88: The CTO Role Has Changed — Why Doing More Isn’t the Answer

[Music] Welcome back to the CTO Playbook, the podcast dedicated to helping CTO's excel. What if the reason your role feels harder right now isn't because you're doing something wrong, but because you're doing something right? What if the discomfort so many CTO's are quietly carrying isn't a signal of struggle, but a signal that the role itself has changed and they've crossed into a new kind of leadership terrain? What I'm describing isn't burnout. It's a transition. In this episode, I want to talk about a feeling I hear again and again from successful CTO's, people who are shipping, hiring, raising and delivering, yet they still say that they're struggling under the weight of the role. Today we're going to unpack why that feeling shows up after success, not before it, why trying harder often makes it worse, and why the most important skill for the modern CTO isn't speed, resilience, or technical depth, but orientation. If you've ever felt like you're moving fast, doing all the right things, yet still not fully sure whether role is taking you next, this episode will give you a new way to understand what's happening, and how to lead through it with far more clarity and calm. I've heard this feeling expressed in a few different ways, but the most common and relatable version of it goes something like this. I can't quite put my finger on it, but everything feels heavier than it used to, not longer hours, not worse teams, not even more responsibility in the obvious sense, just heavier. Decisions feel loaded. Progress feels harder to describe even when plenty is happening. The role feels like it's carrying more meaning, more consequence, more expectation, even when the calendar looks roughly the same, and what's interesting is who is saying this? These aren't struggling CTOs. They're not failing. They're not behind. They're CTOs who raised funding recently, who've shipped major products, who've made excellent senior hires, who are leading organisations that from the outside look healthy and moving forward, and yet when we get into a conversation together, there's often this quite confusion, a sense that effort is still there, but the ease has gone. The momentum exists, but satisfaction is not keeping up. They're moving, but they're not always sure in which direction anymore. If that resonates with you, then hear me out. Because what I want to suggest today is not that something has gone wrong, it's that something has changed, and most CTOs that change, that change is before they really have a language to describe it. I'm your host, Adam Horner. I'm a coach to CTOs from startups, to enterprises helping you lead with clarity, confidence and strategic impact. If you feel like you're figuring it out the hard way, you're definitely not alone. That's why I've created the CTO Playbook, a podcast and platform built, for tech leaders just like you. Explore coaching, cohorts and more at thecTOplaybook.com. Now here's the core idea I want to explore with you today. Everything feels harder because the CTO role has crossed a threshold. And many of us are standing on the other side of it without reorienting ourselves. We're not without skills, we're not without experience, but without recalibrating how we understand the work. This isn't about resilience, it isn't about grit, and it definitely isn't about trying harder. It's about orientation. And to explain that, I want a borrow metaphor that comes up a lot in my own thinking. Navigation. If you've ever done any proper navigation, whether that's orientering, hiking off trail, or even sailing, you'll know this. That before you decide where to go, you have to answer two questions. One, where am I? And two, which way am I facing? And if you skip those steps and just move faster, you don't get progress. You get efficient confusion. And this is exactly what I see happening for many CTOs right now. They're moving, they're active, they're delivering, but the role itself has shifted into terrain that requires a different kind of navigation, and many haven't been given the map. So they default to what used to work. More effort. More output. More urgency, which feels responsible, but quietly makes things worse. Now let's be clear about something. The CTO role has always been hard. There has always been ambiguity. There have always been trade-offs. There has always been accountability for systems that don't behave neatly. That part is not new. What is new is how many forces are acting on the role at the same time, and how little time there is to absorb each one before the next one hits. What used to be a demanding role has become a compound role. Pressure doesn't replace pressure anymore. They stack. And that stacking changes the nature of the work. See, when roles cross that kind of threshold, the solution is not more motion. It's better orientation. So let's name what's actually creating this sense of heaviness. Not as complaints, not as excuses, but as a diagnosis. Because once we can name it, we can work with it. Just like a psychologist tells us to name our emotions. So number one, expectations are moving faster than shared understanding. AI is perhaps the obvious example, but not the only one. Boards and exec teams are excited. They're