Advice for an aspiring CTO with Ivan Teage

As part of our upcoming Aspiring CTOs Mentoring Roundtables event on Thursday 29th October we caught up with one of our CTO Mentors, Ivan Teage to hear his path to becoming a leader in tech and what you can do now to prepare for a future CTO role.

What was your route to CTO?

Tech support -> Software design/analysis -> Software Dev -> Architect -> Head of Tech

What was the first thing that you remember hitting you when you became CTO?

‘The buck stops with you’.

You have to see things through and take full responsibility when things need to be sorted. E.g. major tech outages.

What advice would you give an aspiring CTO that was in a senior developer role now and hoping to step into a CTO role in coming years?

Try and broaden your knowledge as much as possible. Get experience leading projects. Work with other non-dev tech roles, e.g. infrastructure, support, analysis, data, security. Learn your strengths and what you need to develop more.

Can you share any top tips for junior or first time CTOs?

Hang in there! Think about the business, not just the technology, and find out about how everyone else perceives the technology.

If you’d like to sign up to our aspiring CTOs group you can find out more here: http://meetamentor.co.uk/aspiring-ctos/