The Startup CTO's Handbook | Zach Goldberg
Plus, why you need to conduct career history interviews, staying technical when you move to management & how Apple is positioning in the AI race.
This week, host Dan Lines welcomes back Zach Goldberg, CTO and author of the book 'The Startup CTO's Handbook: Essential Skills and Best Practices for High Performing Engineering Teams.’ Zach shares insights from his extensive career as a CTO and his journey in writing a book that condenses the wisdom of numerous other influential works into a single, comprehensive guide.
We explore the three core sections of his book:
Management Fundamentals: Interviewing, Hiring, Performance Management, Budgeting, etc.
Technical Leadership Concepts: Developer Experience, Tech Debt, etc.
Hard Technology Decisions: Pragmatism, Tech Stack, etc.
Zach provides advice for not only CTOs but anyone in a technical leadership position, offering strategies to develop empathy and understanding within technical organizations.
“As a leader, your role is to, in a pragmatic way, evaluate trade offs and understand them regardless of your personal opinions or your team's opinions. What you're looking at now is what's the best fit for my business? What's going to give us the best performance or the most reliability or the fastest time to market? What's most supported?
You decide what actually matters for your business and then have that clear eyed view. Let's go and make the right decision for the company, even if it's not my favorite tool.”
Episode Highlights:
1:59 From Startup CTO to Author and Executive Coach
3:41 The Origin of Best Practices and Genesis of the Handbook
10:25 Why the Startup CTO’s Handbook isn’t just for CTOs
13:02 Part 1: Management Fundamentals Beyond Coding
24:50 Part 2: Technical Leadership Concepts & Developer Experience
30:57 Part 3: Technology Decisions from a Pragmatic Perspective
The Download
The Download is engineering leadership content we’re reading, watching, and attending that we think you might find valuable.
1. Why You Need to Conduct Career History Interviews
“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” also applies when interviewing new candidates. In
’s recent post, she outlines how you can use career history interviews to assess interviewees’ mindset, learning style, and how they deal with challenges over time.Hint: If your interviewee speaks negatively about all of their past roles or consistently deflects blame on external factors, that’s a red flag.
2. Practical Ways to Stay Technical When You’re No Longer an Engineer
The further away you get from being hands on the keyboard writing code, the easier it is to feel as though you’re falling behind technically.
offered practical suggestions for engineering leaders to stay technical like reviewing pull requests or taking courses.
The Engineering Leader's Guide to Goals and Reporting (Sponsor)
Efficiency is still top of mind for most companies, and software teams are no exception. Engineering leaders need to know — and be able to show — that their teams are delivering operational excellence and driving business impact.
Without clear, data-backed goals, companies cannot compete. Download this guide to learn how to leverage metrics program data, resource allocation visibility, and workflow automation to set and meet improvement goals.
3. How Apple is Positioning in the AI Race
Although Apple isn’t making headlines like Microsoft has with their OpenAI alliance, they aren’t out of the AI race yet.
Actually, Apple has quietly acquired the most AI startups in 2023 compared to Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon. Strategically, they’re setting up to bake AI into their 2024 iOS and hardware, and we’re eager to see what they pull off.
Read: Apple has acquired more AI companies than any of its competitors
4. Quantifying AI or DevEx Success = Qualitative & Quantitative Measures
Developers using GenAI tooling report an increase in overall happiness, but how will you convince your CFO that these tools are worth the investment? You need qualitative, and quantitative measures to paint a full picture of ROI.
The same sentiment is happening with developer experience. Companies are adopting a holistic view using a blend of metrics like local build times, happiness scores, velocity, and stability to accurately represent DevEx beyond just developer surveys.
Our host
talked about this and more on a recent Javascript Jabber episode, listen here.