I loved every single job I had and I am very grateful for such a luck. Deep in technical details at Systinet. Steep enterprise software learning curve at Mercury/HP. Immersed in building trust and relationships at CA Technologies to grow their mainframe R&D site in Prague. I didn’t know anything about mainframes, but I loved the leadership trainings I got. I learned to appreciate the value of HR. My second gig at HP’s cloud automation business was such a ride! Aside the joy for working with amazing leaders, I think this job gave me the first real exposure to how technology and GTM leaders work together. GoodData allowed me to extend my experiences with leading Product, Security, Cloud operations, Customer support, Customer success/Account management, Revops, Inside sales, Services, Demand gen and so on. It taught me how important it is to keep these various functions aligned behind the company goals.
Many different products, wonderful people, teams, geographies, cultures, engineering methodologies, customers and their issues, mood swings, and a lots of fun.
The concept of the “First Team”, a team of your peers rather than the organization you manage or your direct reports, is widely accepted. This concept becomes increasingly relevant as you take on more senior roles. However, most engineering leadership books and articles focus primarily on managing inside your team. They cover topics such as CI/CD, Scrum, ShapeUp, RICE, reducing technical debt, testing, organizing on-call duty, managing change, setting up OKRs, creating an architecture roadmap, interviews, … All insightful, inspiring, definitely worth reading and learning from. Therefore, there’s no need to repeat or elaborate on these subjects, especially considering I couldn’t present them any better anyway.
Instead, I will focus on sharing my thoughts on how to be an effective technology leader within your first team. How to discuss, create, and maintain product strategy with sales, marketing, and finance so that it stays aligned with ever changing GTM? How can engineering contribute to marketing? What innovation experiments actually support your business in short term? How to spot misalignment among teams? If your startup is under 100 headcount, you probably don’t face the above questions frequently if at all. Otherwise, I hope you will find this blog relevant and worth your while.
CTO, CPO, COO 