> Left unchecked, the need to handle support tickets can become a major distraction to the team, hurting efficiency, draining morale, and burning out your best people.
This reads like satire to me - "Supporting the customer who is ultimately paying our salaries can become a major distraction to the team". If the need to handle support tickets has become so overwhelming, maybe your "best people" should be right in the middle of it until they figure out a way to get the entire team out of hell.
Protecting the elite engineers from the consequences of their own designs is a death sentence for a technology startup. I watched this happen in real time myself. The moment you let the developers off the hook, nothing feels real anymore.
The CTO should be leading by example. Getting in front of the customer on the calls. Heading up the nastiest implementations of the product. Grabbing the issues that have been rotting for weeks. Generally, throwing themselves directly in front of the bus at every possible opportunity. If you are the most highly-paid technical person, you need to be the backstop. There is no one behind you to catch anything. The CEO doesn't have time for the bullshit you were supposed to be managing.
Everything else follows from putting yourself in harms way as often as possible. After being ran through the rotten issue wringer for 48 hours, how do we feel about playing with clever noSQL/graph databases or web frameworks with no discernable user base? Does AI make sense for our business or customers? Allow the technology choices and policies to be informed by your daily, real world experience with the business. The more deeply you involve yourself, the more accurate your decisions will likely be.