Top CTO Challenges for 2019

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.
We received over 250 responses that provides a pretty good insight into the top CTO challenges.

The rating scale was 1-5 with:

1. Not a challenge
2. A small challenge
3. Somewhat a challenge
4. Definitely a challenge
5. 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?