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What does a CTO actually do?

vadimkravcenko.com · 4,109 words · saved by 1 readers

In 2017, I found myself stepping into the shoes of a CTO for the first time. I joined a small startup as a senior developer, and before I knew it, I was handed the reins of the tech team. Having the CTO title sounded cool, but in reality, it was more of a tech lead role — we were small, just about ten people, and I was deeply involved in building the product. My days were filled with coding, debugging, and playing whack-a-mole with new bugs and customer issues. I was also responsible for ensuring our team delivered on our commitments to investors and clients. It was a challenging time, but it was also a time of immense learning and growth. Also, a lot of stress. But that’s a whole different story. Fast forward to today — I'm running a digital agency in Switzerland as a CTO. We're building multiple projects simultaneously with cross-functional teams on each product. We’ve gotten bigger, not by much, but almost 50 people. My role has evolved. I'm no longer just coding and debugging; I'm

What does a CTO actually do? vadim kravcenko career development management newsletter What does a CTO actually do? 21 July 2023 · 34,410 views · Updated 04 April 2026 2017. I'm two weeks into a “senior developer” gig at a seed-stage startup, happily shipping features, when the founders corner me after stand-up: “Congrats, you’re our CTO now.” No ceremony, no pay bump, just a new Slack channel and the expectation that I’d keep the servers alive. We were roughly ten people, so the title was mostly aspirational — my calendar was still 80 % coding, 20 % putting out production fires.

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