The CTO's Perfect Week

How one hour a day can shape the future of your technology organization into a delivery juggernaut.

I'm on a call with my co-founder and CEO doing a usual CTO update on the week's progress. Our little startup had grown from a debt ridden grind to a solid profit machine. Profits, thanks to no small effort from the two of us. Me in the code and him on the phone. Dialing for dollars.

As we're talking about the development team, which by now had grown to about 10 people, he casually drops a comment that shakes me to the core. "You should consider that your contribution to the company no longer lies in the code you're producing...". I don't even remember what he said after that.

All my life, I considered that coding would be my life. And here I am being told that my coding is getting in the way of overall progress. My coding. No wonder my team was taking longer and longer to approve my pull requests. Huh! I was the one after all, who wrote the first line of code. I wrote all the lines of code.

In hindsight, I was actually feeling relief. The demands on my time had shifted and I was finding it harder to know what to work on next. I was also feeling really bad for letting the team down with frequent delays in delivering my code.

Knowing what to work on as CTO isn't always clear. But it's an incredibly rewarding journey to see others succeed through your ideas and motivation. And through all the chaos that comes with building a company, I learned one key principle that made the difference between torture and bliss for me in my role as CTO.

One hour a day shapes the future of your technology organization into a delivery juggernaut

You fill the role of CTO in your company. But as a chief inside the business, you are responsible to give the company the capabilities it needs in order to sustain growth. As the chief technologist, these capabilities include designing, inserting and maintaining technologies that service the goals of the business.

Naturally as the pressure of the business mounts, the CTO will spend more time alleviating the next pressure point. This leads to their time being consumed by the next urgent thing.

Every week that you're not focused on a machine that runs without you, is a week your company moves closer to doom. Or maybe it's a week closer to your termination. Who knows?

Being needed to run the company may have you feeling good about your day, week or month, but what does this leave your company with? A superhero CTO? Someone that will be sorely missed when they are no longer around. Does this make you feel awesome?

But did you give your company any new capabilities? Capabilities that don't need you. See if you're only focused on the next urgent thing your company evolves like a Frankenstein. A carefully put together monster with very little lust for life. A scary being that doesn't make any friends and scares the little children away.

Let's rather build something beautiful. With deep love and careful attention.

The CTO's Perfect Week

When you follow the CTO's Perfect Week you will turn some spotlights onto the areas of the business that you may not be naturally focussed on.

The CTO’s Perfect Week breaks your week into 4 main topics. Each topic is dedicated to one day of the week. I have a recommendation for how it should flow, but you're welcome to change it up.

Welcome to your 5 new days of the week.

Momentum Mondays

On Momentum Mondays we focus on the one thing that that the whole organization knows they need from you always: speedy delivery of technology. This is the one area you and I both know will either be the end of you or buy you more time with your company.

I like doing this on Mondays because it sets a healthy tone for the week. Everyone is fresh off the weekend. Focus must be regained.

Pick something to work on from this list.

1. take a look at the codebase and revisit how the code is organized and updated

2. make sure the deployments are automated and protected against regression

3. go over the cards on deck and those in development

4. align the developers' intended delivery with the expectations of the company

Make sure that you get through all 4 of these items during the month. See what I did there? I gave you a whole month's worth of goodies to focus on.

Teaming Tuesdays

If Mondays are about the imminent pressure to deliver, then Tuesdays are about the near future. When I was at the early stages of my CTO career I was always very nervous about the changes in the technology landscape happening beyond what I could perceive. I imagined it as wild horses charging towards me. But too far away for me to see the pending danger.

We have to lean on our teams to see into the future. We build our teams to carry us into the future. Spend your Tuesdays focused on your place in the team and how you can influence the future of your company.

Pick something from this list:

1. share with your C-Suite new innovations, ideas and thoughts you've been having

2. chat with your developer teams about how to break up big ticket items into smaller ones

3. lean on your team for diverse perspectives and interesting ways to solve problems

4. coach your teams to help each other become better at what they do and talk about what this looks like in the review process

I find that over and over again, I underestimate the knowledge, experience and wisdom of my teammates. They truly are the key to your company's success.

Watchful Wednesdays

The middle of the week is a great time to consider the weak spots that may have formed in the fabric of your organization. In the mad dash of creating value, hiring people and releasing new technologies, it is forgivable that chinks may have formed in your company armor.

