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My experience as a new interim CTO

September 4, 2020 • ☕️ 2 min read

I was officially the Interim CTO at my company for two weeks in the beginning of September 2020. Although I was assisting the CTO or taking care of tasks during his vacations earlier, this just happened because the CTO was on sick leave to cater to his family medical emergency. There was no time for me to react / accept / reject this thing but just feel it! It’s rightly said:

The best things happen unexpectedly!

I knew being the CTO isn’t an easy task, and below is a summary of the things that I did:

  • Working at X 10 times my regular speed: I had already committed my availability to the current sprint and when this news hit me we were in the second week of our 3 week long sprint. This meant I was coding while attending virtual meetings. This isn’t a joke, I really did this. I am often proud of my multi-tasking capability, but being able to code and finish the sprint tickets while attending meetings is by far the best!
  • Quality management audit for medical software device: We at Curalie GmbH are building a medical software device; this means we have a quality management system in place for ISO certification. The yearly audit rectification plan was due that week and as an Interim CTO I was incharge for all software development processes.
  • Company roadmap and vision alignment: It was that time of the year where the company’s management revisits the roadmap and tries to align it to the long-term vision. I was part of these meetings too. There were some communication lags across IT, product and stakeholders. Although I didn’t enjoy these meetings much, I was responsible for creating a follow up meeting to address the IT team about these changes and align everyone to what we were trying to accomplish.
  • Supporting customer service team: I was also the contact person to support and help our customer service team.
  • Hiring & Firing: This was my first time and I will never forget how nervous I was to sit in the room when we had to break the news about having to terminate a colleague’s contract.

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