Stop Talking About Tech Stacks in Executive Meetings

Technical leadership is a journey of constant evolution.

Recently, I sat down with Adam Horner, a renowned CTO coach who has worked with hundreds of technical leaders worldwide, to explore the critical transition from technical expert to strategic leader.

If you're showing up to executive meetings focused on your tech stack and implementation details, you're missing the point entirely.

The Technical Leader's Context-Switching Problem

One of the biggest challenges technical leaders face is what I call the "dog with a bone" syndrome.

When you're deep in a technical problem, your brain doesn't easily let go.

You show up to meetings still thinking about that code issue you were debugging earlier.

I've been there.

You're physically present in the executive meeting, but mentally you're still solving that performance bottleneck. Meanwhile, your CFO is presenting crucial financial metrics, and you're missing critical business context.

The cost? You can't effectively translate business needs back to your engineering team or surface critical engineering concerns to the executive team.

The Four Stages of CTO Evolution

During my conversation with Adam, he shared a brilliant framework that perfectly captures the growth journey of technical leaders. Having lived through each stage myself, I can attest to how crucial understanding this evolution is for your career.

1. Founding Engineer (The Builder)

This is where many of us start - I know I did at 23.

You're the one writing the code, building the MVP, and making all the technical decisions.

The focus is narrow but deep: get the product working, keep the servers running, and ship features fast.

While this hands-on experience is invaluable, it's also where many technical leaders get stuck, remaining too deep in the code for too long.

2. Expert CTO (The Technical Authority)

At this stage, you've built a small team, but you're still the go-to person for all technical decisions.

You have deep expertise in your stack and architecture, and the team relies heavily on your technical guidance.

The challenge? You're probably still coding too much and not spending enough time on strategy and team development.

I see many CTOs get comfortable here because it plays to their technical strengths.

3. Managing CTO (The Team Builder)

This is where the real leadership challenge begins.

You're managing multiple teams, dealing with product-market fit, and starting to focus more on processes and people than code.

The key shift here is learning to trust your team's technical decisions and focusing on building strong engineering leaders beneath you.

It's about scaling yourself through others.

4. Executive CTO (The Strategist)

The final evolution is becoming a true business leader who happens to have deep technical expertise.

At this level, you're focused on how technology enables business strategy, participating in board-level discussions about market opportunities, and thinking quarters or years ahead.

Your technical knowledge becomes a lens through which you view business problems, not your primary focus.

Between stages two and three lies what Adam calls "the CTO chasm" – a challenging transition period where most technical leaders struggle.

It's where you must develop crucial leadership skills that weren't part of your engineering background: strategic thinking, executive communication, and organizational design.

The most important lesson I've learned? Each stage requires deliberately letting go of what made you successful in the previous stage. You have to stop being the hero who jumps in to fix every technical problem and become the leader who builds teams that prevent problems in the first place.

The goal isn't to be the smartest technical person in the room anymore. It's to build and enable teams that can accomplish more than you ever could alone.

Moving Beyond the Hero Complex

The hero mentality is a trap many technical leaders fall into.

Yes, you can swoop in and solve that critical production issue. But every time you do, you're reinforcing the wrong behavior in your organization.

True leadership isn't about being the hero who runs into the fire. It's about building and supporting the team that prevents fires in the first place.

Speaking the Language of Business

One of the hardest truths I've learned as a technical leader: your brilliance with technology means nothing if you can't translate it into business value.

When I first started attending executive meetings, I wanted to talk about our amazing new microservices architecture or our impressive deployment pipeline. Nobody cared.

Here are the three languages every CTO needs to master to make an impact in the C-suite:

1. Product Strategy Language Start with the fundamental question: How are we delivering value to customers? In executive meetings, I've learned to focus on:

• Market feedback about product direction

• Customer usage patterns and pain points

• Feature adoption rates and user engagement

• How technical decisions enable product differentiation

2. Go-to-Market Language Adam shared a crucial insight: your entire engineering approach should align with how you sell. For example:

• In a sales-led organization, demo environments and feature customization might be priorities

• In a product-led company, first-user experience and self-service capabilities take center stage

• Your engineering team needs to understand these differences to make the right technical decisions

3. Business Outcomes Language Transform technical metrics into business impact:

• Instead of discussing code coverage, talk about reduced customer-reported issues

• Rather than detailing microservices architecture, explain how it enables faster market response

• Don't focus on story points; focus on delivered customer value

• Link technical debt discussions to business risk and market agility

The key is becoming bilingual - fluent in both technical and business languages.

As Adam pointed out, this starts with listening. In executive meetings, pay attention to:

• How the CFO discusses financial metrics

• How Sales describes customer objections

• How Marketing talks about market positioning

• How the CEO communicates company vision

When you understand these perspectives, you can frame technical decisions in terms that resonate with the executive team. For instance, instead of requesting budget for a technical refactor, present a plan to reduce time-to-market for new features by 50%.

Remember: Your engineering team might build the most elegant solution in the world, but if it doesn't align with business strategy or nobody knows about it, that technical excellence is wasted. Your job is to ensure every technical decision supports clear business outcomes.

In my experience, the most effective CTOs spend more time translating between business and technical contexts than they do making technical decisions. They're the bridge that ensures engineering efforts align with business strategy and that business strategy accounts for technical realities.

The Power of Empathy

One fundamental truth Adam emphasized: You have to build empathy throughout your engineering organization. Every engineer on your team needs to understand:

• Who uses the product

• How they use it

• Why they choose (or leave) our solution

• What frustrations they experience

Great technical leaders ensure their teams understand they're not just writing code – they're solving real business problems for real users.

The Path Forward

If you're finding yourself stuck in the technical weeds during executive discussions, start by taking control of your calendar. Create space for strategic thinking. Listen intently in executive meetings to understand the business context.

Most importantly, remember that your value as a technical leader isn't in knowing every technical detail – it's in bridging the gap between business needs and technical execution.

The next time you're tempted to dive into technical specifics in an executive meeting, ask yourself:

"How does this support our business objectives?"

That's the conversation your fellow executives want to have.

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