CTO interview questions and my take on them
####### Fri Jun 2 12:59:37 PM IST 2023 #######
My current assumption is that this company is just starting out and my best guess for the current tech assets is that they are vendor built and maintained. And the plan going forward is to build an in-house team , to get faster output and greater flexibility.
I have tackled this very case in this blog post I wrote titled:
From MVP (minimum viable product) to PMF (product market fit) - Designing the tech stack for an early-stage-startup: https://swlearninglog.blogspot.com/2023/04/from-mvp-minimum-viable-product-to-pmf.htmlAll service based companies where the software is the glue that binds everything together and the grease that allows various parts to function smoothly have essentially the same core requirements from their software
Hence I would like to argue that the progression outlined in the blog post should be by and large applicable to this company as well.
Summary of the article:
a three tier architecture is ideal - front-end, backend, database
premature optimization in my experience does more harm than good
early on the focus should be on modularity, flexibility and extensibility
keep it simple - resist the temptation to go for the latest shiniest buzz word
Can you share your experience in leading and managing a technical team in a fast-paced B2B SaaS or marketplace environment?
For the last 10 years I have exclusively worked with early stage startups leading teams in various capacities. Listing the most significant ones with the latest one first
Onco.com - Online Cancer Care Hospital
Head of Engineering (current)
Team Lead - customer facing portals,
Frsh.com - Healthy Food Cloud Kitchen
Chief Technology Officer
How do you stay updated with the latest trends and technologies in B2B SaaS and marketplace domains, and how do you apply them in your work?
In decreasing order of efficacy
blogging - best way to learn is to explain it someone else
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging#:~:text=The%20name%20is%20a%20reference,by%20line%2C%20to%20the%20duck.In-company tech sessions - twice a month a team member is assigned to present a current / trending / bleeding edge topic to the rest of the team.
social media - twitter, linkedIn, youtube, email digests - follow people / groups that publish relevant bleeding edge content - this helps pick up topics for the blog
What is your approach when joining a new project / organisation? Please highlight your work philosophy, hiring, managing teams and leadership style.*
Approach for a new project / Org
I am a systems engineer by training and almost always approach open ended problems with the v-model of solution implementation
reference: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overview-of-V-model-of-systems-engineering_fig2_254220189
from the model it flows that we decide the mission and mission for the team - high level goals
then establish a roadmap to reach those goals, essentially what do we plan to do to achieve the mission and vision - this has to be actionable and with a timeline
What needs to be built and what pace, them determines the resource requirements and budgets
of-course this may not always match with the available resources and budgets
so this is where a feedback loop can be established till a feasible plan is achieved
again, situations may change mid-implementation and the roadmap changes to handle these
Once a roadmap is fixed
then hiring resources
and starting work towards the first milestone can start
Work philosophy, hiring, team management, leadership style,
I am very flexible with where and when the work happens as long as deadlines are met and none of the people involved have to go out of their way to support an individual.
Hiring
Never hire for a position till you can write a job description and you can articulate what that resource will do and at what frequency. Eg. what will they do on a day-today basis, weekly, fortnightly and so on. More often than not the exercise makes you realize that the need is transient.
Ensure key areas of responsibility do not overlap for two people - recipe for disaster.
Success criteria for a good hire:
All the areas of responsibility assigned to the resource do not need anyone else to look into them at the end of the onboarding period.
Of-course these are ideals and room needs to be made for practicality; how much is determined by budgets mostly.
Team Management
Quoting from the blog:
have been managing a hybrid team size ~15 members quite successfully for 2 years, through various business cycles - hiring, attrition, lay-offs, etc
the following routine has been quite successful.
morning huddle - set the work to be done by all reportees - get them to write it out and send out as a message
mid-day catch-up - either people confirm that they will be able to deliver the committed tasks or present blockers and get them cleared by a Sr resource / decision maker and the deliverables are revised for the day.
EoD call - demo / review for work completed; and TODOs discussion for the next day (this forms the basis of the morning update the next day)
the culture of push updates - reporting as soon as an impediment to the committed timeline is found and not waiting for the next catch-up.
1-1 catch-ups with reportees once a month to align their goals and the company goals
Leadership style
In a high performing, motivated and highly skilled team - the requirement of the leadership is to be the “effort coordinator”.
The effort coordinator makes sure the effort vectors of all people align to the company goals (mission, vision, roadmap) to achieve the maximum possible thrust towards the goal
I would like to quote my good friend and cherished senior on this:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7016524981266251776?updateEntityUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afs_feedUpdate%3A%28V2%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7016524981266251776%29
In a few sentences please describe the top 3 problems you would tackle as CTO for this company.
It is important to note that the top 3 problems evolve with the stage of a technology team / stack. Below are some general approximations. I don’t mean to say that the mentioned heads should be looked into only at the prescribed times, it is just that they become burning issues at those stages of a startup.
1st year
hiring (people)
culture
base tech stack
2nd year
fast feature growth, fast design and process iterations
quality assurance - features become complex / interdependent
devOps setup - ease of continually shipping new code and features
3rd year
attrition / churn / knowledge management
software maintenance - tech debt
system observability - performance, limits,
4th year
security
tech debt - repeated, since this always is a balancing act (read problem)
efficiency - running and maintenance costs
Comments
Post a Comment