glad I’m making some progress.

j

And your right if your CTO is out doing the external stuff (and I’d argue they should) then it is really tough for them to manage the dev team. Depending on the size of your team, there may be a beta geek to lead dev but probably the rest of the geeks won’t let she or he do so I’ve actually had one case where a n00b tester picked up the day-to-day management, I think mostly because no one was threatened by him.

That said you can certainly have an effective CTO without having them manage your dev team. And you’re absolutely correct most CTOs neither want to manage nor are capable of it. I think what Fred was suggesting is that, like anyone on your startup team your CTO needs depth and breadth.

In 3 startups I’ve worked with CTO’s that were the chief technical founder never a manager type in the slightest – in all cases absolutely zero managerial skills. These small startup teams were highly technical, tight, flat and (usually) mature enough to not need a lot of management so, maybe the CTO was the defacto manager but it didn’t feel that way at the time. As stated/predicted we *always* bitched a lot and seemed pretty disfunctional on a personality basis but in retrospect usually got things done.

The CTO was often the one doing the external stuff: doing the analyst briefings, giving press interviews, conference speaking and other very external jobs. He provided guidance internally but it was more a team effort to construct the vision and the details. Our CEO (when we had one – which in one startup we didn’t for a long while) was often more the manager type and worked on the funding and other operational/general management and some marketing roles.

As we grew the CTO role was dominated by product management – because the work required more focus and customer contact than the personality of the CTO would provide. CTO moved off to “research” the future.