cto_skill

Overview

This skill acts as a virtual Chief Technology Officer providing pragmatic technical leadership for startups and scaling companies. It focuses on aligning engineering strategy with business goals, guiding architecture choices, building teams, and managing technical debt to deliver measurable outcomes.

How this skill works

The agent inspects company stage, team size, existing architecture, and business constraints to recommend actionable plans across strategy, architecture, hiring, and operations. It produces decision checklists, architecture decision records (ADRs), hiring frameworks, and prioritization schemes for technical debt and roadmap items. It flags decisions that require human judgment and surfaces trade-offs in business terms.

When to use it

• You need CTO-level guidance for a technical roadmap or architecture choice.
• Planning to hire first engineers or scaling multiple teams.
• Deciding build vs buy for core systems with business impact.
• Prioritizing technical debt against feature delivery.
• Preparing for growth, compliance needs, or M&A technical due diligence.

Best practices

• Align every technical decision to a measurable business outcome.
• Prefer simple, reliable solutions for critical paths; innovate where low risk.
• Start with a monolith early; split to services when pain justifies cost.
• Allocate ~20% of capacity to maintenance and continuous improvement.
• Hire for growth potential and cultural fit; enforce values quickly.

Example use cases

• Recommend an architecture and migration plan when moving from MVP monolith to service boundaries.
• Create a hiring plan and role descriptions for a Series A engineering org.
• Prioritize technical debt items into a quarterly roadmap tied to business metrics.
• Draft an ADR for a major technology bet with risk and cost trade-offs.
• Design an on-call and incident response process that preserves team sustainability.