How to grow from Team Lead to CTO?

Question

Work organization

Hello!
I have this question, my resume works well for a vacancy as a Team Lead, but when I send for a CTO position, I go through several successful stages of a technical interview and in front of the founders of companies, but at the last stage the decision is not in my favor.
I understand that I need to work on my resume, take advanced courses, improve my project management skills.
How do you think how to get through this stage of becoming a CTO? What to focus on, what new knowledge, skills and abilities should be acquired?
I would be grateful for any advice, personal experience, how to present myself correctly for this position and grow.
Sincerely,
Roman

Answer 1

Need
1. Have a good understanding of how to scale applications, both vertically and horizontally. Both for writing and for reading. Implement various science-intensive things as needed.
2. Understand the shortcomings of all existing solutions and how they can be resolved. As a rule, 80% of everything is banal CRUD, and in most cases these are tons of copy-post code ala "one plate - one controller" without 3-4 normal form of the database model. From the browser side, there are also a lot of nuances. You need to understand all these problems, some of them try to solve - to attract people and create new projects and communities.
3. Maintain reusability, relatively simple maintenance and implementation of all system components, implement SOA with good test coverage, without neglecting profiling, fuzzing and load tests. You need to profile everything and everything from the very beginning of work.
4. Correctly prioritize and produce a detailed development of all requirements. A lot of time is wasted due to incorrectly formulated requirements and poorly selected tools.
5. Understand how to motivate existing staff, try to understand what motivates people to work and what their internal goals are, as a rule, money does not motivate people. Treating everyone like "donkeys and carrots" is very stupid.
6. Understand possible cognitive distortions and psychological compensatory processes in the existing leadership and team, be a key link on the way to their resolution.
7. Delegate your own powers correctly - sometimes you won’t be enough for all this, you need to give others the opportunity to solve all the above issues and take the initiative.
8. Hire and work with people who are interested in the development and prospects of your product, and not just "do what they say for the money" - this way you will not be able to build a truly competitive product.
9. Inspiration is not eternal - people cannot always do the same thing, you need to understand that it is better for a programmer to feel like an artist than a butcher in a fish processing workshop.
10. Understand that job titles should not decide how the team will work - people should be interchangeable, and they should be able to analyze and offer solutions to problems for others. The more opinions, the more precisely the requirements are formulated and the tools are selected. Going in cycles in specialization and positions - your BusFactor will always be 1-2, and in a difficult moment it will play a cruel joke on you and your team.
If you have a similar experience of organizing - it will not matter to you the name of your position, you will simply create an office in which everyone will be pleased to work. And if they don’t give you CTO, or something like that, I don’t even know what kind of cockroaches there are in the heads of the CEO and stakeholders.
In general, the situation is that 80% of projects work without sane management and an individual approach, do not have a viable business model and MVP, often sell vacuum, produce "mushroom managers" and "gull managers".
It is worth dealing with the existing anti-patterns and finding them at the current places of work, looking for ways to resolve them and trying to explain why such activities are destructive.
ps I was offered CTO, but in practice everything is so that everything has to be organized from scratch without any guarantees of normal cooperation.

Answer 2

I think they look at whether the candidate has worked in this position.
That is, they take a person with already existing experience.