wow appreciate the kind words… I had fun writing it and yeah I’m pretty sure most of us have had those experiences. I certainly wrote it from some not so fictional experiences.

yeah I think most of us have felt your pain at one point or another. I guess it depends on your management team but: people know what they know and you have to provide context, the “what’s in it for me” applied to either your company or your customers before “Vision” can resonate with them.

If you’re evangelizing vision, you’re probably covering benefits as part of your evangelism but something isn’t sticking. Not that CTOs should be immune from criticism, in fact most of us love a good critique as I’m sure you do but I completely understand the difference between critique and the grind of second guessing.

In my experience this behaviour is symptomatic of something else. I’d suggest you spend some 1:1 on time with members of the exec team and get a better handle on their concerns. Do you lack credibility? Do they lack technical understanding? How can you get to a shared technical vision? How do you build mutual trust? These will be difficult conversations but totally worth the investment and pain on the long run.

I’m new to the CTO position, definitely fitting into the ‘visionary’ stereotype pretty snugly, coming from a light developer background and having run a small dev company.

One thing I wish would be covered more is working with the other members of the exec team, I’m pretty au fait with transforming business requirements into technical challenges and vice versa – but justifying technical ‘vision’ is much harder (for me), and at the moment consists of having to justify the exclusion of alternatives. I would much rather spend my time evangelising solutions, but can’t seem to find a definitive way to get that seed popularity for deeply technical aspects of the business.

A CIO, if appropriate as a role within such companies, reports to the CTO and basically handles just the operational side. The “irregular sleep pattern”, madly prototyping “CTO” that you describe is without a doubt a necessary role, particularly at early startups, but as companies mature, that role either goes away entirely or (better) is subsumed as some kind of architecture/R&D role, again under the executive role of CTO. But the “prototyping CTO” is not really an executive role. It’s something more like (and I say this with all due respect, mind you) “chief propellerhead”. And I do also agree that it’s quite useful to have someone in the role of creating prototypes and pushing the edge. It just gets harder and harder to justify and staff that role, the more a company matures. This is one reason I admire Google’s practice of having all employees work 20% of the time on their own projects.

I think we are talking about different roles mostly due to what I suspect are different stage companies. In particular your comment about VP Eng skills and VCs underscores that pretty well. Although I’d have to say your posting sounds to me more like a CIO position.

As far as whipping up prototypes, well all I can say is sometimes the CTO is a little ‘out there’ and many of us tend to be pretty visual. And a picture says a 1024 KBs, so a prototype/PoC is a pretty natural outcome. Based on your comments, I’d actually be worried that this was some sort of personal affliction but I had a couple of other CTOs post follow-up blogs that this one rang true for them. Come to think of it they also seemed to pick up on the diurnal thing so maybe I appeal to the nichey niche of CTOs with irregular sleep patterns.

It’s almost as if we’re talking about entirely different positions in this case.