Founders Series Vol 1: Rethinking the CTO

I keep having a version of the same conversation with founders, and I’m having it more and more. It usually starts somewhere practical: I want to build product quicker, my competitors are doing it cheaper with fewer people, how do we do that? And it naturally leads somewhere else: well, what is our senior engineering leader actually doing now?

Because what I’m hearing is that the job has changed underneath them. They’re not scaling multiple teams across multiple projects the way they used to. They’re bringing in AI, learning it, embedding it, and that has quietly taken over a big part of their day. So the honest question a lot of founders are now sitting with is: what is the role of the CTO now?

A couple of years ago, a CTO’s value was largely throughput and control. Ship more, manage the engineers shipping it, own the architecture, keep the roadmap honest. And keep those engineers happy, in role, promoted, their careers developing. Not that they didn’t want to be doing the work, but keeping good people and growing them was a real, underrated part of the job. Headcount was the lever. More features meant more people, and the CTO’s job was to hire them, point them, and unblock them.

I truly believe that equation is breaking.

AI hasn’t replaced engineers, but it has changed what leverage looks like. What I’m hearing from execs is that they believe a small team with mainly senior engineers and good judgment now outbuilds a large team with average judgment. The bottleneck has shifted from “how much can we produce” to “are we building the right thing, can we trust it, and how few people do we need to ship it”. And sometimes, if I’m honest about what I’m hearing, how cheaply. That isn’t a coding problem. It’s a judgment problem, and judgment doesn’t scale by adding bodies.

So the CTOs I speak to are spending less time in the executive seat and more time building, and teaching AI to build. In my opinion the role has changed completely. It’s moving into something that sits between a principal engineer and an architect: hands-on, technical, close to the work. And this is exactly where I see founders get caught out. They’ve got a big, CTO-level salary sitting on the balance sheet, but the person attached to it isn’t necessarily in the right role any more.

That shift has knock-on effects right across the team. Three of them come up again and again.

You may not need the team you thought you needed. The instinct when things are working is to scale the engineering org. But if three sharp people plus good tooling do what ten used to, hiring ten isn’t ambition, it’s drag. More people means more coordination, more management, more surface area for things to go wrong. What I’m seeing in the best technical orgs right now is a deliberate choice to stay small and pay up for judgment.

You’re hiring for a different profile. In my opinion, the leader who was brilliant at running a big delivery team isn’t automatically the one who thrives when the team is small, senior and AI-augmented. You’re looking for taste, decision-making, and the confidence to say “we don’t need to build that”. Those are harder to interview for than “can you code”, and easy to miss if your process is still built for the old role.

And the leadership layer can start to thin out. This is the part founders find hardest to hear. In a lot of the teams I’m seeing, it’s the tech leads and team leads who are actually running the teams day to day. The CTO, in some ways, becomes redundant in that classic top-of-engineering role. What I’m watching happen is that they shift sideways, to look after QA, DevOps and IT for example, while the core engineering team runs, in some ways, in its own silo.

None of this is a reason to panic, or to stop hiring CTOs. It’s a reason to hire deliberately. Before you open that next role, I think it’s worth asking:

• Is this a headcount problem, or a judgment problem?
• Is our CTO set up to lead a small, senior team, or just to manage a big one?
• Are we interviewing for the role as it is now, or the role as it was in 2022?

The founders I think will get this right won’t have the biggest engineering teams. They’ll have the sharpest, best-led small ones. And increasingly, the CTO’s job is to build that, not to be the tenth pair of hands.

If you’re rethinking what technical leadership should look like as you scale, that’s exactly the kind of people and org question I love getting stuck into early. In my experience it’s almost always cheaper to design the team you want than to unpick the one you drifted into.

Enjoyed reading this article? What would you like to see next? Leave a comment below.

Related reading: what a fractional HR director & CHRO actually does, and what a fractional HR director costs in the UK.

This is part of the Founders Series: the questions that keep you up. Next: Vol 2: Why the goal of fractional HR is to make yourself redundant.