No Bullshit CTO / Tech Lead Guide
This is a comprehensive guide designed for current and aspiring CTOs. What I aimed with this guide is to bridge the gap in traditional engineering education by focusing on “real-world” stuff that you have to deal with on a daily basis. The guide covers a wide range of topics, from understanding the role of a CTO, to effectively managing remote teams, embracing hacker culture, conducting efficient meetings, and dealing with technical debt. It also includes insights on deadlines, estimations, documentation, mentoring, and managing challenging engineers.
🏄 I've been leading product development for the better part of the decade — from embedded software to mobile apps to banking services — and throughout this time, I've made many mistakes (and learned from them, doh!), which might be helpful to you.
As a software engineer, I imagine you were never taught the art of taking things under control and delivering a product, at least I didn’t learn this at university. It was mostly about bits and bytes and writing assembly by hand. If this isn’t enough, in real world all your team members tend to be incredibly smart, analytical, opinionated, and ambitious. You know, the standard engineering types, the ones who are hard to deal with.
I’d like to fix this and help you become a better manager, a good leader, and a good CTO. I have experience growing my own company from zero to multiple cross-functional teams working as one big, well-oiled development machine. Most of the stuff in the series comes from my personal encounters with the issues described. I had to learn things on the fly.
💸 Buy the guide
The guide is called 185 196 208 221 257 Pages of No Bullshit Guide for CTOs / Tech Leads. As you can see the book is being continuously improved. I’ve created print-friendly PDF/EPUB/AZW3 version of the book, fully-unencrypted, so you can read it wherever you want, even in your terminal. Updated and edited with new information in April 2024
You can buy it here for 39$.
Why should I buy it?
Reasonable question. I’m not a sales guy, but I can tell you the value that you will get is worth far more than a few cups of Starbucks coffees.
If you’re tired of the weird, vague, sugar-coated advice that you find on the internet and want the real deal on what it takes to be a semi-successful CTO, this guide is definitely going to be useful. I’m not here to feed you any usual fluff. I’ve been coding for over a decade and leading teams as a CTO for more than six years. My journey hasn’t been a walk in the park — and that’s exactly what I talk about — my mistakes, my learnings, my experience.
Learn from my mistakes, and buy the book. Also full refund if you don’t like the book. No questions asked.
Is this the right book for you?
This book is NOT for you if:
- ❌ You just want to be a coder and are fine with your current professional development. (Happy for you btw!)
- ❌ You’re looking for some silver bullet with guaranteed results. (I’m pretty confident that the book will help you, but I can’t guarantee it)
- ❌ You don’t have any prior IT knowledge. There are other books for people just starting out in software engineering, I don’t think this specific book will be of help to you unless you at least know one programming language already.
This book is for you if
- ✅ You’re a (current/potential/future) technical founder who wants to level-up their game in 2024
- ✅ You’re already confident in your coding skills and want to expand your comfort bubble beyond simple Jira tasks.
- ✅ You’re studying Software Engineering and what to know how it works in the real world.
- ✅ You got feedback from your manager that your soft skills need to improve and you want to become better at understanding the whole thing.
- ✅ You understand that this is just a book and not a replacement for actual work that you’ll need to put in to improve your skills
You can buy it here. Money back if you don’t like the book, no questions asked.
Scaling anything related to people resources is quite fun once you get the hang of it. It’s finding the right talent, making sure they stay, making sure they are challenged and not bored, and ensuring the teams stay productive and on the right course. As well as building the right things at the right time. Sounds like quite a challenge. It is, but with the tools that I offer in this guide, you’ll be able to get the hang of it quickly.
Hope you have fun reading this.
Cheers,
Vadim