The role of the Chief Technology Officer has changed considerably over the past decade. What used to be primarily an engineering leadership position has become something harder to define — part strategist, part translator, part organisational therapist.
From Engineer to Executive
CTOs who seem to navigate this role well are not always the best engineers in the room. More often, they are people who have learned to ask useful questions: of their teams, their stakeholders, and themselves. They can articulate what a technical decision means for the business without overstating their certainty, and they know when to slow down a conversation that is moving too fast toward a bad conclusion.
The shift from technical expert to organisational leader is genuinely difficult. It is not a promotion so much as a change of craft. Many of the skills that made someone a strong engineer — deep focus, precision, independent problem-solving — are less directly useful than they were. Different muscles need developing.
The Strategic Dimension
Many of the questions that reach a CTO are not really technical questions at all:
- Should we build this capability in-house or buy a solution?
- How do we balance technical debt reduction against feature delivery?
- What does our architecture need to look like in three years to support where the business is going?
- How do we think about AI adoption without losing focus on what actually makes the product good?
These are hard questions. They rarely have clean answers. What helps is having someone in the room who understands both the technical constraints and the business context well enough to hold the tension honestly.
On Interim Engagements
For companies that do not have a CTO or are between permanent hires, bringing someone in on an interim basis can be useful — not because an outsider necessarily knows better, but because they can sometimes see things that are difficult to see from inside.
The interim engagements I have found most worthwhile are not the ones where I arrived with a plan. They are the ones where there was enough trust to surface the real problems — the things people had noticed but not said out loud — and work through them together. The goal is always to leave the team in a stronger position, not to create a dependency on continued outside help.
A Note on 2026
The technology landscape right now is genuinely interesting and genuinely unsettling in equal measure. AI capabilities are moving fast, and most organisations are still figuring out what that means for how they build software, how they structure teams, and what "good work" looks like. Cloud economics continue to surprise people. There is no settled consensus on a lot of things that felt settled a few years ago.
I find this period more interesting than alarming, but I also think it rewards humility. The people I respect most in this space are the ones who are willing to say they are still working things out.
If you are thinking through a technology leadership challenge and want to talk, feel free to get in touch.