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The
LA CTO Forum recently conducted a survey to find out what our Chief Technology Officer (CTO) members saw as their biggest challenges heading into 2019.
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We received over 250 responses that provides a pretty good insight into the top CTO challenges.
The rating scale was 1-5 with:
- Not a challenge
- A small challenge
- Somewhat a challenge
- Definitely a challenge
- Keeps me up at night
We provide both an Average and a Scaled Rating that gives much higher weight to 4s and 5s and discounts 1s and 2s.
Here are the Top CTO Challenges for 2019 sorted based on scaled rating - biggest challenges first.
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Challenge | Average | Scaled |
Recruiting, Hiring, Sourcing and Onboarding | 3.53 | 0.48 |
Appropriate Security for my Organization | 3.49 | 0.47 |
As a tech leader, where do I spend my time | 3.45 | 0.46 |
Personal Career Planning | 3.15 | 0.40 |
Business Metrics for CTOs / engineering | 3.20 | 0.39 |
Motivation of engineering team | 3.21 | 0.39 |
Tech Vision and Tech Roadmaps | 3.19 | 0.38 |
Talent Management, Career Development of team | 3.24 | 0.38 |
Organization and Structure of engineering team | 3.15 | 0.37 |
Managing Technical Debt | 3.18 | 0.36 |
Executive Presence | 3.06 | 0.36 |
Architecture Decision Making / Reviews when you are not the architect | 3.11 | 0.35 |
How to find, explore and choose new technologies | 3.03 | 0.34 |
Capacity Planning and Resource Forecasting | 3.06 | 0.34 |
Testing / Test Automation | 3.05 | 0.33 |
Technical Metrics | 3.04 | 0.33 |
Relationship with CEO | 2.88 | 0.33 |
Relationship with CxO Peers (Marketing, Sales, Service, Operations) | 2.88 | 0.31 |
Management of DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering | 2.95 | 0.31 |
Collaborative Decision Making | 2.95 | 0.31 |
Integrating Offshore, Remote and In-House Engineering | 2.81 | 0.30 |
Effective Agile Management, e.g., Flow Efficiency, Sprint Boundaries | 2.90 | 0.30 |
Working with Product Management | 2.85 | 0.30 |
Delegation & Prioritization | 2.87 | 0.29 |
Sourcing and Managing Remote engineers | 2.77 | 0.29 |
Engineering Management Team (Direct Reports) | 2.82 | 0.28 |
Sourcing and Managing Offshore engineering | 2.62 | 0.26 |
Complex Technology Partnerships & Vendor Negotiation | 2.68 | 0.25 |
CapEx/OpEx optimization | 2.65 | 0.25 |
It's not surprising that
Recruiting and Security are at the top. I was a little more surprised by topics such as "Where do I spend my time" and Personal Career Planning near the top.
Similarly, I was surprised that "Working with Product Management" and "Effective Agile Management" were not bigger challenges for most members. These have perennially been a much bigger challenge. Maybe we CTOs are improving.
We are looking forward to interesting sessions in 2019 on this topic. I would expect that we'll see some of these discussed on CTO Universe as well.
Anything surprise you? Or something that we missed?