Eric Ries on The Startup CTO

I’m moving to another organization with a more entrepreneurial and startup orientation to activism. Been thinking a lot about how this will change my job focus and have been really impressed with Eric Ries and the five things he thinks startups CTOs need to focus on and his canonical, “The CTO’s primary job is to make sure the company’s technology strategy serves its business strategy.”

• Platform selection and technical design
• Seeing the big picture (in graphic detail)
• Provide options
• Find the 80/20 (understand the objective and then give it for 20% of the cost)
• Grow technical leaders (and technical skills of the organization)
• Own the development methodology (it decides what we can do and what we need to do)