This month I joined two discussions – one was about hiring and managing technical leaders, and the other brainstormed cost-effective approaches to PR.
The short take-away CTO messages:
- If there’s no technical co-founder, don’t rush to hire CTO if it’s possible to build “low-code/no-code” solutions.
- CTO should be able to bridge the gap between dev and executive.
- The smaller the company, the more hands-on their skill set must be; a hiring a CTO from a much larger firm may be bad news.
- Remember that a CTO must be able to train managers and maybe devs. “People Skills” are important too, both as management coaches and also as technical coaches.
- They should have a programming skill level that big companies call “Principal”, which means basically being able to either solve any problem or find a solution to any problem.
And for PR:
- Getting media coverage is about building relationships with the people whose beat includes your industry. Find them and offer help with whatever they’re working on; you might get cited.
- Subscribe to HARO (“Help a Reporter Out”), to get free notifications of journalists looking for input to current articles. It’s a lot of work to keep up, but the opportunities are real.
