How the CTO Role Evolves as the Company Grows
“Personal experience from a startup that began with 8 people and grew to 100+ employees”
#Introduction: the reactive CTOa
At the start, I didn’t know what I “should” be working on.
I worked on whatever was burning the hottest.
As a managing partner + CTO (not a “pure” CTO), my co-founder and I were making CEO-level decisions from day one. That meant code, clients, people, finances – everything, all at once.
Over time I learned one simple rule:
> If you don’t plan your own time, someone else will do it for you.
The four zones where a CTO invests time
– “Operations” – code, infrastructure, bugs, hiring, incidents, “get it done today”.
– “Lift Team” – mentorship, developing people and leaders, feedback, the right 1:1 conversations.
– “Strategy” – technology and product vision, architectural decisions, balancing speed vs. sustainability.
– “Business” – business decisions, clients, partnerships, pricing/margin, risk, investment prioritization.
The distribution across these zones “is not static”. It shifts as the company grows.
An important note for the managing partner + CTO
The “pure CTO” model assumes that “Business” comes later. For a “co-founder / managing partner”, business is in the picture from the very beginning:
– you have ownership over the outcome, not just the technology;
– you participate in commercial/product decisions because technology risk is business risk;
– most often, you are the translator between “what the market wants” and “what’s possible, when, and at what cost”.
That’s exactly why the calendar becomes a strategic tool: it reveals whether you’re actually living your role – or being carried along by other people’s urgencies.
Stage 1: the start (8 people, 3 engineers)
– Operations: ~75%
– Lift Team: ~10%
– Strategy: ~10%
– Business: ~5%
Here the CTO is “the lead engineer + firefighter”.
Business shows up early because you’re a co-founder, but the focus stays in execution.
What this looks like in practice
– “You are the default architect”: stack choices, first standards, first “we don’t do it that way”.
– “You are the incident manager”: when something goes down – everyone looks to you.
– “Meetings = context”: you talk to clients to understand the real requirements and trade-offs.
The typical trap at this stage
Getting your identity tied to the code. At some point, that gets in the way of developing people and processes.
A small but decisive habit
At the end of the week, ask yourself: “”Where was I irreplaceable – and is that a good thing?”” If the answer is “everywhere” – that’s a warning sign.
Stage 2: first scaling (20 people, 7 engineers + admin)
– Operations: ~40%
– Lift Team: ~30%
– Strategy: ~20%
– Business: ~10%
This is where the real turning point begins.
If you stay too long in Operations – you start holding the team back.
What actually changes
– “There’s now “someone to do it””, but no “how we all do it consistently well”.
– Recurring problems start to appear: quality issues, regressions, unpredictable delivery.
– The admin/DevOps role opens up space, but only if you stop “climbing in through the window” and doing everything yourself.
The transition that hurts
This is the stage where many people feel a loss of control:
– instead of “touching it and making it work”, you have to explain, wait, and train;
– instead of being the fastest, you have to become a “multiplier”.
How to avoid becoming a bottleneck
– “Identify 1–2 technical “lieutenants”” (senior/lead) who own the day-to-day decisions.
– “Calendar blocks for Lift Team”: 1:1s, code review as coaching, design reviews.
– “Deliberately reduce the input flowing to you”: not everything goes through “CTO approval”.
The signal that you’re already late
When you’re called into 80% of incidents and 80% of architecture conversations because “it won’t happen without you”.
Stage 3: mature stage (100 people, ~20 IT team)
– Operations: ~10–15%
– Lift Team: ~35%
– Strategy: ~30%
– Business: ~20–25%
Your role is no longer to write code.
Your role is to make the people around you better – and the company more resilient.
What mature CTO work looks like
– “Organization, not heroics”: systems, processes, leaders.
– “Technology strategy”: platform thinking, architectural principles, technical risk management.
– “Business partnership”: investment prioritization, make/buy decisions, cost of delay.
Operations doesn’t disappear – it becomes “selective”
You’re no longer doing daily operations; you step in for:
– critical high-risk incidents;
– decisions that change direction (e.g. migration, re-architecture, security posture);
– cultural/organizational problems that can’t be resolved “with a ticket”.
Your new metric
Not “how many commits did I make”, but:
– how much faster does the organization make decisions without you;
– how predictably does it deliver;
– how healthy is the middle management layer
The most common mistake
A CTO who “doesn’t shift their focus” becomes a bottleneck.
What follows:
– slowdowns (everything waits for approval)
– team tension (“why does it have to go through him again?”)
– burnout (because you’re the last line of defense for everything)
Three common anti-patterns
1) “CTO-as-API” – everyone “integrates” decisions through you.
2) “Hero mode” – incidents get resolved through heroics, not systems.
3) “Meeting drift” – the calendar fills up with meetings, but leaves no time for strategy.
A practical framework: the 30-minute calendar audit
One exercise that works almost every time:
1. Pull up the last 2 weeks from your calendar.
2. Tag each meeting as “Ops / Lift / Strategy / Business”.
3. Sum up the hours.
4. Ask yourself: “”Does this distribution match the current size of my team?””
The time-protection rule
– Strategy doesn’t happen “between two meetings”.
– If you don’t block time for Strategy/Lift, you’ll get more Ops.
How to shift your focus without breaking the company
1) Delegate decisions, not tasks
Not “do this”, but “you own this problem”.
2) Reduce the input flowing to you
– define “what counts as an escalation”
– define “who decides what” (even with a simple matrix)
3) Create a rhythm
– weekly leadership sync (short)
– monthly strategy review
– quarterly tech/business alignment
4) Turn Operations into a system
– blameless postmortems
– runbooks
– SLO/SLI (even lightweight ones)
Visualization: the evolution of CTO time
“`mermaid
flowchart LR
A[8 people\n75% Ops] –> B[20 people\n40% Ops]
B –> C[100 people\n10% Ops]
A1[Lift 10%] –> B1[Lift 30%] –> C1[Lift 35%]
A2[Strategy 10%] –> B2[Strategy 20%] –> C2[Strategy 30%]
A3[Business 5%] –> B3[Business 10%] –> C3[Business 25%]
“`
Conclusion
The CTO’s job is not to be the best engineer in the room.
It’s to invest their time where it has the “greatest impact”.
The calendar is not an administrative tool.
It is strategy.
My personal “litmus test”
If at the end of the week I feel that:
– I solved a lot of things “with my own hands” → I probably overdid Operations;
– I made 2–3 people stronger → Lift Team had room to breathe;
– I made 1–2 decisions that make next month easier → Strategy is alive;
– I translated technical risk into business language → the Business partnership is working.
“A question for you:”
Where are you investing most of your time today – and is that where the highest value is?