As a Chief Technology Officer, AI is proving both an accelerator and a complicator.
Everyone’s got ideas and everyone’s a coder. While expected to deliver more, faster, you and your teams are hitting some major challenges that threaten to create operational drag, fragment ownership, introduce new risks, and degrade your influence. To survive and excel, you must now move up several gears and demonstrate your business savvy on all fronts.
If you can't translate technical capability into commercial reality, you'll eventually be replaced by a CTO who can. Or you could find yourself reporting to a Chief Product Officer who controls the real budget.
In this 4-part series, The CTO’s Strategic Roadmap, grounded in my Leaders Who Coach™ methodology, I’m going to discuss:
Why you need to develop holistic views of the company as well as your technical estate
Who you have to be influencing across the whole business
I’m also going to up-skill you with sharp Coach-Leadership questions and phrases to start using in all your conversations.
When Sales Sell What's Not in the Box
Let’s start with the number one and long-time bane of a technologist’s life - sales teams selling what’s not in the box.
Not only is it frustrating when commercial teams sell features and products that don’t exist, it’s properly demotivating, especially when, at one point, those features or that product had everyone excited and focused on them being the ‘next big thing’. And now, everyone forgot about that and is wishing for the next 10 big things without a true understanding of the resources and capability they require, and often without robust UX or market testing to validate if it’s usable or if customers want it.
Getting more commercial requires you to get closer to the market and customers (and R&D if you have that function), and to your sales and commercial leadership. Applying the Leaders Who Coach™ methodology, here’s what you want to consider.
Foster Common Understanding with Sales
Proactively initiate regular, structured discussions with sales and commercial leadership using coaching techniques to uncover their true needs and help them understand technical capabilities and limitations before client commitments.
To help you get those conversations going, try these two conversation approaches to help reduce instances of over-promising, build mutual respect, and align expectations:
Invite Exploration & Guide Thinking:
"Help me understand the core problem the customer is trying to solve."
"Here are our current capabilities and here’s what we could realistically develop to meet that need within a [defined timeframe]."
Ask for & Invite Clarification:
"What are the key features or benefits that sales teams are consistently hearing from customers, and how do those align with our current product roadmap and technical capacity?"
"Does building this increase our Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), or is it [just a shiny object] to close one difficult deal?"
These types of questions help to slow down the decision-making long enough to consider the strategic and operational impact, realistic time-frames, and quality judgements on what the market actually wants or needs.
You guide their thinking towards alignment on the best way forward. Also, this kind of conversation builds trust, creates synchrony of thought, and strengthens relationships way more than a flat “That won’t work”, “We can’t do that”, or silence will ever do.
Establish Your Alliance with the Chief Product Officer
Convergence is beginning to happen between your role and the CPO role. There’s significant anxiety here about what that means longer term and strategically for both the CTO and CPO role depending on how the organisation grows. And it’s becoming common for leaders to hold a joint function responsibility - both product and technology as we see the CPTO or CTPO roles emerging. What this signals is that businesses need their technology leaders to develop or have a product mindset.
You want to get ahead of the issue, establish your point of view about how you collaborate with this function - areas of responsibility and ownership, areas of input, etc. - and make it a priority to build strong collaborative relations with a peer CPO.
For similar reasons of convergence or overlap of responsibilities (that I expand on elsewhere in this series), it’s also worth considering what your alliance needs to be with Chief AI Officers (yes, they’re coming), CISO, and legal counsel to support all related and expanding responsibilities.
Proactively Manage Changing Commercial Priorities
Implement a structured process for evaluating new commercial ideas - building the framework helps you influence the discussions. Instead of reacting, proactively engage commercial teams in a discovery process to understand the why behind new priorities and their true business value.
Ask for Validation & Data:
"What specific market insight or customer feedback is driving this new priority, and what's the anticipated return on investment if we successfully deliver it?"
Query New Priorities Pragmatically:
"How does this new idea fit within our existing strategic objectives, and what existing initiatives might need to be re-evaluated or paused if we pursue this?"
These questions serve to focus your discussions for evaluating new ideas, prevent reactive churn through priorities, and allow for informed decision-making.
The Leaders Who Coach™ skills in use throughout are Skill 2: Establish Common Understanding, Skill 6: Ask Good Questions, and Skill 8: Grow Awareness. Learn more about the full curriculum here.
The Bottom Line
Embracing a Coach-Leadership mindset gives you access to strategies and techniques for increasing your influence as a CTO beyond the technical estate.
Being in the room offers you opportunities to foster common understanding, strategically build alliances, and pragmatically shape commercial priorities.
Being deft at enquiry and clarification brings rigour to commercial logic before engineering wastes time building it. It positions you, the CTO, as an equal partner in revenue generation, not an order-taker.
For where we are headed, CTOs need to get really comfortable partnering their peers and the CEO as a trusted decision-maker and vision-holder.
