Book launch – Executive Engineering now available
I’ve spent the last two years distilling my decades of startup experience into a book. It’s now available for purchase
A preview of the first chapter is below
Your company might run out of money.
This is a foundational truth of business and a reason for your CEO’s restless nights. Your job, as CTO, is to help remove your CEO’s worry and to ensure your engineers take the least time to deliver the maximum value.
Some lucky startups do everything wrong and still have revenue. Trying to copy their internal processes is useful only if we’ve also got their luck. For most of us, at most companies, even doing everything right may end with us closing our doors. Therefore every executive needs to ensure their function of the company costs less than the value it delivers. If we can’t do this, we’re not yet operating at the executive level; we’re just a really senior manager.
Doing this is hard for executives of any function but it’s super hard for whoever leads Engineering. The work that Engineering does only results in revenue after it passes through many layers of abstraction and ultimately through Sales, Marketing and Customer Support. So even identifying the value that Engineering provides is a herculean task, to say nothing of trying to increase it.
And yet, that’s the job. To ensure Engineering is delivering for the company and to prove that to some degree. Enough for the CEO and your peer executives to not worry if you’ve got this handled.
You might be tempted to borrow the habits of large, rich, established companies here. If you have a monopoly on hardware or ad publishing or defense contracts then it’s best to use the practices entrenched at Apple, Google, and Microsoft, respectively. If not, you’ll need to be much more careful about understanding what you’re doing, what you’re not doing, how it connects to the business plan, and how it’s all going at any given time.
