How CTOs Leverage Strategy to Drive Business Outcomes
Strategy — it's the key to focusing on the right things, and it's simpler than people make out.
The Core Problem You Solve
At the highest level, your company has a goal, which can be to solve a problem, or a class of problems:
People need to travel from A to B but don't have a car.
People want to invest but don't know how to start.
People want more books to read, but affordably.
People want/need a life partner.
Your Approach
How will your company achieve this goal?
What is your approach?
As a single phrase.
→ That's your Strategy.
Let's give it a capital S because it's the company's highest level strategy.
Effectively, this Strategy is who you want to be as a company.
The easiest investment platform.
The taxi app that gets you there fastest.
The cheapest bookshop on the internet.
The only dating app that finds you normal people.
That's not the level of strategy my CTO coachees need help with. We focus on one level below this:
Business Goals & Strategies
Ideally, a company has business goals for the next quarter or year.
Capture a 10% market share.
Break-even on unit economics.
Reach $1M annually recurring revenue (ARR).
Raise a financing round, based on $150 million valuation.
There are many ways to achieve such goals, and each will have its own trade-offs. So the company's departments need to align on some agreed-upon strategies to achieve them.
In this context, a strategy is the chosen approach to achieving a common goal.
Example business strategies:
Lower the subscription price (to capture more market share).
Increase advertising budgets (to increase paying customers).
Increase conversion and customer lifetime value (to break even).
Technology Initiatives
Once we have a set of business strategies, the CTO's job is to figure out how to leverage the engineering department to support these strategies.
For each business strategy, the CTO may be able to identify and propose strategic technology initiatives that could support it, for example:
Handle a higher volume of users.
Measure and improve time-to-activation.
Increase Google Page Speed Insights score of all landing pages.
These initiatives involve identifying, controlling, and moving technological levers that control business outcomes.
Yes, CTOs can, and should, take responsibility for driving business outcomes!
Free Workshop
I'm hosting a free online workshop on 3 + 4 March to show SaaS CTOs/Engineering VPs how to drive strategic business outcomes, and how to get the C-Suite’s cooperation, too.
> Effectively, this Strategy is who you want to be as a company.
I would call it your motto, not a strategy (with or without a capital S).
Great article, Itzy! Loved how you broke down Strategy with a capital S the simplicity makes it feel less like corporate jargon and more like a guiding compass. The part about CTOs identifying tech levers to move business outcomes really stood out. What's one underrated technology initiative you've seen have an outsized impact on business goals especially for early stage SaaS companies?