I've been a CTO for 5+ years and have grown a company from 1 to 15+ engineers. I agree that a CTO SHOULD be technical but it shouldn't be their only skill. The

I've been a CTO for 5+ years and have grown a company from 1 to 15+ engineers. I agree that a CTO SHOULD be technical but it shouldn't be their only skill. The CTO's skill actually varies depending on the stage of the company and being technical, helps in making decisions in every stage. A core part of being a CTO is to set the technical direction of the company, you are a Chief Technology Officer after all. A part of a CTOs job is to know how to execute/deliver the plan of the company in the most efficient way technologically speaking. As the leader in the engineering department, if you have say a budget of 1 million USD, not only do you have to know how to allocate this efficiently, but also know the technical details of why you do so in the grander scheme of things of building the product. As an example of my said stages, if you are with a company that has: 1-5 engineers: The CTO is mostly likely coding and also making decisions on what technology stack to use and sets basic processes for development (kanban/scrum or basic todo list). 5-15 engineers: The CTO is mostly doing process management and technical analysis of the stack to set further systems and processes for future growth. Here you will start to find the issues of the technology, you are growing the engineering team because there is a further NEED to hire. For example, you hire more frontend engineers because the plan is to build a more ambitious frontend. 15+ engineers: Here you already have established good processes and have the product moving forward with teams being mostly self sufficient. The CTOs job at this point is to work more with product to know the future roadmap and efficiently plan further hires or changes technically speaking. My few c's from this. I've yet to experience growing a company for 50+ engineers but that is a goal that I have still going forward.