needs to expand its team as it grows. But before we hire, we need to understand when it makes sense to add another role, what it is the people in those jobs need to accomplish—and how they fit into the company structure.

The company, its business activities and its employees depicted in this podcast are fictional and are not intended to represent or depict any current or former business organization or any individuals living or dead. Any resemblance to any individual or organization is purely coincidental.

Compiler team Red Hat original show

Suscribir

Subscribe here:

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Subscribe via RSS Feed

Transcripción

Could you write a job description for a CTO or an architect or a UX designer? We've heard of these roles before, but when it comes to accurately describing what they do and how they fit into a tech company, we realized we came up a little bit short. And we know we're probably not alone, so we set out to fix that. This is Compiler, an original podcast from Red Hat. I'm Kim Huang. I'm Angela Andrews. And I'm Johan Philippine. We're following a fictional startup as they grow their business. Any resemblance to real companies is purely coincidental and unintentional. As it grows, our startup realizes it needs to fill new roles. Today's episode: the CTO. Producer Johan Philippine is here to get us started. We're going to start the episode with definitions. As we do, I went to a CTO for firsthand knowledge of the role. I mean, if you're going to find out about CTOs, you should probably talk to a CTO. The difficulty is they tend to be a pretty busy bunch, so getting one on your calendar is... yeah. They're pretty busy. Well, the CTO I spoke to is our very own Red Hat's Chris Wright. He was kind enough to explain his role to me. The T in CTO is all about the technology. That C-level type of title really means you're doing something broad across the whole organization. And so I'm looking at technology from the point of view of, "What is our technology strategy?" And as a result of being a software company, which is so much about how we deliver technology, our technology strategy. Okay, so what does it mean to actually look at the technology and form the tech strategy? He needs to be on top of tech trends. He needs to be able to sift the useful news from the hype, and then he needs to figure out how that useful new technology fits into the overall company portfolio, if it does at all. Now, the degree to which a CTO can really dig into the pure technology itself to figure all this out really depends on the size of the company. So if you think about an early stage startup, it's not uncommon that the CTO is the person whose technical idea that business is built around. And so that's very much the inventor, maybe a really hardcore hands-on-keyboard technologist person. As the company itself grows and you're a mid-size company or transitioning to a larger company, the amount that you're balancing the technology view with the business view changes. Initially it's so focused around technology and what's the invention or what's the differentiated technical idea that we're building here? How you take that to customers and grow a company around that idea or collection of ideas... That has a much more business view or business lens that becomes really critical. So as the business grows, the CTO has to focus on much more than just the technical aspects of the technology. Chris told me he has to think about more than just how to build the technology, but also how do you build a business around it? And he asks himself who the audience is, what are the market outlets for the technology, and how do you reach that audience? And that's a really broad set of skills. It goes far beyond what I expected a technical leader to be responsible for. Angela, I'd be interested to know: What do you think about a CTO and what they have to bring to the table? Well, I'm impressed because having a technical acumen and being able to come up with the idea for a product that you're launching your startup around and helping getting off the ground... That takes a very technical person. It takes a person with their pulse on what the market is currently doing, what technology is currently doing. And then as he said, as the business starts to grow, well, so does his business acumen. The focus tends to move a little bit away from the technical because you've hired on all these folks to take on that mantle, but now you have to wear your business hat. And your business hat deals with profits and margins and losses and where we are in the tech space and quadrants and things like that. That seems to me like a totally different skillset from being the technical person to being the business person. And it takes a special person to be able to switch between the two. And I'm sure that there are even other facets and roles that a CTO does that we probably even haven't scratched the surface on yet, but that's huge. Now, the additional thing that Chris does is not only is he the CTO, he's also the vice president of engineering, so he's in charge of all the technical teams and not only coming up with the ideas and setting the vision for where the company is headed, but he's also in charge of the execution of that vision. And that's not always something that CTOs do, especially when the companies get bigger. When companies get bigger, the CTOs focus on the vision part and then hand it off to the engineering teams to figure out how that gets built. But Chris is in a special position where he does both. So when he's connected with that engineering side, he can get a little bit more of an idea of, "Well, is this vision that I'm thinking of... Is that actually feasible from a technical standpoint? Can we build this and incorporate it into our technology? And is it going to be a successful integration?" And I wonder even further, if that has that grounding or that presence