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A startup is born from an idea that is most relevant to the time. However, the experience and expertise of the creators are primarily responsible for the success and profitability of the project. So why do you need a Chief Technology Officer if you have experienced startup leaders? A CTO in a startup goes all the way through product development and makes a business out of its programming skills. He or she is responsible for choosing technologies and solving startup problems at all stages. In this article, we will tell you why a startup needs to hire remote CTO or in-house CTO, and how to find a good candidate for the company’s success.

Why Does Startup Need a CTO

CTO – one of the leaders of the company, responsible for the development of new services or products, as well as for the optimization of production. The task of a startup is, first of all, to reach payback as quickly as possible. There is a business strategy for this. This is where the CTO is responsible, as its mission is to ensure that the organization’s technology is fully aligned with its business strategy. 

Since all startups have specific milestones, workshops perform different tasks during these milestones. Strategically, they must think ahead and plan for the future of the business. The executive is to turn these strategic plans into reality by breaking the task down into parts and directing the people who will solve it. 

Leaders and founders without technical expertise are involved in the management and executive activities within the organization of the business, while the CTO takes on the tasks of planning strategy within the technology. But first of all, the CTO is an executive director, and then a technical specialist. He can identify areas where technology can be used to create new business solutions that align with the company’s overall strategy. Also, the CTO can do so that the technology always evolves, anticipating and allowing the company and the product to develop.

What Founder Should Know Before Hiring a CTO

It is worth clarifying who CTO is not: they are not only engineers. This position is not held by those who enjoy coding, architecture, or technical design. The main task of this specialist is to deal with business strategy and management. This person can take responsibility for the work of a large team of people. 

CTO can be classified according to their main area of ​​activity.

• Technical leadership

Such CTOs are qualified developers with extensive experience in programming, software architecture design, and cloud infrastructure configuration. They write code a lot and review the written code by other developers on the team.

• Operational management

In this case, the CTO is primarily the operations manager who is responsible for leading the engineering team. He or she has a comprehensive knowledge of programming, but tasks related to development only have faded into the background. Instead of coding, these CTO’s technology strategy and manage the programmers in their company. 

As a tech startup grows, the CTO’s focus often shifts from technology to management.

4 Benefits of Hiring a CTO for Startup

As we mentioned above, every startup has stages that it goes through. There are tasks for the CTO in each of them. We have highlighted the benefits of hiring this specialist within each of the steps: 

Stage 1: Business idea

Any IT startup starts with a business idea. Founders get together to brainstorm their ideas and come up with a viable business plan. The advantage of having a CTO is that it,

having extensive technical experience, he checks the technical feasibility of a business idea and proposes potential technical solutions for the implementation of a software product. 

Stage 2: Early launch

If an idea gets the approval from investors, the team gets to work and build a software product. If the team has a CTO, then they are responsible for the development of the MVP as soon as possible. 

CTO chooses the technology stack, designs the architecture of the application, sets up a scalable cloud infrastructure, and tests the application. A startup can hire developers, so the CTO doesn’t have to do all of these responsibilities personally. But if there is a person in the team who bears full responsibility for the technological side of the project, then they can be engaged in de-alloying tasks in this area. 

Stage 3: Ensuring product conformity to the market

As the startup gains traction in the market, it is shifting its focus to updating its software solution, making it more functional and easier to use to attract more customers. To speed up software development, a startup often scales up its team and hires more programmers. 

The advantage of having a workshop at this stage is that it can take over the optimization of the feature deployment pipeline so that developers can be productive, ensure the security and long runtime of the application, and ensure the scalability and cost-effectiveness of the cloud infrastructure. At this stage, the workshop is already managing a growing development team and shaping a software development culture in the organization. 

Stage 4: Growth

At a time when a startup becomes a large company with thousands of employees, the workshop leads a development team with a well-developed coding culture. Thus, the CTO shifts the focus to management. If a startup wants to operate a new product line; the CTO may need to create and manage multiple teams working on projects. 

CTO can develop a future vision of a software product. He or she monitors the latest trends in the industry and is ready to implement them in the company’s products. The main advantage of having a CTO at this stage is maintaining a competitive advantage through the use of the most relevant technologies. 

The cost of hiring an in-house or remote CTO in the USA is $163,349, in Germany a CTO can be hired for $118,268, in Canada – for $106,914, and in Ukraine you can hire remote CTO for startup for $12,453.

Some Tips to Choose a Good CTO

What should you focus on and how to hire CTO in a startup? Of course, on skills. Depending on the role that you are ready to assign to this specialist in the team, you should look for the following skills in the candidate:

                      1. CTO as a software architect

• Design and implementation of software architecture
• Choosing a technology stack
• Infrastructure design and configuration
• Development and implementation of database design
• Improvement and optimization of the application architecture

                      2. CTO as a developer at the initial stage

• MVP development and testing
• Writing software and API documentation

                     3. CTO as a leader

• Participate in strategic planning
• Suggest ways that technology can help a company become more successful.
• Monitor technology trends in the industry and identify competitive advantages
• Evaluate the technical performance of a company
• Control IT budgets to optimize costs

Conclusion

If your aim is to hire remote CTO,the task of a CTO is not to write the best code, but one that is needed to implement a business idea. However, good engineering practices and team development will be a strong competitive advantage – and this is what the CTO has a direct impact on. CTO manages all technology-related issues and makes sure that the company’s software product solves the problems of the target audience. If you hire CTO for startup it can help a company become a profitable project faster, since the technical stack and business strategy will be technically taken by one qualified specialist.

ET Digital Team

We’re a Digital Team from EngineTemplate with 5 content experts. Our team has 5 years exp in open source Joomla and WordPress, we make daily blogs and build useful resources for everyone who is having issues with open source while using it.