How to Stay Technically Relevant as a CTO: 6 Practical Strategies

One day I decided to leave the individual contributor (IC) track and become a technical leader. I felt I had accumulated enough knowledge across many engineering disciplines to try leadership, hoping for more power, prestige, compensation, and influence.

However, I discovered that ICs can wield as much, if not more, influence than leaders in the companies I worked for. The IC track includes roles such as Engineer, Senior Engineer, Staff Engineer, and Distinguished Engineer, while the leadership track includes Engineering Manager, Senior Manager, Director, VP, and CTO.

When I became a CTO at a large enterprise, I realized staying technically ahead is essential for sound decision‑making and building trust across the organization. Yet leadership consumes most of your time with performance reviews, one‑on‑ones, meetings, relationship building, writing blogs, emails, and developing career ladders. Consequently, the technical depth of a leader inevitably declines.

Choosing the leadership path must be intentional; you must enjoy managing people and accept that you cannot maintain the same level of technical depth as an IC while handling large‑scale organization responsibilities.

1. Be a Greedy Learner

Keep a stack of books and open browser tabs with blogs and articles at your desk. If you lack time to read, listen to podcasts at 1.5–2× speed, and always seek additional data outside meetings.

Read source code and documentation, explore commits, test results, and deployment logs to understand how the team works and to share best‑practice ideas.

2. Treat Code as a Hobby

Do not push new code to production constantly as a CTO, especially in large companies. Instead, stay involved by reviewing bugs and repos, but recognize that leadership duties limit coding time.

At Shopify we use a tool called Spin to spin up a cloud‑based development environment: spin up shopify This configures an instance, connects to the largest repository, and sets runtime permissions.

Then we launch the editor: spin code Spin opens VS Code (or another editor) directly in the repo, allowing immediate coding.

Using cloud environments lets me stay familiar with the tools the team uses and occasionally contribute to side projects in production repositories.

3. Participate in Hackathons

I have joined internal and external hackathons, such as Shopify’s Technovation for girls aged 8‑18, and internal Hack Days. These events help me stay close to product innovation, evaluate projects, and provide feedback to engineers.

4. Hire the Right People

Hiring poorly creates extra work for leaders. Investing time in intentional hiring ensures teams stay aligned with goals and reduces the need for constant course‑correction.

Good hires bring technical depth, help teach the team, and accelerate learning. For example, Shopify hired engineers skilled in WebAssembly for a major bet on that technology.

5. Build a Technical Advisory Team

I maintain a private Slack channel with about 20 senior engineering leaders from inside and outside Shopify. We ask questions, share guidance, and quickly get up to speed on new technologies or large‑scale implementations.

6. Clear Bugs and Backlog

Technical leaders must manage operational issues—downtime, incidents, bugs, and backlog. Regularly triaging these prevents them from consuming all the team’s capacity and allows focus on innovation.

Balancing operational work with new product development is crucial; otherwise, you become a tactical firefighter rather than a strategic leader.

Conclusion

Staying technically relevant as a CTO isn’t easy. Allocate time for coding and code review, enjoy hackathons, hire well, and build a trusted advisory team.