that he has to maintain with engineering folks internally and with those teams. He has to think, "Is what I'm thinking reflective of the organizational experience or the people that are working for me? Are those the types of things that they're thinking about?" I'm sure he has to be a really good listener. If you're going to be a part of the engineering org, you're going to have to listen to what engineers are saying, what the customers are saying to them. And I think that's actually a pretty smart move for Chris to want to stay embedded into the engineering role, because these are the folks... These are the boots on the ground people. Imagine that they have this really great understanding of what our customers want and where technology is going because they're literally dealing with it each and every day. And to have that as a part of his role where he has to deal with it each and every day... He'll always be in tune with, "Well, this is how our business is operating. This is how our customers are operating. This is what our customers want." Listening is a great soft skill to have, but it's only one in the arsenal that he needs to develop and that he has developed... Chris Wright specifically, but that a CTO needs to develop. He told me a little bit about another one that's super important to be an effective CTO. So there's not just the technology, the bits and bites. There's the communication around the technology. There's the leadership aspect of getting people pushing in the same direction, sharing a vision, and then really executing against or striving towards that vision in a way that's the leadership aspect. Very different from the technology side. So what he's saying here is that as part of the C-suite, he's a leader and he has to really push everyone in the same direction, not only get that vision and understand what it is that the company should do from a technical standpoint. He then needs to make sure that his vision is communicated down to the rest of the organization so that everyone is working on that vision and making it as successful as it can possibly be. Because if you can't communicate well, then people aren't going to really understand what it is that you want to do, what you want to build. And if you don't have that focus, it's going to be difficult to be a successful organization. I want to ask, Johan, because I have a question about customers. While within an organization you can have that shared vision, I can't imagine that different customers and their expectations are uniform. They can't all be the same. How does the CTO deal with that and that different customers have different needs and different desires? Well, as part of the C-suite, the CTO spends a lot of face time with customers and with partners. And those communication skills really come in handy to figure out what they need and what they're curious about. But also, like you're saying, he needs to manage expectations a little bit. It's true. So it's not uncommon for me to have these conversations with customers that start out with a very open-ended question like, "Effectively, what's the world going to be like in five years?" The honest answer to that is in many ways I just have absolutely no idea. So the fortune teller aspect... Boy is it hard to tell the future. Now, you could recontextualize that. "In five years what will the enterprise look like?" That's a lot easier to have an opinion around because most of what the enterprise will look like in five years is what we're working on today. Well, we know that crystal ball isn't absolutely accurate because if we're talking about looking into the future, we'd already be in flying cars by now. But that's an interesting take on it where that is two different questions. Where we are now has a huge impact on where we'll be in five years. It is the groundwork. So less Nostradamus, more Magellan is what I'm picking up from it. I hear that. Yes, I definitely hear that. Exactly. Yeah. The other example that he gave in our conversation was back in the mid-2000s or whatever, no one really knew anything about the smartphone or what it was going to be or what it was going to do and a lot of early adopters bought it just because it was the cool new thing. And then you couldn't have predicted the impact that it would have on our society and the rise of apps and social media and all the different things that arose out of this new invention and how that changed the tech industry. And look at us now. Look at us now. All they expect me to know is everything that's in our portfolio, all the features, the roadmaps, the dates for deliverables, the commercial pricing models, et cetera. If you take a look at our portfolio, there are white spaces where we might work with partners or just have no great solution. So there's everything that's in our portfolio, then it's everything that's not in our portfolio. And then it's all the emerging new ideas that aren't necessarily well mapped to either of those. That's all. It's essentially everything. And it's a completely unrealistic expectation that any single person knows that much because they also assume I'll know it down to a level of detail of lines of code, implementation details. And I've found that frustrating and even overwhelming at times. Wow. Wow. Okay. So that's wow for me. Me too. That is so much pressure to put on someone and to know that he realizes and feels that pressure... Oh, I feel so bad because I'm just like... That's what I expect. You're Chris Wright. And I wonder. He knows this to be a fact, that that is the kind of pressure that customers and partners put on him. And it's impossible to be able to uphold that. So I'm sorry for my part in that. I'm really sorry for my part in that. It's also refreshing to hear him say as much, that even for someone like him it's unrealistic and it's very overwhelming. And I can see any person in his position being very overwhelmed. You have to