An interview with Alan Conley, CTO of the IT monitoring company Zenoss.
The Enterprisers Project (TEP): You've said that there are two types of CTOs. Can you explain what you mean?
Conley: The concept of two types of CTOs often manifests itself in larger companies. The first type of CTO is the traditional CTO—highly technical, who sets the technology and product strategy for the company. While this type of CTO does engage with customers, customer interactions are typically limited to an advisory capacity.
The second type of CTO is the true evangelist with a CTO title. While still highly technical, this CTO is much more engaged with marketing and sales, and is often positioned as a thought leader externally. While these CTOs may no longer have significant input into technology strategy, they are fully versed in the direction of the company and used to getting the word out. The CTO title gives them the clout they need to get with the right level of technical or business decision makers.
TEP: Which is more effective?
Conley: These two CTO types, traditional CTO and evangelist CTO, are defined by the needs and goals of an organization and the specific role of the company within its landscape. However, most CTOs need to combine characteristics from each type so that they can communicate where the company is headed to key stakeholders, including customers and analysts.
Larger companies tend to recruit more externally facing, evangelist CTOs, while smaller organizations tend to lean more heavily toward traditional CTOs In general, a 30/70 ratio of evangelist to traditional is the norm.
However, no matter what the CTO type and percentage of focus, deep technical skills are required. A CTO with surface knowledge will struggle when interacting with a technical audience and quickly lose credibility and trust. Starting out as a traditional or inward-facing CTO can go a long way towards preparing someone for a career as an evangelist, or external-facing CTO.
TEP: Is it important for a CTO to be customer-facing?
Conley: While the percentage of time a CTO spends with customers may vary, it is absolutely imperative for a CTO to be customer-facing. Many technologists shy away from this part of the role because they are more comfortable focusing on complex IT system engineering challenges than they are using the soft skills required for successful customer engagement. However, not focusing on customer engagement is a huge lost opportunity.
In front of customers, the CTO must be a strong evangelist, with a comprehensive understanding of the business value and key differentiators. The CTO must also be able to effectively address the in-depth technical questions posed by all of the various stakeholders. This means that the CTO must understand the industry landscape, have a forward-looking vision for two to five years from now, know where the products and company are headed in the future, and be intimately familiar with product roadmaps. Skating to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been—this is what a CTO must be able describe to customers.
TEP: Are there drawbacks to having a CTO work directly with customers?
Conley: Typically, having a CTO work closely with customers is not detrimental. Customers always want to communicate their pain points and enhancement requests, so it's great for a CTO to hear these first-hand and be able to respond. In addition, interacting with customer-CTOs really helps CTOs understand the vision and emerging needs of their customers.
However, listening and responding to customer requests can cause short-term issues within the organization. Balancing and tweaking the current road map to add new capabilities requested by customers can become contentious and often requires a good sell by the CTO to push the customer's agenda forward.
TEP: What are the biggest mistakes you see CTOs make?
Conley: Being one-dimensional! As we discussed earlier, CTOs have to put together a great balancing act. They need to understand the technology, and they also need to be able to articulate the benefits and the bits and bytes that go into making it.
Being solely one type can be problematic. For example, traditional CTOs can be very knowledgeable. But in my experience, many of these CTOs are short on soft skills and choose to hide behind their monitors, never reaching out to customers, never articulating their vision or getting buy-in for it.
Being a heavily sales-focused evangelist CTO, with a sole focus on customers and sales, can also backfire. While these types of CTOs can tell-and-sell, they cannot always provide the granular technological depth that many customers expect from a CTO.
The best advice I can give to CTOs is to get your soft skills up to speed and be able to communicate true business value. If you can't speak to customers, or if you come across with a thin veneer, you put your company's credibility at risk each time you get in front of customers or prospects.
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Alan Conley joined Zenoss in 2011 as CTO, where he is responsible for driving the Zenoss cloud management vision, direction and on-going innovation. He brings over 20 years of hands-on experience running large scale IT operations and building management products that span virtual, physical and cloud-based IT. Prior to Zenoss, he served as CTO of the Network Management Group and as a Distinguished Engineer at Cisco Systems, where he was a key driver of Cisco's strategy and architecture for Cloud management, next generation network API, OpenStack, DMTF OVF 2.0, and Open Network Foundation (ONF). He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Davis.
