The most successful organisations have leaders with clear divisions in their responsibilities. In my role as a CTO or Engineering leader, I often find myself addressing the same type of problems, even in organisations with very diverse industries, teams and funding.
I have also on occasion acted as a Product leader (sometimes at the same time as being an Engineering leader), and while the importance and challenges of the roles have similarities, the frame of mind that you must adopt is quite different.
And in being fortunate enough to work with inspiring leaders in other positions, I know full well that the best leaders of other domains make it their business to understand the intellectual demands of their roles, and the boundaries between them and their colleagues.
In this article, I present a framework for thinking about the most fundamental questions that each leader in an organisation must answer.
Why?
In Simon Sinek’s book Start With Why, he puts forward the compelling case that “Why?” is the single most important question that a company must answer. The definition of why a company exists, its purpose and reason for being, is the most fundamental characteristic that must be clear and compelling for any organisation to succeed.
Knowing why we exist underpins every other decision we make as a business. It gives a reason to employees, it sets the culture of the business and makes it clear who will enjoy working here. It answers the question about how we talk about the value of what we do. And it makes it clear why customers should come to us rather than all the other guys.
Given its centrality in the definition of the business, answering this question usually falls to the CEO. It is the CEO’s responsibility (among other things) to articulate the vision of the company to its employees, and any coherent vision must start with why.
Who?
Knowing why we exist may sometimes define who we are serving. If our why is “to make every plumber safer at work” then our users are, most likely, plumbers. If our why is “to challenge every aspect of how we think about technology”, then who our immediate users are is more ambiguous - and likely to grow and shift over time. Note that I talk about users rather than customers - who pays us is, fundamentally, less important than who we deliver value to. And no, that is not “shareholders”.
Understanding who our user is might sometimes fall to a CMO, if their remit is to identify groups of potential users who we can reach, or a CRO or similar if we are a services business.
For product companies, it will usually fall to a CPO, who must anyway have a monomaniacal customer focus to do their job well (see below) and can be best placed to know who can help us meet our why. And in some cases, of course, it will also be set by the CEO.
Which?
Knowing why we exist and who we serve is table stakes for coming into work each morning. But what next?
A blank page can be intimidating, but usually this is not because ideas are hard to come by. It is because there are always far too many ideas, and picking just one to start with means saying "no" to all those other amazing things that we could be doing instead!
Saying “no” (or “not yet”) to some possibilities, and “yes” to the most important and impactful ones for our users is the lifeblood of any successful company. It requires strategy, analysis, planning, understanding of constraints, and the ability to look up and see the landscape as it evolves.
Fundamentally, deciding which path to tak is only made possible by understanding what will benefit the users of our product or service. This is a distinct definition from what they say they want, and indeed from what they are willing to pay for. Knowing what to do to make our users' lives better requires a focus and depth of knowledge about our customers that must define a person's existence.
This is the job of the CPO, though it is sometimes done by leaders with other titles, or by a hands-on CEO. Getting up every morning, bringing together all the data available, and deciding the next step on the path towards answering the "why" - that is the direction we pursue.
How?
And so we finally come to the humble CTO. Your job is to solve the impossible Rubik’s cube that the other leaders have put into your hands. We already know what we’re doing, who we’re doing it for, and why - but how can we accomplish it?
That technology first appears so far down this list is a reason why many leaders will often view it as a cost centre - just a commodity that solves a problem, where the hard work is in identifying the problem to solve. Sadly this hubris is increasingly common in leaders who fail to realise that the engine of any company is really in how it innovates and solves problems.
Regardless of any lack of prestige, figuring out how to deliver the work that we have identified as valuable is the true powerhouse of any organisation. Before this point, all we have are mere hopes and dreams, memos and slide presentations - theory but no practice.
Now the real work can begin.