I thought becoming CTO would mean more engineering. It has meant much less, and the part of the role I love most has no code in it at all.
Before this seat I led the team at Linum Labs building 80eight, and I led it from inside the work rather than above it. I cleared blockers, shaped fixes, made the calls on how things got built, and wrote my fair share. By then I was more conductor than soloist, though I never stopped being in the music. I knew what I was good at, and I did plenty of it.
Becoming CTO of 80eight changed the question I spend my day answering. It stopped being "how do we build this" and became "are we allowed to build this, and is it the right thing for the business at all." It is a harder question, and I find I like it more.
The first surprise was compliance. In fintech the binding constraint is rarely whether you can build something. It is whether the rules let you, and what you take on by doing it. A large part of my job now produces no commit and no green test. It is reading regulation closely enough to know which corner of it applies to a specific user flow, then mapping those obligations onto real systems and deciding which good ideas are worth what they cost. Nobody writes that part on the job description, and it turns out to be most of the job. It is also genuinely interesting, once you stop resenting it and start treating it as the puzzle it is.
The second surprise was how much of the role is business rather than technology. I set direction from the tech side, but the direction is a business decision wearing engineering clothes. Over the past stretch I have done more than help engineer the internal systems. I have helped reshape what the business is. That is a stranger and more satisfying sentence to write than it looks. I arrived as the person who builds the machine, and I have ended up helping decide what the machine is for.
To do that well, I went quiet on purpose. Outside of the partners and providers I stay close to, I pulled back most of my outward exposure so I could put everything into driving the team toward a newly defined path. That was a choice, not a retreat, and it paid off. We took the codebase down to its foundations and rebuilt it properly, which cleared out the early-stage problems every young product carries and leveled up what we offer in ways I am proud of.
I want to be precise about who did that. Our lead engineer carried most of the heavy lifting, and I am not saying that to be gracious. The rebuild does not happen without him. My job was to set the direction and then back him all the way, which is most of the role now: find the people who are better than me at the thing, then make sure nothing gets in their way.
That sounds tidy. It is not. The hardest part of the past year has been resisting the pull back toward the editor, because after nearly twelve years with my hands on the keyboard, sitting with a problem I could solve myself and choosing not to is a strange feeling. Sometimes the right move is to let the person closest to the code carry it, and sometimes it is to roll up my sleeves with them for an afternoon. I am still calibrating that line, and I expect to be calibrating it for a long time.
I still build, probably more than people in my seat are expected to, but most of it happens after hours, and if I am honest, not on the personal projects I keep meaning to get back to. It goes into an internal operating system, and into the small chunks that push our newly rebuilt system toward production. The instinct did not die when I stopped coding for a living. It just keeps pointing back at the work.
I am surfacing now for two reasons. The first is selfish in the good way: writing is how I think, and I have a year of hard-won lessons that will be sharper on the page than in my head. The second is that I went heads-down for so long that the people who should know what we are building, and what I have learned building it, mostly do not. So this is me coming up for air, sharing the path so someone a step behind me can move faster, and so the people watching from outside have something honest to read.
I have not solved the CTO thing, and I do not want to. The whole appeal is that it keeps getting harder as I get better at it, which is the kind of work I have always chased. I am just doing it in public now.