know what you know and then also know what you don't know. How is that possible? I understand a CTO being like an expert in certain things, but there's a reason why companies aren't just two people. True, true. Yeah, exactly. And what that means is when he's got meetings with customers or partners or whoever where he's going to have this kind of conversation, he prepares by bringing subject matter experts with him to those meetings to field a lot of the expected questions that he won't be able to answer with the same amount of expertise. He has a team. It's great that he has a team that can back him up because that's what we expect, that he's surrounded by all these brilliant folks that can provide him with all of this information and support any conversation that he's having. And he shouldn't have to know all those things because there's so many great people on his team that can really tie those ends up for him. Right. And they can bring a specialized knowledge maybe for a certain vertical, maybe for a financial, for example. They can bring a lot of that very specialized expertise and knowledge to a conversation that wouldn't have it otherwise. So just to recap a little bit, the CTO keeps an eye on technology trends. They figure out if those trends fit into the company's technology and business strategies and they need to set the company's tech vision, which for a tech company often overlaps with its overall direction. They also need to communicate that vision with their teams, their partners, and their customers. So we want to hear a little bit about the CTO as a founder. So Johan, to that point, who did you talk to get a little bit of that perspective? Well, we spoke with Kirk Barnes. He's an author and the CEO and co-founder of TransPharMed in Atlanta, Georgia. He also helps a lot of startups through the early stages of the business and that includes advising CTOs. Now, he's worked with a lot of great CTOs and has observed some qualities that many of the successful ones have in common. Yeah. I think the fantastic CTOs... They will have a deep technical expertise in a specific area, whether that is a physician or whether that is a deep engineering background or computer science background or programming. Usually they're the people that are just exceptional at their craft, whatever that technical craft may be. And then they somehow have identified the ability to be visionary on top of that. And part of... As I jokingly quote one of my prior presidents and CEOs: He used to say the difference between a vision and a hallucination is how many people see it. That's a good one. That's great, isn't it? That is a good one! Right? Chris Wright was talking about how important communication is for any CTO and here Kirk Barnes is making that same point because it's so important for someone to have that vision and say, "Oh, here's where I think we should go." And if no one else sees that, then it's not going to be a successful organization. Now, for the early stages of a company, making that vision not only clear, but also inspiring is very important, especially for a founder trying to build a team. Many CTOs have a firm understanding of the technology and then a vision for what the technology could do to be transformational, but then being able to articulate what that vision is and what they could do. And typically many of the early employees that come to the companies... They're not getting paid. They might get shares if shares really mean anything at that point. But most people will join a technical founder because they believe in not only their ability, but they also believe in the mission and vision that's ahead of them. If they can work together, they really can change the world. You have to have a lot of faith in these founders and what they're bringing to the market because he said some folks don't get paid and if they do, they get it in shares only. Imagine the level of faith you have to have in that product or that company to want to go down that path. It can be transformational for those folks who jump on early, but boy, what a test of faith, right? To have that much faith in someone's vision... It's impressive. Knowing that technology inside and out takes a lot of work. Forming that vision also takes a lot of work and communicating that vision and the potential that it represents... Again, that takes even more work. Making sure that you're able to have a team that not only knows that you have a vision, but then also believe in that vision so that it is a shared vision and not a hallucination... That's very, very difficult. And not only is it difficult, it can be really exhausting and discouraging and just all around very difficult to do in an industry where a lot of startups don't make it. So many of the founders... They're not taking a salary very often. They're lonely, especially before they take a first round of funding where they can hire a team. Many times they're not supported. And many times on top of how smart people are and how great technology is, no matter what that technology is, we are all people at the end of the day. He said that they're lonely. I never really thought about that before. When I imagined a person who's a startup founder I don't think of the isolation, but it does make sense. When you're a person who works for a company, if you're working with a team and you already have this organizational structure that's already there, you take for granted that you're surrounded by people where you can bounce ideas off of them. You can talk to them when you're having a hard time or you can share in your success. But for a CTO who's also a founder, there may not be anyone to do that with. That's really interesting. And just like Chris mentioned, everyone has their limits and CTOs need to realize that and make sure that they get the support they need to be successful. Where do you go to get that type of support you need when you're in this startup