---
title: "Six Tips for Staying Technical as a CTO"
description: "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."
---

# Six Tips for Staying Technical as a CTO

[Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify) · 2023-10-18 · Aug 9, 2022

**Type:** Tutorial

## 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.

**Tags:** [CI/CD](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ci-cd), [Code Review](https://yomu.fyi/topic/code-review), [Developer Experience](https://yomu.fyi/topic/developer-experience), [Reliability](https://yomu.fyi/topic/reliability)

- Source: [Shopify](https://shopify.engineering/six-tips-staying-technical-cto)
- Source URL: https://shopify.engineering/six-tips-staying-technical-cto
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-08-30T13:39:55.359Z

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