What is unforgivable though is standing by while deterioration sets in as nothing is done to examine where the weak spots are.

Use your Wednesdays to be watchful by spending an hour on one of the following activities:

1. examine your tech stack, frameworks and service dependencies to see what might becoming outdated or obsolete

2. spend time on your infrastructure to make sure everything is up to date, scripted and version controlled.

3. consider your team's values and principles and work with them to create some playbooks that new and existing employees can follow

4. take a look at all the data flowing into your systems and devise ways to present it to the company so that decisions can be made more easily

Threats to our organization can come from the outside through attacks, collapse or competition. But consider that threats mostly come from inside your company through ignorance, ambiguity and isolation.

Use an hour on Wednesdays to combat this.

Thriving Thursdays

I love Thursdays. And if you're following the CTO's Perfect Week, you should too! You set the pace on Monday, invested in your team on Tuesday and made sure everything was buttoned up on Wednesday.

It is time to focus on the company's need for sales growth and smooth operations. This is a call that the CTO is always ready to answer and I would recommend you pick an hour on Thursdays to do one of the following:

1. find out if there is any script, app or feature that will make someone's life in the company easier and have your team build them a small prototype

2. work with customer experience or support to find out what your customers' needs are and how your technology is changing their lives

3. sit down with your product people and empathize with the work they are doing to help steer the product ship

4. ask the sales team for some feedback on how you and your development team are doing to help support the cause of the company

Ultimately you preside over a team that is the key to helping your company thrive. Be the cheerleader the company needs you to be.

Friendship Fridays

This is the day that I focus on relationships. Spend at least an hour doing one of the following:

1. stay ahead of the curve by sending a highlights email to your C-Suite shining the spotlight on work that was accomplished this week

2. have your team focus on bringing joy to the rest of the company by tying up loose ends that may have occurred during the week

3. spend some time reaching out to people in your network so as to keep relationships warm for when you need to stand on the shoulders of giants

4. if possible, take care of your mental health and have an extended lunch with a colleague, play a round of golf, go bowling or do something with your colleagues to show them that you are indeed a mere mortal :)

But what do I do with all the other hours in my day?

Do what needs to be done of course! The ad hoc needs remain and you need to be great at getting all the random work done. But consider that over time, the one hour of dedicated, themed work could turn into two. And perhaps even three. Or maybe four?

Feel free to expand your CTO’s Perfect Week to more hours in your day. There is a whole host of playbooks you can keep yourself busy with as documented by the CTO Levels™ Framework.

It starts with 15 minutes

Here’s what you can do to move out of your current rut. Forget about the one hour chunks if that seems too intimidating.

Take a look at your calendar do the following:

1. Insert one 15 minute block into your Monday and call it "Momentum Mondays". In the description simply write, "What obstacles stand in our way of delivering tech with speed?". Use the 15 minutes to write down your ideas, some research and perhaps some Slack messages with some of your team members.

2. Insert one 15 minute block into your Tuesday and call it "Teaming Tuesdays". In the description ask yourself, "What capabilities do we not have today that we are definitely going to need in the next 12 months?". Do some research, talk to some friends and write this stuff down.

3. Insert another 15 minute block into your Wednesday and call it "Watchful Wednesdays". In the description write, "What are potential attack surfaces at my company that could be exploited?". Go buck wild with your imagination and think about all the different ways your company could be exploited. Write that down.

4. Insert a 15 minute block into your Thursday and call it, "Thriving Thursdays". In the description write, "What would make my sales people really happy today?". Do your best to have empathy for all the people in your company that are non-technical. What do they need from you to be successful in their jobs?

5. Finally add a 15 minute block into your Friday and call it, "Friendship Fridays". In the description write, "Who can I reach out to today with a curious mind and an open heart?".

It would be really great if you could send your C-Suite an update on your developer team's accomplishments, but also think about your network and people you haven't spoken to in a long time. Usually I just scroll through my very old emails to find those lost connections.

This is how to get started. 15 minutes. Remember that eventually you'll want to get to those 4 items I listed in the previous section. But for now, just to get you going, follow the 15 minute steps.

You should feel a shift happening in the way you CTO your company. Let's start this Monday. You in?