The CTO Transition
- Market and business model
- External technical signals
- Power map and tensions
- Outcomes and authority
- Resources and constraints
- Success criteria
- Listening tour
- Money, change and incident flows
- Hypotheses with evidence
- One or two systemic bets
- A first result that earns trust
- Core of the strategy
A transition is usually counted from the first working day. For a CTO that is late: by then the company, the task and the people are already chosen. The four phases are linked — weak research weakens the contract, a weak contract hampers diagnosis, and rushed diagnosis leads to the wrong changes.
−30 — researching the market, the business model and the map of tensions, where interviews work as a mutual check. 00 — the commit point where expectations become a mutual contract. 30 — diagnosis: one question yields four versions of the company, so the map is built by triangulation. 90 — one or two systemic bets and a first result that earns trust.
The model has two milestone artifacts: a company map by day 30 (people, money, flow, risks, hypotheses, questions) and an updated contract by day 90 (diagnosis, the year ahead, changes, cadence, metrics, team). Red flags are not a separate final phase — they run through the entire transition, and the first result is due by day 90 because the people deciding about you are observers, not assessors of how well you are learning.
Start the clock a month before day one: study the business model, external technical signals and the power map while you can still walk away.
At the commit point fix a mutual contract: outcomes, authority, resources, constraints and success criteria.
Deliver a company map by day 30 and an updated contract by day 90, and handle red flags as they appear rather than at the end.