CTO checklist

Published

January 7, 2014

Management style

  1. How are technical decisions made and communicated?
  2. How does engineering work get assigned?
  3. Is there a product roadmap that all developer can see?
  4. What is the team structure? (dedicated tech lead, designer, QA, technical writer, sysadmin/ops)
  5. How often do you have tech meetings?
  6. Does tech team participate in business and customer meetings?
  7. How is performance evaluated?
  8. How do you handle training? (junior staff, new tech)
  9. How do you resolve conflicts/arguments?

Engineering practice

  1. What is your tech stack?
  2. What version control system do you use?
  3. What do you use for documentation? (design, usage, api, …)
  4. What do you use for issue tracking?
  5. How do you test the code base? (unit/functional, coverage)
  6. How often do you do code review?
  7. How do you manage code deployment? (staging, production, rollback)
  8. How do you deal with technical dept? (maintenance vs new features)

Operations

  1. Do you have system monitoring/logging in place?
  2. Do you have application monitoring/logging in place?
  3. Do you monitor 3d party (dependency) services?
  4. Do you have a disaster recovery procedure?
  5. How do you handle alerts? (escalation)
  6. Do you provide customer support?

Non-tech questions (during tech role interview)

  • Can you give an example of a time you helped a non-technical person with a technical problem, and how did you explain it to them?
  • Have you worked with QA before? What were your feelings and how would you improve the process?
  • Have you ever worked in a customer support or client facing role?
  • What are your hobbies?
  • What do you like about your current work environment, and what do you not like about it?

Resources

Design and development standard practices

Management practice