111–120 of 228 posts
Check out this post about transitioning to hands-off position http://www.elidedbranches.com/2016/04/ask-cto-navigating-han...
What I'm about to say may be considered harsh, but I promise I don't mean it to be. Quit. Just leave. Go back to coding. It's obvious you don't enjoy management, there's no shame in admitting that. Rather than inflict your misery on the rest of the team, get back to your wheelhouse where you can be happy, your team can be happy, and ultimately your company (current or future) can be happy. I have worked in a job wher…
Thank you for this, it's the way my mind has been leaning but it's good to hear. I realize my original post makes it sound like I had no idea what being a senior manager might involve which is just not true. I understand a lot of fire fighting and dealing with problems is par for the course I just didn't know if I'd enjoy doing that or not. How are you supposed to know until you try? :) I also felt like I'd have way…
I've never had a CTO title, but I've been in many similar positions.
In case you decide to stick it out for a while, I would suggest several easily implemented opportunities immediately:
(1) Establish an #engineering-support channel in Slack and a Triage calendar in Google Calendar. Put your team members on a rotating schedule to triage any engineering fires that the business has.
The Calendar should pipe into the Slack channel at 9 am every day. For a few weeks, send an "@channel please remember $engineer is your point of contact for today." By then the rest of the business should get the idea. Instruct your team that you trust them to decide which issues need to be addressed immediately and which ones need to go into the queue, but if they have any questions they can escalate to you. Also explain you understand that context switches are expensive, and you are totally okay if this causes a productivity hit on their given triage day.
It doesn't mean you won't be interrupted with real fires, but it does keep the less urgent ones from creating a context switch for you. Include yourself in the schedule, and you can send the message to your team "we're all in this together" instead of "hey I'm too good for this nonsense."
(2) The Business guys will respect your calendar, and if they don't, you have leverage to call them out on it because The Calendar is sacred in the business world. Block out 2 or 3 hour chunks throughout your week to work on hard problems. You drive a lot more value this way than with the fire fighting, anyway.
(3) The Calendar also works for time with your family. Daughter's Ballerina Recital? Block out 4pm-8pm on your calendar as soon as your hear about it—"Blocked—At Home"—and again, leverage if somebody wants to interrupt you with a fire.
(4) Train everyone on how to add each others' calendar to their own calendar view; this seems obvious to engineering, but less engineering-minded people may not know they can do that.
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tl;dr: My first hire, and ideal cofounder, would be a really great CFO. (When I frame myself as a technical leader, there's a quick assumption that I don't grok sales/marketing. If I introduce myself as a "Harvard MBA & angel investor", there's an immediate conclusion that code is beyond me... Nice to know that, when both are presented, the engineer wins. :) ) That said, sales is one of the easiest areas to hire for.…
OT, but I greatly appreciate that you put your post summary at the top instead of at the bottom. I don't need a tldr summary at the end... Was that a result of learning about executive summaries in your MBA program, or just something you picked up along the way?
For web content, we think of "above/below the fold". For executives/investors, the analogue is "above/below the [first screen of my blackberry | iPhone alert]".
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It's funny how you hit the MBA nerve there. I've been considering going that route, but with the intention to get more involved with people from different backgrounds than anything else. I don't want the MBA to move away from my position as CTO, but to improve my abilities in other areas of the business and networking purposes. Would you still recommend not getting the MBA in that case? This is all in preparation to…
An MBA provides only one thing: the opportunity to stop doing engineering. Do you want to stop coding/building things, and instead build teams & business? Then do an MBA. There really is a lot to learn; it's not the irrelevant piece of paper it's often made out to be. The usual caveats apply (right school/program, work hard, etc.) Do you want to be a higher-impact engineer? Don't do it. Apply to YCombinator, build mo…
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Any idea what your new venture will be?
