CTO Sounding Board: A Second Opinion Without Politics

The exec coach your CEO hired is a business coach, and will ask you good questions about how the week is going when what you need is somebody who has run capacity planning for forty engineers. The CTO Slack groups are useful for links and weak on your specific call, since nobody there carries your context and the people who reply fastest are rarely the ones you wanted. Books get written by people whose company was not your company.

What's left is one person outside your org chart, with no stake in how you come across, who has held the seat. Sixty minutes every fortnight, built around the two hardest calls on your plate that week rather than around a curriculum. The pattern data from 3,400+ sessions matters mainly because it means I've watched your particular situation resolve well and badly a number of times, and can tell you which way it usually goes.

Every session ends with a written decision or a concrete next step on something real. If one doesn't, it wasn't worth your hour and you shouldn't be charged for it, which is what the under-7 rule is for.