Frequently asked questions

What is a senior engineering leader?

We have communities for:

Growth CTOs* - running product/engineering orgs of 50-200

Scale CTOs* - running product/engineering orgs of over 200

CDO’s - the most senior data leader within an org

Directors/VP’s of Software

Directors/VP’s of Platform/DevOps/Ops

Directors/VP’s of Data/Analytics

Other

* “CTO’s” - Up to the two most senior engineering leaders within your organization - even if you're an(S)VP Eng, Head of Engineering or have some other title. Often a CTO and a VPE.

Why “senior” engineering leaders?

We love Tech Leads and Engineering Managers, but the roles are very different. There are already lots of great places for more junior engineering leaders to connect. We wanted to create a community specifically for those dealing with challenges around leadership at scale and the design of effective engineering organizations.

What if I’m not a senior engineering leader?

We want to create a safe space for senior engineering leaders to engage honestly and openly with what are often sensitive issues. At the same time, we want to share their wisdom with the broader community, so whether you’re a tech lead, an engineering manager or an individual contributor interested in learning more about engineering leadership, please sign up for our “TNG” resources for the next generation of engineering leaders.

Why should I join another engineering leadership community?

Three reasons: the community, curated content and events.

Community

The CTO Connection community is:

• Global - we deliberately invite senior engineering leaders from around the world to share their varied perspectives.
• Senior - by ensuring everyone is a senior engineering leader, the signal:noise ratio is much lower for those of us who are already pretty comfortable running a 1:1 or structuring a presentation to the board.
• Vetted - we manually review every request for community membership to ensure that everyone in the community is a senior engineering leader.
• Moderated - we review postings on a regular basis to ensure the community members are being inclusive, supportive and are sharing high value content with their peers.
• Prompted - while you can share your biggest engineering leadership challenge at any time, we also have a monthly “topic” so we can focus prompts, polls and presentations around a deep dive into a specific topic, which we then add to the open source engineering leadership playbooks we’re generating for all engineering leaders to learn from.

Content

There is a lot of content available on engineering leadership, but there is still not an easy way to get high quality, actionable, curated content that relates to your role and scale. We are building out a new set of playbooks that are:

• Role/scale appropriate - Some advice is universally applicable, while other advice is a function of your role or the scale you are operating at. Where appropriate, we’re breaking out content for startups, growth and scale stage orgs.
• Curated - so that all of the content is thoughtful and valuable
• Edited - to ensure that you get concise insights without too much fluff
• Actionable - designed to be easy to process and implement
• From multiple perspectives - Much of our content will bring together multiple perspectives from the community, to provide a wider range of experiences and better heuristics for what might and might not work for a given org.

Events

Community membership is required to attend our online and in-person events. CTO Connection started in 2014 as a series of regional events where senior engineering leaders could connect with and learn from their peers. Originally they were focused on short, 20 minute talks with lots of time for networking and discussion. These days they’re much more focused on allowing participants to share their experiences and to create specific actionable plans for improving their orgs. Find out more here!

How can I attend an online event or a CTO Summit?

Community is at the heart of everything we do at CTO Connection. Whether you want to attend a monthly meetup online or one of our regional in-person CTO Summits, please start by applying for membership and then you’ll get the ability to request an invitation to an event.