The Hagakure #86: One Job
My CTO role in a nutshell... or how I see it, anyway.
In my last post, I promised to share an unfiltered account of my experience as CTO of a SaaS startup. I have been mulling how best to do it, and even considered actually not doing it in the end. Giving advice is an activity that doesn’t sit well with me because the real world is a mess and I certainly haven’t figured anything out.
So, I decided I will simply try to share how I think through whatever is facing me.
I started this job in the summer of 2024 and the first big question was: how the hell am I going to tackle this?
For years, I’ve leaned on a framework to guide how I lead. It’s not my own—I borrowed it from L. David Marquet, author of Turn the Ship Around! and Leadership is Language. I still haven’t changed my approach, because I’ve had no reason to. Here’s what it boils down to:
To give control, you have to create clarity and develop competence.
Why give control? Simply because you want to push the authority to where the information is, not the other way around.
Why? Because no driven and intelligent human being wants to be told what to do. And because I want to be able to sleep at night. I wouldn’t if all the decisions had to come from me.
If giving control means empowering people to make decisions, what do they need to do so well?
Clarity and competence.
Clarity about what matters more, what matters less and what matters not at all. Clarity about who we want to be and what we want to do—and why. Clarity about the values that define us and the principles that guide us. Clarity about how we set ourselves up, how we measure success—and what success is in the first place. Clarity about how we are doing (collectively and individually), clarity about how our daily work connects to our mission, and clarity about how it’s affecting others “out there.”
You get the idea.
Competence, because it makes or breaks all of the above. Competence and rigor in our thinking and in our coding. Competence in how we design and run our processes. Competence in how we write a user story. Competence in how we talk to each other, and competence in how we help each other grow. Competence in how we choose what to spend our time on, and competence in how we make amends when we screw things up.
100% of what I do daily falls into one of these two buckets. And a lot of activities are about both. Having a coaching approach helps—a lot—because it generates better thinking and helps learn because we arrive at our own conclusions rather than being told what the right answer is.
That’s been my whole job as CTO: to create clarity and develop competence, so I can give control—and sleep better at night.
Hopefully, in a future post I’ll share some concrete ways I’ve attempted to create clarity for my team.