The No-Bullshit Guide for CTOs
Everything I know about being a CTO — compiled into one book. No frameworks, no corporate jargon, no "it depends." Just practical advice from 8+ years of leading engineering teams, making mistakes, and figuring out what actually works.
Written over 300 hours from real experience building products, growing teams from 3 to 50, and navigating the chaos that nobody warns you about when you take on a technical leadership role.
268
Pages
300+
Hours of writing
156+
Copies sold
100%
Money-back guarantee
This is for you if...
- You just got promoted to a tech lead or CTO role and feel in over your head
- You're a senior engineer thinking about moving into management
- You're a startup founder who's also the technical co-founder
- You want practical advice, not academic theory
Not for you if...
- You want a step-by-step career playbook
- You're looking for management frameworks and methodologies
- You prefer polished corporate language over blunt honesty
- You're already a seasoned CTO with 10+ years experience
What's inside
Understanding the role
What a CTO actually does (spoiler: it's not just coding). The difference between a CTO at a 5-person startup vs a 500-person company. How to figure out what your company needs from you right now.
Building & managing teams
Hiring the right people, firing the wrong ones, running effective 1-on-1s. How to build a team that doesn't fall apart when you go on vacation. Remote teams, culture, and all the soft stuff that turns out to be the hard stuff.
Technical leadership
Code reviews that actually improve code. Technical debt — when to pay it, when to ignore it. Architecture decisions you'll regret and how to avoid them. Documentation that people actually read.
The hard conversations
Dealing with difficult engineers. Saying no to your CEO. Managing up, managing down, managing sideways. Deadlines, estimations, and why everyone hates both. Postmortems that lead to actual change.
Processes that work
Running efficient meetings (or better, canceling them). Agile without the dogma. Setting up proper CI/CD, monitoring, and incident response. The boring infrastructure that makes everything else possible.
Growing as a leader
Mentoring engineers, building a learning culture, dealing with imposter syndrome (yes, CTOs get it too). How to stay technical while spending most of your time in meetings. Work-life balance — or at least trying to have one.
100% money-back guarantee
If you read the guide and don't find it useful, email me and I'll refund you immediately. No questions asked, no awkward back-and-forth. I'd rather give your money back than have you feel like you wasted it.
Get the guide — $39PDF · EPUB · AZW3 — read on any device
About the author
Vadim Kravcenko
CTO for 8+ years. Co-founded a 50-engineer digital agency. Built seojuice.com to 10K MRR. I've hired and fired, shipped and failed, scaled and burned out. This book is everything I wish someone had told me when I first became a CTO.
120,000+ people read my blog every month. If you've read any of my articles, this book goes deeper on every topic — with the kind of honest, no-bullshit advice I can't always fit into a blog post.
Ready to level up?
268 pages. One-time purchase. No subscription, no upsell. Just the book.
Get the guide — $39