I was asked by a member of our Chicago startup community to detail what the day-to-day life of the CTO looks like at Mediafly. I thought I’d share how I spend my time, summarized in this graph:
As you can see, my role pulls me in a lot of different directions. Often, what I believe I will be doing at the start of the day turns out to be completely wrong by the end of the day looking back.
This graph doesn’t state much in isolation. More interesting is when I pair this with where I want to spend my time (assuming Mediafly is no more than double its current size):
As we grow, I want to spend less time troubleshooting client issues, and more time with the product, with prospective customers, with my team, and writing and speaking. Put another way, I want to spend more time being externally focused and be able to further rely on my team to make things happen.
The following notes apply when reading this:
- This is how I spend my time. It is not meant to be prescriptive, and It will almost assuredly differ from how you spend your time in the same role at the same company.
- I am the CTO of Mediafly, a high-growth enterprise mobility software-as-a-service company. We turn enterprise content and data into compelling mobile experiences. We have approximately 25 employees and contractors, the bulk of whom reside in engineering and services.
- My experiences and time allocation will differ from the CTO of a consumer-focused startup, established enterprise software company, or internal IT CTO.
I plan to update this post over time as my thoughts evolve. As always, feedback is welcome!