What Kind of CTO Are You Becoming?
Most CTOs don’t get hired into the role.
They drift into it.
One day you’re the lead engineer, solving hard problems, earning trust with technical execution. Then suddenly, you’re in budget meetings, hiring sprees, and strategy sessions—wondering when you last wrote a line of code that mattered.
And somewhere along the way, you realize: the job you signed up for isn’t the job you’re doing anymore.
That’s not failure. That’s evolution.
But only if you can name where you are… and where you're going next.
The 4 CTO Archetypes I’ve Seen
When I wrote Product Driven, I started mapping out the types of engineering leaders I kept running into.
Not titles. Not org charts.
Mindsets.
Here’s the framework I came up with:
Technical CTO: The deep technologist. You’re the architect. The debugger. The person who makes the system work when no one else can.
Operational CTO: The executor. You’re building systems, scaling teams, managing people, solving day-to-day delivery problems.
Strategic CTO: The partner to the CEO. You’re thinking about vision, business models, market moves, and aligning tech bets to company goals.
Product CTO: The user-first builder. You’re sitting at the intersection of customer pain and engineering possibility.
Every strong CTO has some of these. A few might master two. Maybe three.
But here’s the hill I’ll die on: nobody is all four.
And the real trap? Believing you should be.
Most of Us Start in One Lane
I started technical. Most CTOs I know did too.
You were the best engineer. The most trusted pair of hands. So when the company needed a tech leader, it was you.
But no one told you the job would become less about systems and more about storytelling. Less about code and more about clearing the way for others.
At some point, the job stops being about being the smartest engineer in the room and starts being about building rooms full of engineers who don’t need you in the middle.
That transition wrecks a lot of people. Especially if you don’t see it coming.
Why So Many CTOs Get Stuck
About half of all startup CTOs get replaced by Series B.
Not because they weren’t smart enough.
But because they didn’t evolve fast enough.
Your company grows. The complexity grows. Suddenly you’re leading a 30-person team, your CEO wants to raise a round, and you’re still deep in technical debt cleanup.
You need a roadmap for becoming the kind of CTO your company needs next.
The CTO Levels Framework
On a recent Product Driven episode, I talked with Kathy Keating, co-founder of the CTO Levels framework and author of the book Liquid.
Her model hit me hard. It lays out how CTOs evolve across levels—and how most of us “tap out” at a certain point if we don’t actively grow.
She breaks it down into 4 Sentinels:
Speed: how fast and lean your team executes
Shield: your technical architecture, security, and resilience
Stretch: your ability to keep growing with the business
Sales: your communication and influence across the company
Every CTO is strong in a few. Few are strong in all.
Sound familiar?
Her work gave language to what I’d felt for years: that our job changes radically as the company scales, and most leaders never get a map for the road ahead.
So…What Kind of CTO Are You Becoming?
Are you defaulting to the thing you’re already good at?
Are you hiding in the work you know how to do?
Or are you stretching into the uncomfortable parts of the role. The ones that feel like you’re faking it, but probably matter most?
You don’t have to be all four archetypes.
You do have to know where you are today. And decide where you need to grow next.
Because the CTO role isn’t static.
It’s a moving target.
The only way to keep up is to evolve on purpose.
🎧 Want the full conversation with Cathy Keating and a deeper breakdown of the CTO Levels framework?
Catch this week’s episode of the Product Driven podcast. We go deep on what makes a strategic tech leader, and how to grow into the one your company needs next.