There is a difference between being good at the CTO job and being good at the CTO role.
The job is everything that is required to deliver real results: hiring great people, building great software, buying the right things, defining strategy and doing everything it takes to execute on that strategy accurately.
The role is the perception of the job you’re doing; how well you play the part.
It is much harder to learn how to excel at the role than it is to learn how to excel at the job. Expectations can change via conversations that happen in conference rooms you’ve never been to, involving people you’ll never meet, who discuss questions and decisions that will never be communicated to you. The CTO role is not a game played with complete information.
Despite that, it is important that we do everything we can to create and fulfill roles that we feel are right for the organization. Sometimes that means forcefully arguing for change, other times diplomatically finding compromise. Sometimes it means spending more time interfacing externally, and sometimes it means putting in extra face time internally. It involves finding the right balance between different stakeholders’ ideas of what the company needs, which are very often mutually exclusive.
