What requirements should the Chief Technology Officer meet?

Question

Project management

In your opinion, what requirements should be met, what experience and knowledge should a competent Chief Technology Officer have to create a new product from scratch?

Answer 1

Product to product is different. For example, it is important how critical the quality of the code is for this product, the level of the entire team, who the users are (for example, if the product is for IT specialists), the estimated team size, the use of the latest developments, etc.
CTO, as a dry abstract manager with basic HR skills, and an understanding of the differences between waterfall and scrum - I don’t think that this is enough in practice. CTO must be at least in some areas of technology ahead of the team, also under his responsibility is the architecture, and all critical areas of the system.
If you start a product from scratch, you can expect the team to be small in the early stages, so it’s more like a teamlead who will take all the development into his own hands and create a team, and then organically grow into a CTO.

Answer 2

It really depends on the scale of the project. Somewhere you need more technical experience, somewhere managerial.
And the requirements in general are as follows:
1. Know modern approaches to the development of software architecture and be able to apply them in practice.
2. Be able to collect product requirements and validate them.
3. Be able to delegate tasks and control their execution.
4. Own project management. At a minimum, know how the waterfall or scrum methodologies differ and understand in which cases which methodology to apply.
5. Basic HR skills are also needed. CTOs need to be able to select people they feel comfortable working with and who can get the job done.
A CTO dealing directly with development is appropriate only in a startup at an early stage. In other cases, the task of SRT is to manage the development process.