Hands-on CTO: How Not to Lose Technical Context as the Company Scales [ukr]
As the team grows, products multiply, and the engineering organization evolves - the CTO role often shifts from a technical leader to a manager staring at spreadsheets and dashboards.
And that’s when it becomes truly challenging: to stay in the technical loop, remain close to the architecture and systems, and keep a real sense of what’s happening on the ground.
In this talk, I’ll share my experience on how to stay a Hands-on CTO - maintaining deep technical understanding, influencing architecture, and scaling the company at the same time, without losing touch with the code and core systems.
- Key topics we’ll cover:
- How the CTO role evolves as the company grows - from coder to system-level leader.
- The most common traps: loss of architectural memory, disconnect between business and engineering, dependency on a few key people.
- Healthy habits that help keep technical context: code reviews, architecture stand-ups, "walk the code" sessions, CTO R&D sprints.
- Decision-making systems: how ADRs and RFCs help maintain clarity and traceability.
- Communication with tech leads: building effective 1:1s, technical syncs, and knowledge-sharing loops.
- Tools and platforms that preserve context - dashboards, monitoring systems, and architecture reviews.