phase of your company before anything has taken off? It sounds like it can be very isolating. And because people really do need people, what do you do when you and only a few other folks kind of believe in your vision and those folks are stretched thin and you're stretched thin? It sounds very isolating. It sounds very stressful as well. Well, for some startups, there's the option of joining an incubator, right? That provides a little bit of a support network and a little bit of extra help to get you started and off the ground. There's also usually a community of other startups that you're working alongside, but that's not available to everyone. Some of these incubators can be... They only have a limited capacity and they pick and choose who they want to be part of them and not everyone has access to them. And that's when it can be really important to have a support network outside of work, right? Friends, family, fellow colleagues who are in it but aren't necessarily working directly with you. It's important to have someone to talk to. So it's important to build out your own support system if you don't have that already laid out for you in maybe a startup incubator or some other type of format. But what other points did Kirk have about founders and how things work? Well, so Kirk works in Atlanta, Georgia. He works with a lot of diverse CTOs and he had an unfortunate point to make about the state of VC funding in the tech world. I'll say something to that point. This will be controversial. I might get myself in trouble, but I'll just say it. So I think sometimes I've... Not sometimes. I've seen this and it shouldn't surprise anybody that if you have a female CTO or if you have a diverse CTO and they have a problem raising money or getting customers, sometimes they might need somebody that doesn't look like them to help align better with investors or customers, whatever the case may be. That is very common. I've seen that. And it shouldn't have to be that way. I think it's changing and getting better, but if you look at the numbers, the numbers are what they are in terms of who gets money and who doesn't and what you have to show. Align better? Okay. That phrase just grinds my gears and I know it's true and he has a point. The tide is changing, but the simple fact that you have to put on a mask or have someone else present for you when it's your idea and it's your passion just to get funding... It's so unfortunate that we still live in a time where racism, sexism, ageism... These isms are creeping in and possibly getting in the way of great ideas. Oh gosh, it sucks. Now, we covered some of the people pushing for change in Command Line Heroes Season Six in the season finale, people like Arlan Hamilton who started a VC specifically to fund diverse CTOs and CEOs and founders. But that's one VC out of many, right? Exactly. So what do we talk about next? So we spoke with Phil Schraeder and he is the CEO of a company called GumGum that is a contextual technology platform. So in short, they're trying to bring back advertising based on the context that it's found in rather than based on the data they can find about you. So if you're going to... Let's say it's a fishing website. You're going to find ads for fishing poles and tack and bait and that kind of stuff, rather than having ads that are served to you based on your data that aren't necessarily related to the website that you're on. Interesting. Now, he really relies heavily on his CTO. So to me, the interaction between the CEO and the CTO is so incredibly important. For me specifically, I don't come with the tech background of the product. I come from the operational execution and transformation of that into the go-to-market product side. So my CTO, Ken, and I have to be connected at the hip, but by connected at the hip, it has to start with the ability for us to trust one another. And so I think you have to say, "Does this individual, as the CTO... Do I trust them enough to go and make decisions on product, make calls, bring in new technologies, break things, and that you're going to be there to support them when something doesn't go right?" Because you're really giving them the autonomy to make that call. Ooh, that's a lot of trust. A lot of trust. That's a high level of trust for them to each fulfill their roles and responsibilities. And he also acknowledges that both of them are absolutely essentially required for the success of the company. What the biggest thing I think is that the bridge of that relationship... Don't take for granted either side being more important than the other. That is the important piece. Just like Ken has to... And I know is very important. He also needs to understand how the business and strategy needs to go and what I'm seeing. So the way from takeaways is your CTOs should be in all these different meetings. Your CTOs should not just... They should be in here. And I think the biggest misconception that I think people have around CTOs is that they are just data driven producers. Engineering have a certain DNA, right? So yeah, CTOs are technical, but as we've heard, CTOs are also customer facing. They have to also communicate their vision to the company. And even though they have those set roles and responsibilities of engineering and setting the technical vision and keeping a pulse on the tech industry, there's no reason for them to be also absolutely constrained by those specific responsibilities. They're very strategic and they're super strategic. And your job is to understand how you can help them bring that strategic thought to the front lines. And what I mean is they might not want to be the one that's the loudest in the room. Now, I can't have an ego and say, "Stay in your lane. You're the CTO." That's death. So as founders, as leaders, as people who have influence over the course of a company, CTOs often have insights about areas that are "not in their lane" that could be