curious. They're anxious about missing out. And yet, they often don't have a shared mental model for what meaningful progress actually looks like. So the CTO becomes the translator. The sense maker, the person expected to turn possibility into direction. But sometimes before the organization is ready to understand the trade-offs, the gap between excitement and comprehension lands on our desk. That's heavy work. Number two, the scope expanded before the role was re-explained. See, most CTOs didn't come up through strategy roles. We came up through engineering, architecture, delivery, and suddenly the role includes narrative, organizational design, ethics, long-term capability, external credibility. The scope itself isn't wrong. In many cases, it's overdue. But the transition often happens without guidance. The role levels up. The preparation very rarely does. So CTOs feel like they're failing at something that they were never actually trained to do. They're not behind. They're under-oriented. And that creates heavy work. So number three, the time to credibility has collapsed. New CTOs and even existing ones are given less time to listen, less time to diagnose, less time to build context. The expectation is visible movement quickly, which encourages action before clarity. It feels efficient, but it's so expensive. And it adds weight to every decision we take. Number four, technology is both cost and bet. In uncertain markets, technology is seen in two contradictory ways at once. On the one hand, it's a cost to control. And on the other, it's a lever for future advantage. CTOs are expected to reconcile those narratives, often without clear prioritisation from anyone else. Holding that tension is not a technical task. It's an executive one, and it's a heavy one at that. Number five, the surface area of accountability has grown. Security, resilience, data, AI usage, developer experience, architecture health, often without the matching authority. Responsibility is expanded faster than control. And that imbalance is draining and so heavy. Number six, the pace of change exceeds the pace of sense making. There's simply less time now to fully absorb one shift before the next one arrives. Micro services, cloud, crypto, AI, regulation, delivery models, organisational structure, CTOs are expected to operate at the level of principles rather than recipes. And judgment is cognitively expensive. That's not weakness. That's maths. And it adds weight to the odds on every bet we take. So let's pause there for a moment. As you're listening, ask yourself this. And don't rush the answers. Where does the role feel heavier now than it did two years ago? Then it did six months ago, not busier, not loud, you're heavier. That answer matters. So take your time with it. I encourage you to write it down while you think about it. I want to try and bring this to life with a coaching story. As CTO, I started working with recently, smart, capable leader in a growing scale up, objectively successful. New hires, increased delivery. Bigger team. And yet, when he described his experience like this, than on these exact terms, he said, "It feels like the hamster wheel is spinning faster, but the scenery isn't changing." So what did he do? He worked harder. He asked more of the team. He hired more people. All sensible moves in the old terrain. But that feeling didn't go away. Because the problem wasn't speed. It was position and orientation. He was running very efficiently on a treadmill. And this is the crucial distinction. See, when you're on a treadmill, effort, creates exhaustion, watching the TV in front of you creates distraction. When you're navigating terrain, effort creates progress. If you know where you are, and which way you're facing. So he came and asked me about coaching when you can see the symptoms, but not the mechanism. And that's where a lot of CTOs are right now. So here's the reframe that I want you to think about and take away with you, the discomfort, the extra weight, the additional burden you're feeling is not a signal of failure. It's a signal of maturity. It's what happens when the role becomes more abstract, more executive and more consequential before you fully adjusted how you inhabit it. So you haven't lost capability. What you've done is you've outgrown an old operating posture. And this is where navigation matters again. Because when the terrain changes, the answer is not to walk faster, is to stop, check the map, figure out where you are, and reorient yourself. So let's think about what we can do about this. And more follows are not tactics. This is not frameworks. These are postures, ways of standing in the role that reduce friction and increase leverage in this new environment. Think of them as how you hold the compass. So number one, make a transition from answer provider to sense maker. The job is no longer to have the answer. It's to help the organization understand what's actually happening, naming uncertainty, clarifying assumptions and framing trade-offs. When chain yet paces comprehension, sense making is the highest value contribution you can make. You're not behind if you don't have all the answers, but you're leading if you help others understand the question, this is about navigation, not about speed, to transition from scope