Ask a CTO which executive relationship matters most, and they'll name the CEO, but my guest today would send you to the CFO instead.
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Anoop Tripathi is 32 years into a career that spans from writing firmware for telephone exchanges to sitting as CTO at Sauce Labs, and he's unusually direct about what decides whether your technical work gets funded.
Most of us step into this role believing the job is to be the strongest technologist in the building. Anoop thinks that's the fastest way to build an organisation of people waiting for commandments from the top.
The conversation gets sharper when he talks about scaling an engineering team from zero to over 100, then having to bring it back down to 70 in a tough market. His lessons from that period are not the ones I expected.
There's also a serious defence of laziness as an engineering virtue, a story about resellers walking out of a Citrix demo because the product was too good, and a framework he calls SHAPE that he uses to run his own career.
Fear is the dominant feeling across my coaching practice right now. Anoop's take on what that fear is costing tech leaders is worth contemplating.
You'll Learn:
[0:00] Introduction
[2:51] The double-edged sword of laziness as an engineering trait
[7:18] Reframing tech debt as a business outcome your CEO hears
[10:24] How investor pressure and a faster POC upended the Citrix integration story
[18:01] What he learned cutting a team from 100 to 70
[26:19] Spotting an inflection point before hindsight makes it obvious
[29:50] Fear you plant in your head tends to come true
[32:52] The SHAPE framework for tech leadership
[47:44] One piece of advice for a first-time CTO
Resources Mentioned:
Sauce Labs | Website
Find more from Anoop Tripathi on LinkedIn.
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