Leadership
The first 90 days as a CTO
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Taking on a CTO role, whether for the first time or the fifth, tends to compress a lot of judgment into a very short window. The organization is watching for signal. The board wants confidence without overreach. And the engineering team is quietly deciding whether this is someone worth trusting with hard problems.
Resist the urge to decide everything early
The instinct in the first weeks is to have an opinion on everything — architecture, process, tooling, org structure. Most of that instinct should be suppressed. Early opinions formed without context are expensive to walk back, and walking them back costs more credibility than waiting would have.
A more durable approach: spend the first month building an accurate model of how the organization actually works, not how the org chart says it works. Where do decisions really get made? Where does work quietly stall? Who do people go to when something is genuinely broken?
Find the two or three decisions that can't wait
Not everything can wait, though. Some decisions — a failing vendor relationship, a critical hire, a system on the edge of falling over — are already on the clock before the CTO walks in the door. Part of the job in the first 90 days is separating those from the much longer list of things that merely feel urgent.
A rough filter
- Will the cost of waiting compound weekly, or is it flat?
- Does only the CTO have the authority to unblock it?
- Would a reasonable outside observer consider it obviously overdue?
If a decision doesn't clear that bar, it can usually wait until there's enough context to make it well.
Build trust with engineering before asking anything of them
Credibility with an engineering organization is earned specifically, not generally. Being technically strong in the abstract doesn't transfer trust automatically — showing up to the right conversations, asking sharp questions, and being visibly fair when things go wrong does.
The first 90 days are less about proving technical range and more about demonstrating judgment under incomplete information — because that is, in fact, most of the job afterward too.