What Makes A Great Tech Leader or CTO!

Super deep discussion with Niklas Herriger/8 Bit Coaching, Tommy Krul/Super Evil Megacorp, and Avinash Pandey/LILA Games

Dec 13, 2021

We live in a complicated world with new innovations, technologies, processes, and best practices emerging every day.

As technology has become a core driver for sustainable competitive advantage, the CTO and tech leadership at companies have become increasingly critical for success.

The technology leadership role, in particular, requires additional challenges relative to other roles in that:

High Impact: Technology choices and execution can have a critical impact on the success of a product
Required Skills: Tech leaders require a broad set of skills around not only technology but management, leadership, communication, and strategic thinking
Frequent Changes: The technology landscape changes so often with continuous changes in architectures, best practices, vendor capabilities, etc. making technology decisions very difficult
Personality Conflict: Many great technical experts do not have the social skills or personality often required from a manager or leader, thereby presenting an additional, and sometimes, impossible challenge

What Makes A Great Tech Leader?

Given the criticality of this position for any company, I decided to dive deeper into what we should be looking for in a tech leader or CTO.

What follows is an in-depth discussion on how technical leads at gaming companies can become great!

This may be one of the deepest and most insightful conversations for this newsletter yet, so don’t miss it.

A super far-ranging conversation from the scope of work, biggest problems, transitioning from individual contributor to manager, how to spend day to day, biggest lessons learned, and more…