Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?
41–50 of 148 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?
#42Read about what to do: _The Fifth Discipline_ by Peter Senge. A bit dated by now, it's still good stuff about "systems thinking" . And you'll need a lot of deliberate systems thinking in your job, and you'll need to teach others to think that way.
Read about what not to do: _The Ultimate Question_ by Fred Reichheld. This book is about the notorious Net Promoter Score. (Would you recommend HN to a friend? Would you? Would you?) Reading it will give you insight into how bonehead MBAs with Cs in their marketing classes can convince leadership they've come up with a good way to measure customer satisfaction. (Net Promoter Score works fine for competitive businesses selling commodity products -- rental cars to individuals for example -- but not for many places where it is now used.)
Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?
#43Coincidentally, this showed up on my Twitter timeline just now:
https://github.com/kuchin/awesome-cto - A curated and opinionated list of resources for Chief Technology Officers and VP R&D, with the emphasis on startups and hyper-growth companies.
Someone else beat me to the link.
Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?
#44I've been a CTO a couple of times (VMware, startup), I don't think I'm a good one (I am better as an individual contributor, rather than as a manager), but I have one piece of advice for you: ignore books, or use them as secondary source of truth. You should instead TALK to long-time or former CTOs and ask them for advice. You won't find that advice in any book. It's invaluable.
How/where did you find former CTOs to talk to?
Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?
#45So, does a CTO need to know about: - Dev/ML/X Ops - System Architecture - DB design? etc?
IMHO they ought to have a developer background. That doesn't mean they need to be an expert in DBMS design or whatever, but they should know enough to know when one of their reports is talking BS.
I once worked for a CTO who threw out all our Linux systems and replaced them with Solaris (early 2000s) because "Linux couldn't scale", at the behest of our database architect who was basically just trying to increase his own empire and budget. One of the stupidest and most costly decisions, that also demoralised the rest of the team.
Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?
#46The effective manager - how to manage people The mom test - how to discover product The EOS (Traction and Co) - how to manage the company and give direction to the vision of the company
I think EOS is great and that every startup should use it, but have a feeling that most HN readers will detest it because of Not Invented Here syndrome. It’s too tempting to think “How hard can it be to figure out how to run a meeting, set goals, etc.?” And then end up spending the time that should’ve been spent having meetings and working towards goals on all the minutiae and cruft that somebody else has worked out in the past.
Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
And maybe CTO means “the founding programmer of a new startup” in which case my advice would be to stop reading and start coding :-)
There's always time to read, you can't only code. E.g. I run a lot so I get through a hell of a lot of audio books.
I don't think the parent comment means only code, never learn. I think their intention was to not worry too much about the "CTO" title and instead focus on building the product at hand.
Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?
#48Those who can't do, teach.
Don't read.
Do.
Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
And maybe CTO means “the founding programmer of a new startup” in which case my advice would be to stop reading and start coding :-)
And honestly, pre product-market fit my advice would be not even coding, but iterating in an extremely scrappy way (read: Google Sheets, Jupyter Notebooks, no-/low code, handwritten invoices) until you have people paying for your product and not churning after the first month. Everything else comes secondary. For every company that didn‘t manage to scale their tech and teams fast enough, there‘s 100 that die by „buil…
this is perfect advice which i can't agree with enough. that is unless the founders insist on a flawless UI... then you are in for a world of pain
never understood why teams of literally 1 or 2 devs are always forced to try attempt to acheive the visual quality of apps like instagram, whatsapp, etc
Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?
#50Mindset and leadership (explore other titles by Gerald M. Weinberg as well)
- An Introduction to General Systems Thinking
- Becoming a Technical Leader: An Organic Problem-Solving Approach
So that you have a good answer to "when will it be ready"
- Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art
- Agile Estimating and Planning
People management
- The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
- High Output Management
Besides Mythical Man Month already mentioned in other comments.