defender to scope shaper. Right. Leadership is not about absorbing everything. Nor is it about protecting in narrow remit. It's about shaping where your attention and authority matter most are not weaknesses. Then navigation aids for you and everyone else. So everything feels heavy. It's often because nothing has been deliberately excluded. That was big to a CTO recently described as from like this. Instead of painting the detail in the center of the picture, black out the bit around the outside, draw the silhouette first. That's what your boundaries are. Number three, transition from motion to meaningful progress. Activity is seductive. But motion without direction creates fatigue rather than momentum. So define what good looks like and then limit the amount of work that's done in parallel and make the trade offs explicit. These are no longer nice to house. There's a core leadership work in here. In navigation terms, take fewer steps on a better bearing. Number four, transition from heroics to stewardship, heroics, scale stress for you and everyone else. Stewardship scales resilience, especially for everyone else. As a modern CTO, we need to optimize for system health, not for personal effort. And this is where fundamentals quietly win. And where many CTOs finally feel some relief as you get everybody else to carry a share of the weight. Number five, transition from proving value to exercising judgment. So when accountability expands, judgment becomes a key differentiator. Fewer decisions, better decisions. Right. So saying no is no longer defensive. It's responsible because it reduces the load that everyone is expected to carry. And it's often one of the clearest signs of executive maturity. So here's another pause point to write, which of these six postures are you still approaching with your old instincts? And which one, if changed even slightly, would make your role feel lighter. You don't need to fix everything. You need to reorient yourself by just one degree and try to do that every week. So let's return to that navigation metaphor. When people get lost, it's rarely because they're incapable. It's because it didn't stop long enough to check where they were. The CTO role hasn't suddenly become impossible. It become more consequential, more abstract, more strategic, and more human. All these transitions always feel uncomfortable, not because we're failing, but because we're crossing into a more mature version of the role itself. So let's finish with a practical playbook that you can take away, put into practice straight away, not to move faster, but to stand differently. So ask yourself these four questions, which part of my role has evolved from execution to judgment without me explicitly acknowledging it? Number one, number two, where am I still measuring progress against old metrics? Number three, what decisions am I making harder than they need to be by not naming the trade-offs clearly? And then four, where am I running or even sprinting, where I should be navigating? I really encourage you to take pen and paper and write these down or use your favorite editor and write them down, because this is about internal repositioning before you start the external change. And once you've done that, once you've oriented yourself, three small actions, right? narrate the terrain, talk about it. In your next exact meeting or leadership conversation, spend time framing the context before you propose the solutions. And notice how the room responds to that. What you normally find is that extra context reduces complexity. It gives everybody a shared language to speak about the situation with name your boundaries, right? explicitly state where your attention is focused and what is not being prioritized right now. Again, clarity reduces that weight of all that extra stuff. And then try slowing one decision down, choose one complex decision and deliberately make it with more sense making and less urgency and then see what changes in you and in the team. Now, these aren't dramatic moves. They're just orientation adjustments. So if everything feels harder right now, it's not because you're weaker. It's because the work is heavier. The role has matured for all of us who wear the CTO title. The expectations upon us are more executive and the environment is less stable. And that does not mean you need to run faster. It means you need to stand differently. And when you do, when you reorient the role doesn't suddenly become easy, but it does become clearer and clarity is what allow strong leaders to move forward with calm confidence despite the weight. That's what the CTO playbook is here to support. I'll see you next time. Thank you for listening to the whole episode. I appreciate your time. So just before you go, I'd like to ask you for a favor in return for putting together this episode of the CTO playbook for you. Please share the episode with just one person who will appreciate it. Wherever you're listening, whether that is Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or another platform, sharing the episode will help more CTOs find the podcast and enable me to create more great content. Remember that you can find more information on the CTOplaybook.com. Thank you for listening. And I'll see you on the next episode of the CTO playbook.