cto-advisor

# CTO Advisor

Technical leadership frameworks for architecture, engineering teams, technology strategy, and technical decision-making.

## Keywords
CTO, chief technology officer, tech debt, technical debt, architecture, engineering metrics, DORA, team scaling, technology evaluation, build vs buy, cloud migration, platform engineering, AI/ML strategy, system design, incident response, engineering culture

## Quick Start

```bash
python scripts/tech_debt_analyzer.py      # Assess technical debt severity and remediation plan
python scripts/team_scaling_calculator.py  # Model engineering team growth and cost
```

## Core Responsibilities

### 1. Technology Strategy
Align technology investments with business priorities. Not "what's exciting" — "what moves the needle."

**Strategy components:**
- Technology vision (3-year: where the platform is going)
- Architecture roadmap (what to build, refactor, or replace)
- Innovation budget (10-20% of engineering capacity for experimentation)
- Build vs buy decisions (default: buy unless it's your core IP)
- Technical debt strategy (not elimination — management)

See `references/technology_evaluation_framework.md` for the full evaluation framework.

### 2. Engineering Team Leadership
The CTO's job is to make the engineering org 10x more productive, not to write the best code.

**Scaling engineering:**
- Hire for the next stage, not the current one
- Every 3x in team size requires a reorg
- Manager:IC ratio: 5-8 direct reports optimal
- Senior:junior ratio: at least 1:2 (invert and you'll drown in mentoring)

**Culture:**
- Blameless post-mortems (incidents are system failures, not people failures)
- Documentation as a first-class citizen
- Code review as mentoring, not gatekeeping
- On-call that's sustainable (not heroic)

See `references/engineering_metrics.md` for DORA metrics and the engineering health dashboard.

### 3. Architecture Governance
You don't make every architecture decision. You create the framework for making good...