What does a CTO consultant do?
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A CTO consultant will be a resource you can outsource to come in and set your technology strategy. It may be for a limited engagement and or it may be a part-time role. In the same way, as you would hire a consultant for anything else, the CTO consultant is the more experienced senior person you may need than a regular consulting engagement.
And that’s the role I have been playing for the last 8 odd years and enjoyed setting strategy and then seeing it to execution. The best part, as probably the senior most person in the room (in my case it is also in terms of age), the respect it gets you unlike “taken for granted” situation for internal roles.
Technology in the modern world is key to fulfilling business goals. The CTO role hence is very significant. The CTO is accountable for defining the technology vision, developing the Technology strategy, and alignment during execution to achieve the business goals.
CTO is a stakeholder in the business and understands the competitive differentiation required for the business. CTO understands the bigger picture of interconnected technology and trends, which shape the future.
CTO effectively communicates the vision and strategy throughout the organization in order to align the execution. CTO is a mentor and creates a effective technology leadership in the company.
Though CTO is an fulltime executive role in the company, however due to various reasons, companies can not hire a CTO. In addition there are additional Roles such as CIO and CSO, addressing the IT managment and security objectives. Hence smaller companies and startups look for CTO consultants, who can provide companies the expertize required for some of the strategic functions of CTO and also for CIO and CSO, if not all mid/short terms needs. The trends are emerging where such roles have started shaping the initial and growth phase of companies, where the focus is building and growing the business.
CTO consultants are pure strategists unless you bring on someone to fit a specific technical niche. Think software architecture design, hiring strategy, supply chain - where you source components and what you bring in-house. CTO consultants are not doers - although they can be very capable and that can be negotiated - they are there specifically to provide guidance and lend their experience for you to act on.
I actually offer CTO consultant services. The main focus is providing a high level architecture on how products are built and how it will interact with present systems. A huge part of the job is solution building and understanding how the different components of varies systems can marry together to create a cohesive system.
Consultant CTO comes in for following reasons (I think)
Reduce Technical debt - Software libraries and dependencies easily get outdated. Or there are new and bettor options always being built to solve the problem faster and quicker. Every software needs technical checks and analysis every 2 years now a days. Used to be 5 years but things are very rapid now a days. CTO can help you decide whether to go with the change which other industry is doing and help you decide whether to invest in that efforts or not from business prospective.
Scale your software/infrastructure - In terms of cloud and cloud native there are lot of ways to do the same thing. What happens is you realize this once you have enough or more user base (traffic) that the path you choose is not optimal. so, How to deviate from it without hurting user base and making compromise to in cloud billing. solution mostly involve scaling infrastructure or changing it in a way that it can manage more traffic in the same configuration/billing.
Feature development and brainstorming - You always need second opinion because in house team will be biased towards what they have as their existing stack. It's their baby they will not easily convinced to scrap everything and start from scratch with different angle in mind. Most of the time they will try to do things without making drastic changes to the existing structure. Sometimes it could be limiting for management in terms of what they want. Consulting CTO can be middleman to who can find the middle ground to make both parties happy.
Strategize and streamline processes - One of the biggest hurdle in programming is when people change there is a lot of KT and other things. New person may not have the same skills and or may not have the same style/way of working which makes harder to get everything up and running fast. Consulting CTO can make sure this doesn't happen by setting up proper processes, guidelines in place to do certain things.