“What got you here won’t get you there.” — Marshall Goldsmith
The Journey from Startup VPE/CTO from Seed Stage and Beyond: Navigating Growth and Cross-Functional Relationships
As a startup evolves from its early stages to raising a Series B and beyond, the role of a VP of Engineering (VPE) or Chief Technology Officer (CTO) transforms dramatically. At the startup phase, the VPE/CTO is often a technical leader, hands-on coder, and architect, working closely with a small, scrappy team. However, as the company scales, particularly post-Series B, the VPE/CTO must grow into a strategic leader, balancing technology decisions with company-wide objectives, cross-functional collaboration, and long-term vision.
The Evolving Role of the CTO
From Architect to Strategist
In a startup’s earliest stages, a VPE/CTO is typically focused on building the product. They are deeply involved in technical decisions, from selecting the technology stack to solving scalability issues and building the engineering team. However, as the company matures, the role shifts from hands-on involvement to a more strategic focus, where you’re responsible for aligning technology decisions with the company’s long-term business goals.
At Series B and beyond, scaling becomes the priority. The engineering team grows, technical debt starts to pile up, and there is a need for strong leadership to ensure that the product can meet the demands of a growing user base. The CTO must focus on hiring senior engineering managers, optimizing team structure, and driving an engineering culture that can scale without sacrificing quality or innovation.
Product Vision and Roadmap Alignment
A post-Series B CTO plays a crucial role in defining the technology roadmap that aligns with the product vision. This requires close collaboration with the Chief Product Officer (CPO) or Head of Product. As the company scales, the product development process becomes more complex, involving multiple teams, stakeholders, and dependencies.
The CTO must ensure that the engineering team is not only delivering features but also maintaining the technical integrity of the product. This involves making tough decisions on trade-offs between immediate product needs and long-term technical investments, such as refactoring, addressing tech debt, or improving infrastructure.
Balancing Innovation and Stability
The pressure to innovate while maintaining platform stability intensifies after Series B. Investors and stakeholders expect continued product growth, faster feature delivery, and technical resilience. As CTO, it’s crucial to strike the right balance between pushing the boundaries of technology innovation and ensuring the product is stable, secure, and scalable.
This often involves working with other members of the C-suite, particularly the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and Chief Operating Officer (COO), to justify investments in new technologies or infrastructure that may not have immediate ROI but are essential for long-term growth.
Navigating Cross-Functional Relationships in the C-Suite
The journey to a Series B and beyond involves developing strong relationships with the rest of the C-suite. The ability to collaborate effectively with other key leaders, such as the CEO, COO, CPO, CFO, and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), becomes critical to scaling successfully.
Partnering with the CEO
As the company scales, the CTO must establish a close, strategic partnership with the CEO. The CTO’s role is not just to build and deliver technology but to enable the CEO’s vision by ensuring the technology strategy aligns with overall business goals. This relationship is essential for guiding the company through technical challenges and aligning on growth strategies, such as expanding into new markets or launching new products.
The CTO often serves as a bridge between the engineering organization and the broader business, helping the CEO understand the technical implications of business decisions and vice versa.
Collaboration with the CFO
As the company moves into the growth stage, the CTO must work closely with the CFO to manage the costs associated with scaling the engineering team, infrastructure, and technology investments. Budgets for cloud infrastructure, software tools, and hiring must be carefully planned and monitored.
This relationship is particularly important during Series B and beyond, where financial discipline becomes increasingly critical. The CTO must be able to justify investments in technology that will drive growth, such as expanding engineering capacity or upgrading infrastructure, while also being mindful of burn rates and ROI.
Building a Strong Partnership with the CPO
The relationship between the CTO and CPO becomes even more critical as the company scales. A successful partnership between these two roles is key to ensuring that the product vision is executed effectively without sacrificing technical excellence. This collaboration requires constant communication, alignment on priorities, and a mutual understanding of each other’s challenges.
The CPO is often driven by customer needs, product-market fit, and feature delivery, while the CTO must balance these pressures with the technical realities of scalability, architecture, and long-term sustainability. Both leaders must align on the product roadmap and ensure that short-term feature delivery does not come at the expense of long-term technical health.
Aligning with the COO and Operations Teams
As the company scales, operations become increasingly complex. The CTO must work closely with the COO to ensure that the company’s technology infrastructure can support operational scaling, from automation in customer service to optimizing internal processes.
This collaboration can include anything from integrating new enterprise systems to ensure smooth scaling of backend operations to managing DevOps and SRE teams that keep the infrastructure running efficiently.
Marketing and Growth: Working with the CMO
While less obvious, the relationship between the CTO and CMO becomes more important as the company scales. Digital marketing and growth strategies are often closely tied to the company’s technology infrastructure, including websites, mobile apps, and analytics platforms.
As CTO, it’s essential to support the CMO’s efforts by providing the necessary technical tools and platforms to track user behavior, optimize performance, and enable A/B testing for marketing campaigns. Moreover, building APIs, data integrations, and ensuring the platform can handle traffic surges from marketing campaigns becomes vital.
Preparing for Series C and Beyond
As the company heads toward a Series C or later stages, the CTO’s role continues to evolve. The focus shifts from product-market fit to optimizing operations and driving efficiency. The CTO must develop long-term technology strategies, build partnerships, and continually innovate while ensuring that technology investments are delivering value.
Scaling internationally, introducing machine learning, AI, or big data capabilities, and ensuring regulatory compliance across multiple regions are common challenges in later stages of growth. At this stage, the CTO becomes a key driver of innovation, supporting the company’s growth into a global market.
Wrapping up…
The journey from startup VPE/CTO to Series B and beyond is a dynamic one, requiring constant growth, adaptation, and collaboration across the C-suite. As the company scales, so too does the need for the CTO to evolve from a hands-on technical leader to a strategic partner, working with the CEO, CFO, CPO, COO, and CMO to drive both innovation and operational excellence.
The ability to navigate these cross-functional relationships while maintaining a clear technical vision is critical to the success of the company and its ability to thrive beyond Series B and into the future.