Oh sure. Software eats fulfillment, basically. Currently FBA ( http://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/benefits.ht... ) is a 3B$ business without any competitors. There are good reasons for that: it's capital-intensive, technically/operationally/managerially challenging, and can only really be learned by doing. I've just finished architecting & implementing a 30k package/day distribution system from scratch,…
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Oh sure. Software eats fulfillment, basically. Currently FBA ( http://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/benefits.ht... ) is a 3B$ business without any competitors. There are good reasons for that: it's capital-intensive, technically/operationally/managerially challenging, and can only really be learned by doing. I've just finished architecting & implementing a 30k package/day distribution system from scratch,…
I would have thought UPS - and similar companies - would be considered competitors, which are no small fries! But, perhaps I'm looking at the wrong layer of the onion? And perhaps the layer you're referring to/hoping to operate in is n degrees removed from that. In any case, good luck! +1!
It's not hard to get a dedicated fulfillment service once you've hit a decent size (say ~10k/day). But it's a very intensive sales process with long-term commitments.
They also tend to be both opaque and hard to integrate with other systems. Most use end of day EDI (yes, the 30yr old standard), some of the more "modern" ones have multiple drop times/day.
So major fulfillment providers (not UPS, which doesn't do fulfillment; but FedEx/Rakuten/etc.) are both inappropriate for fast-growing, flexible or seasonal loads, and don't support innovation in customer service for eCommerce companies.
FBA is a much more modern (and extremely successful!) service, but is only cost-effective if you're selling on Amazon. Their 3rd-party, non-branded service is not only prohibitively expensive but feature-light and under-developed.
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Given your technical background, be sure to involve someone with a strong sales/marketing point of view whether that's a cofounder, investor, or friend. Moreover make sure it's a relevant point of view. For example, someone with a great b2b pedigree won't necessarily add the most value if you're starting a consumer focused company. Most importantly, best of luck to you -
tl;dr: My first hire, and ideal cofounder, would be a really great CFO. (When I frame myself as a technical leader, there's a quick assumption that I don't grok sales/marketing. If I introduce myself as a "Harvard MBA & angel investor", there's an immediate conclusion that code is beyond me... Nice to know that, when both are presented, the engineer wins. :) ) That said, sales is one of the easiest areas to hire for.…
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Why would a techie want a MBA job below VP level? Most don't want to be advertising account managers or business analysts either. Does that matter?
tl;dr: If there's no reason to get an MBA as a promotion-track engineer, then not only will none of your promoted engineers will have MBAs, none of your promoted MBAs will have practical experience being a great engineer. They wouldn't, of course. And that's really the problem. If you don't have mid-level technical managers with MBAs, you don't get to promote/hire VP-level technical MBAs. An MBA does teach a lot of v…
I'd think that there would be some interest around this from the universities, and business is really crying out for this too.
From the Uni viewpoint, it is another product they can leverage, whilst still using there in house competencies and also creating cross university synergies (HBS-MIT TeMBA)
For businesses, they get exactly the top management they need - even for non-tech companies - a CIO/CTO with solid tech skills and business skills is a sure winner.
P.S. Please forgive me for slipping in the word synergy. I truly believe it's a great word, with a great meaning, but has been flogged to death by the consulting industry.
{Edit} Actually, I like the idea of a TeMBA, I am going to start a AskHN: What would the syllabus be for a TeMBA?
{Edit 2} Here's the link:
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? The mid/senior leadership of the best known companies hires all thr available techie MBAs. There are few CTOs because a 50K employee company only has 1 CTO. Others are CEO, COO, CIO. A mid/senior person at a big company is similar to a CxO at a small company.
> The mid/senior leadership of the best known companies hires all thr available techie MBAs. This is false, and also misses the point. I went through two recruiting cycles at HBS (Harvard Business School), which is one of the largest (~1000/yr) and most representative business schools. I did not see a single position advertised which required actual engineering experience. I was also one of three people (in 1000) who…
Find out what you REALLY want. Find your motives. Find the underlying essential motivation. That's much deeper than coding or not handling crap. Those are superficial symptoms, not what makes you move. Find a good professional coach that can help you with finding this out. Pay money for it. You probably can spend several thousands $$$ on this. Not that it needs to be that expensive, but $1000-$2000 is easily spent. I…
https://medium.com/code-like-a-girl/why-i-left-management-th...
The author was in a similar spot, and chose to go back to the tech track.
Her takeaways were:
What gives you energy and what drains you? How do you feel accomplishment? What drives and excites you?
Answering those three questions honestly will give you a better idea on what kind a role would best fit you.