absolutely beneficial. But as we go through this series, as we explore the roles and the responsibilities and how they fit into the larger tech ecosystem, we're going to hear a lot of overlap and we're going to hear about what they're experts in. But it's important to remember that people often can have good ideas about the company that doesn't necessarily fit or neatly fit in their job description. That's very common in tech. Think about our Stack/Unstuck series where we talked about it makes sense to know what's happening up and down the stack because it makes you better at your job. So for Kirk and Ken's positions, it makes them better in their roles because they are joined at the hip and they have a great understanding and respect for each other's roles in the company. So there is no real lane for you to stay in because if you're working at a startup, it's almost all boots on the ground. Everybody has to contribute. So you have to know a little bit about the CTO's role if you're the CEO and vice versa. So it makes sense. And it's nice that we're doing this because it flushes out those roles. Yes, they do have a lane and they have a purpose, but in a startup where... If it's an up and coming startup where there are so few people on the team, you really do have to rely on the resources and smarts of other folks on your team. So there is no real lane at that point. That's right. And in lieu of having a team, I guess that that direction can come from maybe other people that you're sharing space within a startup incubator or in one of those support systems or support teams that you've built out outside of your day-to-day. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely right. You can definitely get help and support from people who aren't necessarily working for you and bounce ideas off of your colleagues and people who aren't necessarily involved with your company. So have we flushed out this job description yet for a CTO? I think so. I think we've done a lot to describe what a CTO does, but also more importantly, what they don't do, that CTOs have their limits and that they also really need to rely on the teams that they build- Just as important. In order to fulfill the parts of the job that they can't handle by themselves. I think what I've learned today is that a CTO is not just important from an internal perspective if you're talking about a company, but also from a very external perspective, because they are the ones that people outside of your company are going to look at when they're looking at whether or not your service or your product is going to align with whatever they need for themselves and what their own vision is. So it's a cartographer person that gives you direction, but not necessarily tells the future. They're not a mind reader and they're definitely not fortune tellers. And they can feel certain types of isolation and they do feel overwhelmed or they can feel overwhelmed at times. But just because they are this really cornerstone of a startup doesn't mean that they should be boxed into one specific thing. They need to be able to move around and explore things and sometimes fail in order to find a good strategy and a good vision. Now, we were just saying that we shouldn't box people into their own lanes, but everyone has their lanes for a reason. It's their responsibilities. That's true. Yes, that's true. At some point, they're not going to be able to do things that are "outside of that lane," or not at least not full-time. For our next episode, our CTO has found that they've hit their limit and they need to hire someone to help them build the rest of the application. They're going to ask to hire an architect. This will be your time to shine, Angela. I know a little bit about being an architect. And that does it for the CTO episode of Compiler Re-Roll. Today's episode was produced by Johann Philippine, Caroline Creaghead, and Kim Huang. Victoria Lawton makes sure that we all share the same vision. Our audio engineer is Kristie Chan. Special thanks to Shawn Cole. Our theme song was composed by Mary Ancheta. Thank you to our guests Chris Wright, Kirk Barnes, and Phil Schraeder. Our audio team includes Leigh Day, Stephanie Wonderlick, Mike Esser, Brent Simoneaux, Nick Burns, Aaron Williamson, Karen King, Jared Oats, Rachel Ertel, Devin Pope, Mattias Faundez, Mike Compton, Ocean Matthews, and Alex Traboulsi. If you liked today's episode, please follow the show, rate the show, and leave a review. Share it with someone that you know. It really helps us get the word out. Take care, everyone. See you soon.

More about application development and delivery

Development and delivery involves creating, testing, and deploying software applications, speaking to the entire product lifecycle. 

Publicaciones en el blog

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10: Ein Betriebssystem denkt neu – und zwar von Grund auf

12 de agosto de 2025  |  Matthias Kranz

...

Publicaciones en el blog

Red Hat Named a Leader in 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Container Management for the Third Consecutive Year

11 de agosto de 2025  |  Sara Buffington

...

Containers

Programas originales

At Your Serverless | Command Line Heroes

Desarrollo y distribución de aplicaciones.
Historia de la tecnología

Programas originales

Hello, World | Command Line Heroes

Desarrollo y distribución de aplicaciones.
Historia de la tecnología

Programas originales

Steve Wozniak | Command Line Heroes

Historia de la tecnología

Sobre el podcast

Compiler

Do you want to stay on top of tech, but find you’re short on time? Compiler presents perspectives, topics, and insights from the industry—free from jargon and judgment. We want to discover where technology is headed beyond the headlines, and create a place for new IT professionals to learn, grow, and thrive. If you are enjoying the show, let us know, and use #CompilerPodcast to share our episodes.