Ask HN: Steps to take as a CTO to create a great eng culture?
TL;DR: How can I quickly pick up the soft skills needed to become a good CTO&#x2F;lead dev? Are there any good books&#x2F;articles on the processes to follow&#x2F;implement?<p>I&#x27;m a CS grad and I&#x27;ve been offered an exciting lead dev position at a very early startup. I&#x27;ve never worked in a management position before (although I started&#x2F;led multiple projects); I&#x27;ve briefly worked in research, open source, industry, but only as a SWE. While technically I&#x27;m comfortable with the challenge (of scaling their product, building good tools&#x2F;infrastructure, etc), I&#x27;m not that familiar with the skill-set needed for a CTO.<p>I have a basic idea of what to do (encourage writing good tests&#x2F;docs, do code reviews, encourage pair programming, start code katas, etc.), but I&#x27;d love the opinion of people who&#x27;ve actually dealt with this first-hand. Or at least get some good reading recommendations.<p>1. What are the best books&#x2F;articles on the topic? (eng-focused, not the regular PM mumbo jumbo)<p>2. What are some of the common (potentially counter-intuitive) challenges that arise?<p>3. I&#x27;m a big fan of Urs Hölzle and would like to emulate the way he helped build an incredible engineering culture at Google [0]. What do you reckon he did right and how can one follow from his example?<p>4. AFAIU, surviving startups need to be good at market validation and maintaining focus (&quot;build things that don&#x27;t scale&quot;, lean startup, etc) and over-engineering seems like a quick way to fail. How do you contain the impulse to build superfluous stuff, when you&#x27;re also trying to emphasise engineering? (I guess the typical answer to this is &quot;start from your customers and work backwards&quot;, but I&#x27;d like a more detailed answer.)<p>Many thanks<p>---<p>0: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;steve-yegge.blogspot.co.uk&#x2F;2008&#x2F;06&#x2F;done-and-gets-things-smart.html (Urs is referenced covertly in the article)