Need help with growing individuals in your team?
- Sergio Visinoni from Sudo Make Me a CTO <makemeacto@substack.com>
- Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>
Hi, 👋 Sergio here! Welcome to another free post from the Sudo Make Me a CTO newsletter. If you prefer to read this post online, just click the article title. As this is a free newsletter, I do immensely appreciate likes, shares and comments. That's what helps other readers discover it! Need help with growing individuals in your team?Introducing Career Architect in CTOBox, the most comprehensive and effective way to define career ladders for your team.
I first announced that I was building CTOBox in late February. Since the first announcement, I kept working on it as much as I could, prioritizing this initiative over other engagements. As the tool is shaping up for the first public release, I thought it would be a good time for a long-overdue update on its progress. For the folk who are new around here, let's start with a quick summary of what CTOBox is: As I said in my original post:
In essence, I'm building a tool for engineering leaders at all levels, especially those aiming to reach the executive ranks one day. The tool I'd always wanted to have available as I was going through my career. When I first announced it, CTOBox only included a module called Team Compass, focused on running effective 1-to-1s with your team members. Thanks to the first round of early testers, I was able to collect and act upon a ton of feedback. That has allowed me to improve the functionality way beyond what I originally envisioned. If you missed the original announcement, I recommend you check it out before continuing: Besides working on improvements around Team Compass, I've spent a significant amount of time iterating on the second major module: Career Architect. Introducing Career ArchitectLet's start with the problem to be solved, or the job to be done. Back in September 2023, I wrote a somewhat provocative piece on what I saw as a common startup sin: not having an engineering career ladder. After talking with numerous engineering leaders, I realized two major things:
That's why with Career Architect, I aim to simplify the task of defining and operationalizing a ladder — or framework, if you prefer — for an engineering team, especially for those leaders who have never done this before. Like everything else in CTOBox, Career Architect is and will be opinionated. If you want full flexibility, you should probably look at using a spreadsheet, but then you'll mostly be on your own. With Career Architect instead, I want to guide you to build a sane and solid starting point that you'll then be able to evolve and customize at will. How it WorksEnough sales pitch, let's look at some concrete stuff. Those of you who have access to CTOBox will be able to access Career Architect from the main menu. It's helpful to clarify some terminology before we get into the mechanics. Let's start with the terms specific to the structure of a ladder
There are also a handful of concepts specific to the competencies part of a ladder.
The process that helps you go from zero to having a complete ladder in place is guided and should be intuitive enough not to require any particular guidance. A typical process will look as follows:
Once you've done all that, there is one more thing you can and should do: assign levels on the ladder to the team members you've already configured in Team Compass. You'll be able to do it via the newly added Career tab in the person's view. Of course, you'll see the full history of the evolution of your team member in the company. What's MissingThough I feel Career Architect is ready for initial private testing, there is still a lot of ground I want to cover before opening CTOBox up for the public. That includes:
Once those are complete, I believe CTOBox will offer a comprehensive set of tools to help engineering leaders proactively manage the lifecycle and performance of their employees, providing clear guidance and expectations and helping them grow. I believe that will be enough to make it the first public version of the product, while I'll keep working on covering many other aspects of engineering leadership, starting with offering a way to help leaders define effective tech strategies for their teams. But that is something we'll talk about in another article! Join the Testing GroupMany people helped with testing the first iteration of Team Compass, and I'll be forever grateful to them. Now, with Career Architect taking shape, I want to invite another cohort of private testers. If you're interested in getting free access to CTOBox and helping me shape its future while being able to benefit from it in your current job, you can sign up for the waitlist here. I process the waitlist in batches, and as soon as you've been granted access, you'll receive an email inviting you to sign up. I'm convinced that with your help, I'll be able to launch a great product in the upcoming months. As a sign of gratitude, I can already disclose that I'll be offering temporary free access to the tool once it becomes paid to everyone who helped out. I haven't ironed out all the details yet, but I'll be offering something generous in exchange for your precious time. Thanks in advance for all your feedback! Sudo Make Me a CTO is a free newsletter edited by Sergio Visinoni. If you found this post insightful, please share it with your network using the link below. If you or your company need help with one of the topics I talk about in my newsletter, feel free to visit my website where you can schedule a free 30 minutes discovery call. I'd be delighted to investigate opportunities for collaboration! |
Similar newsletters
There are other similar shared emails that you might be interested in: