Same title, different jobs
Ask ten people what a CTO (Chief Technology Officer) does and you will get ten confident answers. What’s interesting is that each answer is usually correct in its own context. In one organisation, the CTO runs engineering. In another, they shape product direction. In a third, they sit alongside the board and help make sense of technology choices. The title is consistent, but the role is anything but.
That variation can make the role feel vague from the outside but the shape of the job reflects the organisation around it. A startup trying to build something new needs a very different kind of CTO to a large enterprise trying to modernise decades of systems. A services business has different needs again, where credibility, narrative, and client engagement matter just as much as technical depth.
The common core
Despite that variation, there’s a common core. Strip away the organisational differences and the job usually comes down to three things: setting direction, making decisions, and developing leadership:
- Direction is about ensuring there is a coherent technology roadmap that supports the business rather than competing with it.
- Decisions are about navigating trade-offs that do not have neat answers — speed vs. resilience, standardisation vs. differentiation, build vs. buy.
- Leadership is about creating the conditions for others to succeed.
This is where the role is often misunderstood. A CTO should not be the person with all the answers, or the most hands-on engineer in the room. The job is to help the organisation consistently arrive at better answers, and to turn individual pieces of work into something that adds up to a clear direction.
For a neutral definition of the role, MIT provides a useful overview of how CTO responsibilities typically span strategy, architecture, and innovation.
Turning technology into outcomes
Several years ago, I came across a line about the CIO (Chief Information Officer) that stuck with me. Gideon Kay observed on Twitter that:
“The mark of a strong CIO is the ability to turn a technology platform question into a business outcome answer.” — Gideon Kay (@gids), April 2017
That felt right, but I thought it could also work the other way round:
“The mark of a strong CTO is the ability to take a business problem and turn it into a technology solution.” — Mark Wilson, May 2017
Today, I would add that the solution needs to deliver something meaningful to the business — not a solution in isolation, but one that aligns to both business and technology strategies.
That distinction shifts the role away from technology for its own sake, and towards translation. The CTO sits between ambition and execution, helping ensure that what gets built is both technically sound and commercially relevant.
Why context matters
The reason the role varies so much comes down to a few factors. Stage is one:
- Early-stage organisations are focused on building.
- Growth-stage organisations are trying to scale.
- More mature businesses are often optimising or modernising, while others are trying to reinvent themselves altogether.
Each of those requires a different emphasis.
The business model matters too, and a useful way to think about this is whether the organisation primarily builds technology or uses technology. A product company will expect its CTO to lean heavily into engineering, product development, and platform decisions. An organisation that is primarily a user of technology will lean more towards architecture, integration, and ensuring that technology choices support business outcomes. A services organisation often sits somewhere in the middle, with an added emphasis on client engagement and external credibility.
Add in the organisation’s risk profile — particularly in regulated industries — and the balance shifts again towards governance, resilience, and control.
CTO and CIO
This is also where the distinction between CTO and CIO often comes into play, although the boundaries are not always neat. A CIO is typically focused on internal systems and operations — keeping the organisation running and enabling people to do their jobs effectively. A CTO is more often outward-looking, concerned with how technology shapes products, services, and the organisation’s position in the market.
In practice, many organisations blur or combine these roles, which is fine as long as the underlying responsibilities are understood. Problems tend to arise when the ownership of strategic technology direction is unclear, regardless of what title is used.
There’s a useful article from McKinsey that explores how the two roles differ and where they overlap, along with a lot of advice on different approaches to the CTO role.
It’s also worth noting that both roles have evolved. There was a time when CIO was jokingly expanded as “career is over”, reflecting a perception of the role as operational and inward-looking. That is no longer true. The CIO role has shifted towards business leadership, just as the CTO role has broadened beyond pure technology.
A role that keeps being reinvented
A friend once advised me that I shouldn’t seek to become a CTO because it was a “dead job title”. The implication was that the role had either peaked or would be absorbed into something else.
Happily, it turned out that my friend was wrong and, if anything, the opposite is true. As organisations rely more heavily on technology, the need for clear technology leadership has increased.
That said, it’s worth being precise about the different titles that appear around it. A Chief Digital Officer, for example, is often focused on digital channels, customer experience, and business model change. There can be overlap with a CTO, but it’s not simply another flavour of the same role. Similarly, titles like Field CTO or Customer CTO tend to describe where the role operates — closer to customers, sales, or market engagement — rather than a fundamentally different purpose. You will also see the term vCTO (Virtual Chief Technology Officer), which can refer to the same strategic capability delivered on a fractional or shared basis.
There’s also a practical question about the word “Chief”. In theory, there should only be one Chief Technology Officer. In practice, that’s not always the case. As Matt Watts (himself, a former Field CTO) put it in a recent LinkedIn post, “how many CTOs do you have?” — pointing out that some organisations end up with dozens of CTO-titled roles, each with different scopes and levels of influence.
It might feel messy, but it reflects how the role has evolved. What matters is not the purity of the title, but whether the responsibilities are clear and whether someone is accountable for setting direction and making the key technology decisions.
The titles may shift slightly, and new variations appear, but the underlying need remains.
Why the CTO role matters
Most organisations are not short of technology activity. There are always projects, initiatives, and new tools being introduced. What is often missing is coherence. Without a clear direction and someone accountable for the decisions that shape it, work can become fragmented. Individual teams may make sensible choices in isolation, but those choices do not always add up to a clear strategy.
This is where the value of a CTO becomes visible. It isn’t about knowing the technology better than anyone else. It’s about helping the organisation make better decisions about how technology is used, and ensuring those decisions are aligned with what the business is trying to achieve.
You can usually tell when that role is missing, even if the title is not. Repeated debates about priorities, uncertainty about where to invest, and a sense that there are lots of initiatives but no clear direction are all indicators. In those situations, the organisation doesn’t necessarily need more projects or more tools: it needs clarity, ownership, and a way of turning activity into something coherent.
That, in essence, is what the CTO provides.