Six Tips for Staying Technical as a CTO

Summary

The article examines how a CTO can remain technically credible after moving from the individual contributor track into leadership. It argues that leadership inevitably reduces technical depth because performance reviews, one-on-ones, organizational communication, and other people responsibilities limit time in code, making the transition an intentional choice for those who value managing people. Its recommended practices include voracious reading, coding as a hobby, participating in hackathons, learning directly from more technical colleagues, maintaining a private network of technical advisors, and aggressively clearing bugs, incident-remediation work, and backlog. The author illustrates hands-on learning with Shopify’s Spin environment, which provisions a cloud development instance and opens a repository in about 30 seconds, and concludes that controlling operational issues preserves time for innovation and technical leadership.

Context

Moving into technical leadership brings substantial people and organizational responsibilities, including performance reviews, one-on-ones, staff meetings, relationship building, communication, and career-ladder development. The author says these demands make it impossible to maintain the same technical depth as an individual contributor, while technical credibility remains important for decision-making and earning the trust of highly technical teams.

Approach / What changed

The article presents six practices for staying technical: reading broadly and inspecting code, documentation, commits, and test results; coding as a hobby in development environments; participating in hackathons; learning from more technical colleagues; consulting a private network of internal and external senior engineering leaders; and aggressively managing bugs, incident-remediation actions, backlog, and technical debt. Shopify’s Spin environment is given as a way to provision a cloud development instance and enter a repository quickly.

Takeaways

• Leadership responsibilities reduce the time available for coding and technical depth, so moving into leadership should be an intentional choice for people who want to manage people.
• Shopify’s Spin command provisions a cloud development instance, checks out large repositories, sets up runtime permissions, and opens an editor-ready workspace in about 30 seconds.
• Ignoring bugs, outages, remediation actions, and backlog can turn a technical leader into a tactical firefighter; resolving operational work helps preserve capacity for innovation and technical debt reduction.

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