Think Like a CTO: A Baseline for Small Companies

Sasha Shevchenko is responsible for T-Bank's ecosystem of non-financial services. He chose Think Like a CTO when an expanding remit required a view of the entire role. The book covers fifteen areas, but it draws on turnarounds in small companies and often remains an introductory survey.

The CTO role depends on company stage, scale, and the leader's background. Engineers may lack communication skills, managers may lack technical depth, and the necessary mix usually spans a team. The discussion covers the first fifteen to one hundred days, audits without premature fixes, expectations, and managing upward.

The conversation moves through budgets, change, strategy, hiring, and performance reviews. The speakers supplement brief advice with team life cycles, strategy cascading, initiative portfolios, architecture decision records, and engineering metrics. They find several technical chapters particularly shallow.

The final topics are contracts, documentation, security, operations, and company growth. The key lesson concerns succession: leaders must develop successors early or they cannot delegate domains or move up a level. The book works as a map of CTO responsibilities when readers test its assumptions and explore each topic through deeper sources.